State Rep. Virgil Fludd (D-Tyrone) has joined with the Fayette County NAACP in convincing state officials to investigate the rate at which Fayette County Department of Family and Children Services “takes” minority children — that is, removes them from their homes for safety or other reasons.

Fludd announced last week that Georgia Department of Human Resources chief B.J. Walker has agreed to conduct the investigation along with a corresponding study by the University of Georgia.

“Cases will be pulled to determine why the children have been removed and to find if there are differences in removal with minority children,” Fludd said in a news release.

The report Fludd is alluding to, however, compared Fayette to other Georgia counties based on the rate of removal of all children related to the number of impoverished children in each county according to the 2000 Census.

The study dealt only with impoverished children.

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform says Fayette took 107 children, not just those in poverty but from all households, in the year leading up to Feb. 28, 2007.

While that analysis resulted in a high “rate of removal” figure for Fayette at 5.5 times the national average, NCCPR also admitted in the report that the numbers aren’t solid because Fayette has relatively few children living in poverty compared to most other counties in Georgia.

That didn’t stop NCCPR from asking rhetorically in the report: “Is Fayette County, Ga. the child removal capital of America?”

Fludd’s announcement comes on the heels of last week’s news that state DFCS chief Mary Dean Harvey — one of Walker’s hires — was resigning from her position.

Harvey had come under fire after apparently orchestrating a behind-the-scenes effort to support a Fulton County DFCS assistant director who was arrested in Fayetteville for one felony count of cruelty to children for striking her 7-year-old daughter multiple times with a belt while the girl was clad only in her underwear.

NCCPR is a proponent of enhancing child safety by keeping children with their families instead of having the children removed into the care of foster families.

NCCPR suggests that counties like Fayette which don’t have a large number of children living in poverty might lead authorities to “confuse poverty with neglect.”