Despite Reforms, Child Deaths Still Uncounted In Florida

By Carol Marbin Miller
cmarbin@Miami Herald.com

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3016499.html#storylink=cpy

In Lake County, a disfigured 2-month-old whose mother did not want him is left alone in a motel room for 90 minutes, and is later found smothered. His family had been the subject of 38 prior investigations by the state’s child welfare agency.
“It is a general consensus,” a report said, “that [the mother] was involved in the death of her child.”
In Santa Rosa County, child welfare authorities allow a “chronic and severe” drug addict to bring her newborn home, though her two older children had been removed from her care for their safety. Eighteen days later, the mother takes an unprescribed Lortab painkiller and places her baby next to her in bed. The child is found dead.
And in Polk County, a mother leaves two toddlers alone in a “kiddie pool” — and returns to find her 1-year-old daughter face-down in the water. Her 2-year-old son later discloses he pushed his sister down while she was crying. He now suffers nightmares.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3016499.html#storylink=cpy

The children, who all perished last year, are tragically bound by more than death: Even as the Florida Department of Children & Families has promised greater openness, the three fatalities, and dozens of others like them, have never been counted among the state’s victims of fatal abuse or neglect.
No state can protect every child who is born to troubled, violent or drug-addicted parents, and even youngsters for whom child protection administrators make all the right choices can sometimes fall victim to unforeseen circumstances. To ensure that state social service agencies learn from mistakes, the federal government requires that states count and investigate all child fatalities that result from abuse or neglect.
Regulators don’t, however, strenuously oversee how the counting and investigating occurs.

After the Miami Herald published a series examining the deaths of 477 children — and Florida’s failure to protect some of them from abusive or neglectful parents — the state promised a new era of openness and more rigor in the way it investigates child deaths.

But except for abiding by a new state law that required DCF to create a website listing all child fatalities, Florida has continued to undercount the number of children it fails.
“Nothing has changed,” said former Broward Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. James Harn, who supervised child abuse investigations before retiring when a new sheriff was elected last year. “Some day, somebody will say ‘let’s just stop the political wrangling.’ Here’s what you’ve got to do: Just tell the truth.”

For several years, BSO, which has investigated child deaths under contract with DCF, has recorded significantly more fatalities due to neglect or abuse than other counties, where DCF does its own investigations. One important reason for the disparity is that the sheriff’s office long has insisted that drownings and accidental suffocations — among the leading causes of child fatality — be counted, while DCF has, in recent years, declined to include the majority of those in its abuse and neglect tally.
As a result, said Harn, the statewide numbers “are cooked.”
“It’s not going to get fixed as long as they want to hide things,” Harn added.
A DCF spokeswoman in Tallahassee, Alexis Lambert, said the agency studies all child fatalities — not just the ones it verifies as resulting from abuse or neglect — to “improve and strengthen child welfare practice and services provided to vulnerable children and at-risk families statewide.”
She added: “The safety and well-being of Florida’s vulnerable children is DCF’s top priority. Understanding and assessing child fatalities is one way the department analyzes the issues facing families and develops strategies to meet the needs of struggling families and protect vulnerable children.”

Election issue

 Child deaths became an election issue in recent weeks as both Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, and his Democratic challenger, former Gov. Charlie Crist, traded accusations over whose administration better protected children. In two debates, Scott has stated that child fatalities have declined dramatically since he took office in 2011. In 2009, he said in the first debate, 97 children with a DCF history died. “Last year,” he added, “we were down to 36 deaths.” (The DCF child death website actually lists 45.) “That’s still way too many,” he said. “We don’t want to have one death. But it’s a dramatic improvement from when Charlie was there.”

Scott repeated the assertion in a news release and in the second debate last Wednesday.

