It's wrong to assume that the Clark County Department of Family Services failed to act in the 57 cases where the safety of a child was questioned by independent reviewers in 2006, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

"The perception that we were nonresponsive is by no means accurate," Christine Skorupski said. "If a reviewer found a case that needed immediate attention, it was given to (Family Services Assistant Director) Ann Rubin and was immediately followed up on."

But Skorupski did not provide specifics.

On Tuesday, the department's responsiveness was questioned by members of the state's Blue Ribbon Panel on Child Death Review. Panel member and Assemblywoman Susan Gerhardt, D-Henderson, pressed for details of the cases highlighted in a report by Ed Cotton, an independent consultant hired last year by the county.

Cotton's report, based on reviews of 1,352 open Family Services cases, originally contained eight pages detailing situations where the safety of children was in doubt.

Those pages were excised at the request of Deputy District Attorney Mary-Anne Miller and were not included in the public report released in December. When the censored section of the report came to light this week, Gerhardt pressed for an accounting of how each red-flagged case was handled.

Confusion arose at Tuesday's Blue Ribbon Panel meeting because key figures such as Family Services Director Tom Morton had never seen the report pages in question and could not answer questions from panel members, Skorupski said.

When Cotton and his staff conducted the review from May to October, the practice was for reviewers to turn over case files of concern to Rubin, who then dispatched caseworkers to resolve the problems.

"It's not that there was a lack of follow-up on cases," Skorupski said. "But there wasn't a feedback structure back to the reviewers."

Donna Coleman, a child welfare advocate and critic of Clark County Family Services, said she's not willing to accept that assurance without evidence.

Coleman said the county should disclose exactly what actions were taken in each case of concern noted in the Cotton report. That would include what date the worker was dispatched, the conditions of the children involved and the status of the cases.

For instance, Coleman asked, did the county ever locate a 10-month-old county ward whose whereabouts Cotton said were unknown? Were cases that were closed at the insistence of a supervisor and against the desire of a caseworker reopened?

"This is life and death," Coleman said. "We're not talking about county cars getting oil changes. We're talking about the safety of children."

Skorupski said no additional information was available Wednesday regarding the follow-up on the cases in the excised pages of Cotton's report.