In the wake of one of the deadliest eras in the history of Florida
child welfare, administrators pledged to be more open, even suggesting
the added scrutiny could help the agency keep more youngsters safe.
“The
answer is to keep this in the public eye,” DCF interim Secretary Esther
Jacobo said in January while discussing ways to reform the troubled
agency.
But even as lawmakers debated measures to require the
Department of Children & Families to be more transparent, the agency
has pushed to weaken them and has already quietly adopted internal
policies making it harder for the public to track agency actions.
New DCF disclosure policies delay and sharply restrict information
provided in official child death reports, a move critics argue could
help mask mounting child deaths. The policies are far more rigid than in
past years, when the grim details in those reports led to a yearlong
Miami Herald investigation called Innocents Lost.
The series,
which documented the deaths of 477 children since 2008, exposed
systematic flaws in child abuse investigations and the agency’s
inadequate response to troubled families.
A new Herald review of nearly 180 child death incident reports since last November found:
• In the fall of 2013, as administrators anticipated the series, a child death review coordinator overseeing Broward, Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties ceased filing
required “critical incident reports” to the agency’s headquarters in
Tallahassee. Then, a week after the Herald series was published,
coordinator Frank Perry filed nearly 20 child deaths reports — some of
them incidents that occurred months earlier.
DCF’s procedures require such reports to be submitted within “one
business day.”
• In the midst of the Herald probe, agency
administrators implemented a new policy for deleting what they call
confidential information from public records — including virtually all
details of a child’s death. The new incident reports, submitted since at
least last fall, are now significantly narrower — and shorter — than
the ones previously provided to the newspaper and public, records show.
•
In records obtained by the newspaper this week, the agency redacted all
information about DCF’s prior history with troubled families — key
details that allow supervisors, and the public, to study whether the
agency could have acted differently in the months or years leading up to
a child’s death. There was only one exception: a case in which DCF
apparently blamed the death on a Miami judge, who overruled an agency
recommendation about where an abused child should live.
A DCF spokeswoman, Alexis Lambert, said the case involving the Miami
judge was different than the others because it was “an accounting of
what occurred in the child’s case but not a word-for-word copy” of
confidential records.
“The department remains unwavering in our commitment to transparency,’’
Lambert wrote in an email to the Herald Thursday.
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But last week, when a Citrus County man smothered his 16-month-old son
to death with his bare hands so he could continue playing an online Xbox
game, a DCF spokeswoman initially told the Herald the agency had no
prior history with the toddler’s parents. In fact, DCF had been told
about four months earlier that California social workers had flown the
troubled family to Florida amid allegations of drug abuse and
homelessness, both red flags.
DCF’s deputy secretary later acknowledged DCF had visited the family, and the investigation that followed was inadequate.
Lawmakers
and children’s advocates insist more openness is critical for DCF to
improve and to ensure more accurate reporting on child protection cases.
The Herald’s series revealed the agency had systematically
under-counted the deaths of children whose families were known to the
agency,
“Transparency keeps the public informed and holds people responsible —
whether it’s the department, the (private foster care agencies), or
others,” said state Rep. Gayle Harrell, a Stuart Republican.
“Transparency is the antiseptic to keep children safe. The more
transparency the better.”
Lawmakers in recent weeks have debated
provisions of an agency overhaul bill that would have written greater
transparency into state law.
But last week, before the Senate reform bill was passed unanimously, DCF
staff proposed an amendment to gut the transparency requirements. The
measure, late Thursday, was awaiting approval in the House.
Among
the amendments the agency sought: changing the time frame the agency is
required to investigate a child death from within two business days to
“prompt”; eliminating an advisory committee that would provide oversight
to the agency’s critical injury responses; and deleting a requirement
that DCF post on its website whether a victim was under 5 years of age
at the time of his or her death. Such youngsters are the overwhelming
majority of children who die of abuse or neglect.
An internal report detailing proposed changes to the Senate bill
shows DCF also resisted a proposed provision requiring the agency to
post child death incident reports on its website. “The public posting is
designed to find fault, and potentially further traumatize families
while in crisis,” the agency reasoned.
But child welfare administrators in other states have concluded transparency is primarily about preventing future deaths.
“Florida
is now at risk of not playing its role as a public agency being
accountable to the public,” said John Mattingly, the commissioner for
New York’s Administration for Children’ Services from 2004 until 2011,
and now a senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation child
welfare think tank.
A lack of candor also can hamstring a child
welfare agency’s ability to justify adequate funding, Mattingly said.
“If you are not being open and honest with yourself about your failings,
it’s hard to see how you could expect a public legislature to provide
you with what you need to go forward.”
Said Ryan Duffy, a
spokesman for Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford: “The whole point
of the (House reform) bill is to reduce child deaths, and if we don’t
know about them, we can’t do anything about them.”