A careful study of thousands of pages of state documents makes clear that the number Scott cited and the one on the DCF website are both distortions of reality. They are contorted by years-long delays in completing investigations — thus keeping deaths off the books — by a decision to narrow the definition of what constitutes neglect, and by a determination to “unverify” some child deaths that had previously been “verified” as abuse or neglect.
Said Pamela Graham, a Florida State University social work professor who served on a Department of Health statewide death review committee for five years: “Numbers lie if you aren’t counting them.”
For many years, state child protection systems have been evaluated in large part by a standard measure: “verified” child deaths “with priors” — that is, the number of youngsters whose families had prior contact with the state. That is the number that Gov. Scott says is declining. But the decline in deaths with priors can be traced to the factors cited above.
Drownings and accidental suffocations differ from, say, beating or shooting deaths in an important way: “There are human decisions in how you categorize them,” said Richard Gelles, who is dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. There is simply no wiggle room as to whether a beating is a child abuse death. In contrast, a drowning can be a neglect death, or, as many more of them are now called, merely tragic accidents.

‘Verified deaths’

Verified child deaths did spike during the Crist administration, whose term ended in January 2011. And the numbers on DCF’s newly minted website show that overall child deaths — whether from abuse or illness or something else — have receded somewhat. But the more striking decline has been in the percentage of child deaths that are “verified” as neglect or abuse.
In 2009, 43 percent, or 206, of DCF’s 474 reported child deaths were verified. The percentage dropped to 34 percent in 2010, 31 percent in 2011 and 2012, and then to 10 percent in 2013. So far this year, 13 percent of DCF’s 348 reported deaths have been verified, the records show.
Changes in the standard for verification of child deaths have led to some unusual variations. For instance, Broward County — where BSO investigates child deaths under contract, independent of DCF — tallied 21 “verified” child deaths from abuse or neglect in 2013 out of 30 total fatalities, or more than two-thirds. In Miami-Dade, as of Thursday night, DCF had not verified a single 2013 death as being from abuse or neglect out of the 39 overall fatalities for that county listed on the agency’s website.
On Thursday, the June 21, 2013, killing of Ezra Raphael remained unclassified, though the boyfriend of Ezra’s mother, Claude Alexis, is in jail awaiting trial on a murder charge. Alexis told North Miami Beach police he whipped the child with a belt for spilling bathwater. After the Herald asked about the 39 Miami cases Friday morning, Ezra’s case was switched that same day to “verified.”
The July 20, 2013, death of Jayden Villegas-Morales remains unverified, though his father, Angel Villegas, is charged with manslaughter. Of Jayden’s death, DCF says only that the “2-year-old child was found unresponsive by his father.”
Lambert, DCF’s spokeswoman, said 15 of the 39 Miami-Dade child fatalities from last year remain under investigation by the department.

Aftermath of reforms

Following the Herald’s series on child deaths, Innocents Lost, lawmakers passed a sweeping reform bill. One of its provisions required DCF to maintain the website with details on every child death that is reported. The website depicts a dramatic decline in the verification of deaths in categories that are susceptible to manipulation: the drownings and accidental smotherings. In 2009, before the new neglect guidelines took effect, 76 drownings were recorded. Of those, 58 — or 76 percent — were verified as resulting from neglect, and, among those, 26, or 45 percent, came from families with a prior agency history.
So far this year, DCF has tallied 66 drowning deaths. Only nine of the 66 cases were “verified” as resulting from neglect — or 13 percent — and only one of those nine involved a child whose family had any DCF involvement in the prior five years.
Over five years, then, the share of drowning deaths that were verified as neglect dropped from 76 percent to 13 percent. And in the category that is used to judge Florida’s child-protective efforts against other states — deaths with priors — only one of the 66 drownings from this year is on course to make the list.
The percentage of unsafe sleep deaths verified by DCF also declined, though far less sharply. In 2009, DCF reported 97 such fatalities; among them, 31, or 30 percent, were verified. Of those, 21, or 68 percent were children with a prior family history within the previous five years. In 2013, DCF reported 103 unsafe sleep deaths, and 26 of them, or 25 percent, were verified, DCF’s records show. Among the 26 that were verified, fewer than half involved children with a prior agency history.
Lambert said investigating drowning or unsafe sleep deaths is particularly challenging. “Deaths resulting from drowning and co-sleeping require the most extensive analysis and investigation as these deaths can sometimes be tragic accidents,” she said.
Gelles, the social work dean, said the total number of drowning and unsafe sleep deaths is generally not susceptible to manipulation — but the precipitous decline in cases that are verified suggests that those numbers are “fudged.”
“They are no less dead,” he added.

