A nationwide program born of juvenile court's frustration with getting insufficient information from overburdened caseworkers may, at best, have no effect on abused and neglected children, and, at worst, make their lives more difficult.

An evaluation of the Court Appointed Special Advocate, or CASA, program, released this week, says children assigned a CASA volunteer are more likely to be placed in foster care and are less likely to return home than similar children without one.

CASA volunteers are assigned by judges to conduct independent investigations of the family circumstances in which a child has been abused or neglected.

Allegheny County's is one of more than 900 local CASA organizations across the country.

The study, conducted by Caliber Associates of Fairfax, Virginia, with a grant from the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, was released at the National CASA annual conference in Washington, D.C.

CASA was created in 1977 by an exasperated Seattle judge who believed the volunteers would help give the background judges needed to make good rulings.

The study shows, however, few differences in the well-being of children who had CASA volunteers and those who did not.

"In some cases, children with a CASA volunteer looked worse: they were more likely to be placed in out-of-home care, and for some, less likely to be reunified or in kin care than children who did not have a CASA volunteer. These differences were dramatic."

In addition, the study says, the typical volunteer spent no more than 3.2 hours a month on a case and, when the case involved a black child, that dropped by an hour.

While 40 percent of youngsters in the child welfare system are black, CASA volunteers were assigned to black children only 31 percent of the time. The opposite was true for white children: 38 percent in the system are white, but 48 percent of those given CASA volunteer were white.

Kathleen Moore, executive director of Allegheny County's CASA program, said her volunteers are not permitted to deal with more than one family at a time and typically work between 15 and 20 hours a month on a case.

She said, if a volunteer were giving only 2.2 hours a month, as the report suggests the average black family receives, the program is not meeting national CASA standards.

Also, she said, there is no significant discrepancy between the percentage of black children in the system and the percentage assigned a CASA volunteer in Allegheny County.

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said the study confirms what critics have suspected for years: "CASA is one more thumb tipping the scales of justice against families."