Questions about
DCF’s openness with child death records arose as early as the winter of
2013, though records suggested the effort to clamp down on public
information did not gain steam until several months later.
In
February 2013, during the investigation of the death of a Lake County
infant, Matthew Condatore, a DCF supervisor named Stephanie Weis
announced “new rules” for the reporting of child deaths to agency
administrators.
Matthew’s death was particularly troubling. Only
months before he died, workers had been told in two separate
investigation the 11-month-old’s mother left the children for “days at a
time” while she consumed a host of drugs, rendering her an unfit
caregiver. The Condatore home, a report said, was “disgusting, filthy
and dirty,” with bugs and roaches crawling everywhere. The first
investigation was completed without DCF taking any action; the second
remained open when the child died.
Matthew’s mother passed out
while bathing him Feb. 15, 2013. The boy’s 8-year-old sister found him
floating in an overflowing bathtub. His mother, whom a report said was
“messed up” at the time, lay unconscious near her dead infant.
“No
gory details go to (headquarters) regarding the deaths unless they ask
for them,” wrote Weis, a community services director, in an internal DCF
email. Referring to Matthew’s death, she wrote: “I think this got
everyone excited and we are where we are now — hair’s on fire.”
“Our incident reports need to be factual, clear, and to the point — no
dramatization of the events. We need to look like we know what we are
talking about, and we’ve got it under control.”
Beginning last
year, the Herald reviewed hundreds of critical incident reports
detailing child deaths. This week, the newspaper reviewed 177 new
reports. The cases include a child who drowned in an open septic tank,
and a teenager who hanged himself in the woods — after DCF had declined
to investigate two prior reports concerning his family, and was looking
into a third at the time the boy died.
Until about wintertime, virtually every report was filed within days of
the death, as DCF procedures require.
But sometime around
November, records show, DCF Southeast Region death coordinator Frank
Perry stopped filing formal death reports for the counties he oversees.
Those counties are home to two of the most powerful lawmakers in the
state for child protection, Harrell, the Stuart Republican who chairs
the House’s Healthy Families Subcommittee, and state Sen. Eleanor Sobel,
a Hollywood Democrat who chairs that chamber’s Children, Families and
Elder Affairs Committee.
Lambert, DCF spokeswoman, said the agency
had reviewed its incident reporting system in recent months, after the
Herald requested hundreds of the reports, and uncovered
“inconsistencies” in their filing.
“These discussions led to a
misunderstanding in the Southeast Region that resulted in the gap in
reporting you noticed. However, incidents from that region were still
being reported timely via email,” she added.
On April 3, Perry
submitted four death reports. The next day — exactly one week after the
Herald completed its series — he turned in 15 reports, ranging from an i
nfant found dead in his Palm Beach County home on Nov. 22 to a boy who
shot himself at his stepfather’s house on March 25.
Even after Perry submitted the reports, they provided virtually no
information. All but two of the incident reports contained four
sentences or fewer; 13 of the reports contained one or two sentences.
“Today
on 12/26/2013 (redacted) passed away. (Redacted) was found not
breathing,” was the extent of an incident report concerning a child
death in Broward, which was submitted to the state more than four months
after the child died.
An incident report concerning the deaths of
two Broward children on March 10 — submitted three weeks later — said
only: “On Thursday, 03/06/14, the children drowned and they are
currently on life support in pediatric intensive care at Plantation
General Hospital. The babysitter went to the bathroom [redacted] died on
3/10/14.”
Incident reports submitted by other investigators also lack details about the family’s past involvement with DCF.
In
January, the mother of toddler Kayne Williams left him in the care of
her boyfriend while she went to work. Before she returned, Kayne had
been beaten nearly to death. Bryan Blalock is accused of beating Kayne
so severely that he suffered brain trauma, bruising across his face and
body, swelling to his genitals and black eyes. The two-year-old died 12
days later.
On Jan. 15, a child abuse investigator submitted a
report to Tallahassee with details of the death and prior agency
involvement. That entire portion — about a third of a page of
information helpful to put the family’s history in context — was
redacted from public view.
Lambert said the agency recently
changed its redaction of death records when administrators discovered
DCF was inadvertently releasing confidential information, contrary to
state law. “ The department redacts records in compliance with the law,”
Lambert said.
The hundreds of incident reports obtained by the
Herald last year which were considerably more expansive all were
redacted by Assistant General Counsel John Jackson, a DCF attorney who
is the agency’s public records expert.
In her email to the Herald,
Lambert suggested members of the public had recourse if they felt DCF
was withholding information concerning the deaths of children: they can
sue the agency.
“There is an avenue through the courts for the public or the Herald to obtain the redacted information,” she said.
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