The death of Nyla Hardy was counted. And then it wasn’t.

Nyla was born on April 17, 2013, to 22-year-old Alysha Rivers and 24-year-old Kendrick Hardy, two longtime drug abusers. Rivers, according to state records, “admitted to smoking two blunts [of marijuana] a day, and the father admitted to smoking five blunts a day.” A former foster child herself, Rivers had lost custody of an older child in 2007 due to marijuana abuse.
Two months before Nyla was born, DCF received a report of physical abuse, burns and environmental hazards involving older siblings, including one who was previously removed but later reunited with the parents. The allegations were ruled unfounded, and the agency closed its case when the mother agreed to accept help from the state.
When Nyla was 3 weeks old, her parents smoked marijuana and then went to bed. Hardy had rolled over onto the newborn once before, the mother said, but the couple continued to co-sleep with the child anyway. That night, “the mother stated she placed the baby in the middle of the bed, with her arm around her,” a report said. When she woke up the next morning, Nyla “was all blue; she was cold and hard.” She also had suffered “multiple hemorrhages...two contusions,” and was drenched in her own blood — so much so, a report said, that the local medical examiner initially said the death most likely “will turn into a homicide.”
In the end, the cause of death was ruled undetermined. In November 2013, the Herald obtained records on 40 child death investigations DCF submitted to a consultant, Casey Family Programs, for the consultant to analyze. At the time, Nyla Hardy’s death had been “verified” as a neglect death. But months later, when a formal death review was attached to DCF’s fatality website, the classification had been switched to unverified. It now will never be counted among the 2013 neglect-related deaths.
Even as it deemed the case an unverified death, the final death review noted: “Due to the extensive use of drugs by the parents, a child died while in their care.”

‘Verified’ to ‘unverified’

Charlize Terrell’s name has vanished from the 2013 count, as well. Her death also was among the 40 cases reviewed last year by the consultant, and a five-page “casework analysis” provided to the Herald noted an investigation of her May 4, 2013, death was “closed” and “verified.” Charlize was born addicted to her mother’s opiate drugs, and spent several weeks in a hospital detoxifying from them.
Charlize died 10 weeks after birth. Both of her parents “admitted to being under the influence of methadone and alcohol the night Charlize died,” a report said. And though the details of her death remained undetermined, “investigators believe that the mother likely rolled over on top of the infant after falling asleep under the influence.”

In a final death review, the “verified” finding was changed to unverified. Charlize’s death will not be counted.

The “casework analysis” of the May 31, 2013, death of Brooklyn Stewart prepared for the DCF consultant concluded that the 1-year-old girl’s drowning “should be” verified, records obtained by the Herald showed. Brooklyn was the toddler left unsupervised in a kiddie pool with her slightly older brother. “Neighbors reported that the children were often seen outside unattended,” the initial review said. It added that Brooklyn’s mother offered differing accounts of the drowning.

Brooklyn’s parents had been the subject of 11 DCF complaints, the most recent four months before Brooklyn’s death.

A bruise on Brooklyn’s head supported her older brother’s claim that he had pushed her in the pool, the report said.
Despite what was written initially, DCF still closed the case as unverified, without offering any explanation in the formal death review for the switch. And despite the formal finding that abuse or neglect did not cause Brooklyn’s death, her siblings were removed from their parents’ care. Brooklyn’s death did not count.
In another of the Casey Family Programs reviews obtained by the Herald, an unnamed DCF administrator wrote that the March 17, 2013, drowning of a 1-year-old Polk County boy should be verified, as the agency had faulted the family for failing to supervise the toddler — a lapse that led to the boy’s death. Yet that case, too, was never counted.
An unnamed DCF administrator in another case reviewed by the consultant chided death investigators for failing to verify the Feb. 28, 2013, smothering death of a 4-month-old Manatee County girl. The infant’s mom had been the subject of four prior child abuse hotline reports from 2011 through 2013, including two reports of violence between the parents.
“The child’s father,” the administrator wrote, “admitted he had been educated on co-sleeping dangers by the paternal grandmother, who works with infants and children, yet despite this knowledge, he chose to place his infant daughter face down on a blanket in his bed.”
Still, Tampa Bay’s child death supervisor at the time, Lisa Rivera, suggested — in clear conflict with the administrator cited in the Casey Families report — that the father may not have been aware of the dangers of co-sleeping. Though the infant’s mother had been warned in a prior DCF probe, Rivera wrote, “the mother admitted that she later failed to share that information with him.”
Rivera now is the top child death administrator statewide. She wrote a recent email in which she asked that a death in Broward from unsafe sleeping be changed from verified. “Increased risk factors, yes,” Rivera wrote, “verifiable maltreatment, no.” It is unclear whether the death was later discarded from the state’s tally.
And in a particularly unusual case, the agency chose not to verify a suffocation death only because investigators were unsure which parent smothered the 35-day-old baby in bed with them. “Case is being closed with not-substantiated findings of death, due to not being able to determine which caregiver was responsible for the rollover onto the child,” the report said.
Lambert said the department has limited options when a medical examiner’s findings are undetermined and police conclude there is insufficient evidence to make an arrest. In such cases, Lambert said, “DCF also does not have enough evidence to verify. However, we do have authority to remove surviving siblings” when evidence suggests they remain in danger.
Graham, the FSU professor who spent five years on the Department of Health’s statewide fatality committee, which attempts to glean patterns from child deaths, said she was struck by how often the same agency missteps repeated themselves. “You see the same issues over and over and over — and they are all correctable,” Graham said.
“The thing that disturbs me the most is that the energy that is put toward keeping the [“verified abuse”] numbers at a minimum could be better spent looking at the real issues, and preventing future deaths,” Graham said. “To me, that is the biggest crime: We are spending so much energy not looking at cases to make ourselves look good. We should be figuring out how to do this better.”

Florida child deaths by year

2009

Total deaths: 474
Verified: 206
Percentage verified: 43

2010

Total deaths: 469
Verified: 164
Percentage verified: 35

2011

Total deaths: 428
Verified: 136
Percentage verified: 32

2012

Total deaths: 408
Verified: 129
Percentage varified: 32

2013

Total deaths: 432
Verified: 45
Percentage verified: 10

2014 to date

Total deaths: 358
Verified: 45
Percentage varified: 13
Source: DCF child death website

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3016499.html

Child massacre the last straw, advocacy group says: State agency can't protect kids

Posted: October 12, 2014 - 11:38am

By Margie Menzel

TALLAHASSEE | An advocacy group is calling for the Florida Department of Children and Families to relinquish its oversight of child-protective services to local law enforcement or other agencies following last month’s mass murder-suicide involving six children in Gilchrist County.

Roy Miller

Roy Miller, spokesman for the Children’s Lobby, said the murders amounted to the last straw in the department’s response to a series of child deaths going back many years.
“Why is DCF continuing to do the direct oversight of child-welfare services when they have a three-decade history of not doing it well?” he asked. “We need a new model.”
Miller’s group was responding to a department report on Don Spirit, the Gilchrist County man who murdered his daughter and six grandchildren before committing suicide on Sept. 18.
Citing media reports, the group said the Department of Children and Families was warned last year that “Spirit, a convicted felon with a history of discharging a gun that resulted in the death of a child, should have no contact with his grandchildren. More damning, some of the grandchildren themselves, as recently as last year, told DCF workers they feared their grandfather. Yet, they were living with him at the time of their horrific deaths and the household composition was known to DCF.”
The department concluded that the rampage could not have been foreseen, calling the tragedy “an extreme outlier” — but Miller strongly disagrees.

“Clearly what we are doing isn’t working,” he said.
According to the department, the family had been involved in 18 child-protective investigations since 2006, with Spirit involved in six of the investigations and alleged to be the perpetrator in three. Investigators confirmed that Spirit had physically abused his then-pregnant daughter, Sarah, who became one of his murder victims and was the mother of the six dead children.
The Children’s Lobby said DCF did not enforce its own safety plans or take action after a verified report that Spirit physically injured one of his granddaughters in 2013.
The murders in the small community of Bell drew national attention and scrutiny about DCF’s prior involvement with the family. Both the department and the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Office had visited the family’s home as recently as Sept. 2, but the preliminary report said a case note showed that the children were not “in imminent danger of illness or injury from abuse, neglect or abandonment.”
For nearly two years, Children and Families has been under fire for the most recent round of child deaths on its watch. Lawmakers responded with a sweeping reform measure and increased funding during the 2014 legislative session.

Although the department has been putting the reforms into place, the murders in Bell have brought a new hail of condemnation.
The Department of Children and Families released a preliminary report last week, saying it would increase staff training and take up other reforms in the wake of the murders. DCF did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about Miller’s calls for change.
“While DCF issues one more report stating they will use this tragedy to do better, six murdered children who relied on DCF to protect them don’t get a do-over,” Miller said. “This report is not at all different from any number of previous DCF reports about children the state failed to protect.”
Now, Miller said, the Children’s Lobby will join forces with others critics of Florida’s child-welfare system who believe DCF should transfer the oversight of its protective services to local law enforcement agencies or other community partners, such as local governments, who can do the job better.
Currently, six Florida sheriffs’ offices oversee child-protection services in their counties — Broward, Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas and Seminole — rather than the Department of Children and Families having the responsibility.
Many children’s advocates believe the sheriffs do a better job.
“DCF cannot and should not perform protective investigations,” said Cindy Lederman, a dependency court judge in Miami-Dade County. “DCF has consistently proven itself incapable of conducting comprehensive investigations. We need trained law enforcement officers to take over.”
But some sheriffs have been wary of the responsibility, if only due to the cost.
http://mayportmirror.jacksonville.com/news/florida/2014-10-12/story/child-massacre-last-straw-advocacy-group-says-state-agency-cant

Reports: 30 child deaths unreported by DCF

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -
The Department of Children and Families is under fire after at least 30 child death records went unaccounted for.

 A series of reports linked 478 child deaths to a lack of follow-up by DCF over a six-year period. At least 30 other child deaths went unreported under the department's watch.
"Local folks did not use the incident reporting system to document those notifications," Interim DCF Secretary Mike Carroll said. "They elected not to do so because they believed there were some security breaches in that system."
Carroll has been on the job less than two months. The investigation into the reports ended last week. Although some reports were withheld for months, Carroll said the whole thing was inadvertent.
"I'm disappointed that our actions down there and decisions that we made lead to a perception that we were hiding records or destroying records. That certainly is not accurate," Carroll said. "I think I've taken the action that's appropriate based on what's appropriate. Now I'd like to move forward."
The details of the investigation are hidden, which has caused children advocates to raise some red flags.
Mike Watkins, of Big Bend Community Based Care, cited the amount of child deaths as a reason for more child welfare money during legislative session.
"Any of us that are in the business should be concerned about reports that are not being turned in according to what the statute and policy requires," Watkins said.

Former DCF Secretary George Sheldon said the whole ordeal is very disappointing.
"To not report child deaths is not only fraudulent, I think it violates the public trust," Sheldon said.
A bill passed this year will require DCF to post all child death records on its website.
Carroll suspended DCF's southeast region administrator for two days without pay as a result of the investigation.
http://www.news4jax.com/news/reports-30-child-deaths-unreported-by-dcf/26516686

DCF-Child-Deaths-Transparency

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Child-welfare officials said Monday that they are creating a new position within the agency in an effort to improve transparency when releasing child-abuse-death records.

The Department of Children and Families has been under intense scrutiny after a series by The Miami Herald highlighted the deaths of 477 children in the past five years. The newspaper accused the agency of recently shifting its internal policies regarding the sharing of information about child deaths in a way that left the records they released so heavily redacted they were nearly useless.
The details surrounding a child's death are typically public, although names of surviving siblings are confidential.
The person who assumes the new role will oversee data gathering and the agency's responses to child deaths, the officials said.
"When tragedies occur, especially those involving children, our response must be consistent, coordinated, compassionate and transparent," new interim secretary Mike Carroll wrote in a memo Monday to regional managers and the news media.

Tricky Ricky

Gov. Rick Scott appointed Carroll last week. Carroll said he hopes to fill the new position within a month, and he added that the new hire must be given the authority to make policy changes as needed.
Carroll also asked regional managers to finalize plans to streamline reporting so that leaders are immediately informed after a child's death and that information in the reports is consistent and accurate. The Herald series noted serious lag times in reporting child deaths in some cases.
Florida lawmakers also want more accountability from the agency. The Legislature passed a bipartisan bill last week requiring DCF to post child-death information on its website, including the date, region, cause of death, what private contractors were involved and the age of the child. Many of the children identified in the newspaper series were under the age of 5.

http://www.tribtown.com/view/story/cf306db4991f45a29a007602d951f1ec/FL--DCF-Child-Deaths-Transparency

Local Lawmakers Grapple With Changing The Culture At DCF

TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami/NSF) – Both chambers of the Legislature took up child-welfare reform Tuesday, hearing from a wide range of experts with research about staff turnover and caseloads.

But one number stood out: 432, the number of Florida children who died of abuse and neglect in 2012, according to Pam Graham, a social work professor at Florida State University.
Graham, who spoke to the House Healthy Families Subcommittee, served on the State Child Abuse Death Review Committee. Of the 432 children who died in 2012, she said, 40 percent were already involved with the Department of Children and Families.
“It pains me that if the right people had been helping those families, a lot of the deaths could have been prevented,” Graham said.
The number of child deaths usually mentioned in legislative committees is 40, the number that the Casey Family Programs, a policy group, reviewed after a series of child deaths last year.
And that’s how many it took to prompt legislative leaders to vow to overhaul the child-welfare system.
“The public is crying out to us to have revolutionary reform,” said Sen. Eleanor Sobel, a Hollywood Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee. “We don’t want to keep reading about children’s deaths. …However, we’re going to do it in a pragmatic way, step by step.”
Sobel’s panel and the House Healthy Families Subcommittee examined such steps as requiring all new child-protective investigators to have social-work degrees and helping the current investigators get such degrees.
Not everyone who spoke to the lawmakers agreed on how to fix the workplace culture at DCF, but virtually all said it had to be done.
“The thing that we keep coming back to is a lack of fraternity,” Mike Watkins, chief executive officer of Big Bend Community Based Care, told the Senate panel.
To the House panel, Mary Alice Nye, of the Legislature’s Office of Program Policy and Government Accountability, said child-protective investigators report feeling pressured to close cases within a 30-day window and to get all of their work done without filing for overtime pay.
The investigators “felt that they were less and less able to use their knowledge and expertise in decision-making,” Nye said.
They also reported spending 50 to 80 percent amount of their time on administrative tasks and expressed concern about going into homes where there had been violence, difficulty in getting law enforcement officers to meet them there and using their own cars for work, which could identify them in small communities.
“They generally indicated they felt support from their immediate (supervisor) but not from DCF or the lead (community-based care) agencies,” Nye said.
DCF Interim Secretary Esther Jacobo said a program to pair child-protective investigators was being piloted in cases where a child is 3 years old or younger, has a prior DCF history and other family risk factors such as domestic violence, mental illness or substance abuse.
Jacobo said the pilot has been so successful that it will go statewide. Gov. Rick Scott has recommended hiring 400 additional child protective investigators, bringing their caseloads down to 10 apiece.
Sobel said it’s important for state agencies to be more consistent.
“Stop the turnover and create a workforce that likes where they’re working and enjoys what they do and accomplishes a lot,” she said. “For the sake of the kids, we have to do this.”
According to OPPAGA, the turnover for child-protective investigators in Florida is 20 percent. For the case managers who provide services at the local level, it’s 30 percent.
“The News Service of Florida’s Margie Menzel contributed to this report.”

http://miami.cbslocal.com/2014/02/11/lawmakers-grapple-with-changing-the-culture-at-dcf/

Scott Seeks $31 Million Bump In DCF Funding For Child Protection

Gov. Scott to propose increased funds for child protection

By Mary Ellen Klas

Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau

“Editor’s Note: We believe the constant flow of federal funding is the very reason that CPS is so corrupt. They are ALREADY taking/stealing children for baseless reasons and destroying families each and every day. A pay increase and promotion only pushes them to steal more children.”

In an effort to repair his child welfare track record, Gov. Rick Scott will announce Tuesday in Miami that he is steering $31 million in additional money to child protection efforts, a move aimed at reducing caseloads and increasing oversight of vulnerable children in Florida.

Ticky Ricky

The announcement comes in the wake of dozens of child deaths from abuse and neglect in the past year, and amid calls for reform of the Department of Children & Families from the non-profit Casey Family Foundation and Democrats in the Legislature.
“While DCF has made significant changes to protect children, we still have much to do to protect the most vulnerable among us,’’ the governor said in a statement on Monday. “Even one child death is a death too many.”
The governor will also announce that he will steer an additional $8 million to sheriff’s offices to investigate child abuse complaints, a turnabout for the governor who recommended a $17 million reduction in the grants to sheriffs for child protective efforts in his 2013-14 budget proposal.
The governor’s proposal, which is only a recommendation to the Legislature, includes restoring money for Substance Abuse and Mental Health programs, services that play a vital role in reducing child abuse, the agency said in a statement released to the Herald/Times on Monday.
The governor said his “historic increase to DCF funding” will pay for the hiring of 400 additional child protective investigators. The proposal also aims to reduce caseloads for child protective investigators from the current 13.3 cases per investigator to 10, and institute two-person teams in cases involving children under age 4 when the family has a history of domestic violence, substance abuse or mental illness, the statement said.
The program would be modeled after a pilot program DCF is currently running using paired investigators for high-risk cases in Miami-Dade and Polk counties.
DCF interim Secretary Esther Jacobo said she is confident the proposals “will keep Florida children safe.”

DCF interim Secretary Esther Jacobo

“Armed with input from national experts and data to back up our proposals, we are prepared to ensure that these funds will be laser focused on protecting children who are most at-risk,” Jacobo said in the statement.
The governor’s recommendation also includes restoring 26 of the 72 quality assurance positions that were cut under former DCF Secretary David Wilkins. Child advocates blame those cuts for contributing to some of the child deaths.
Another 50 current investigator positions would be eligible for career advancement under a new “Child Protective Master Practitioner” plan that would reward case workers with the most knowledge and experience.
The Casey Family Programs reviewed 40 child deaths last year and concluded that both DCF and community-based care organizations should focus more resources on providing services aimed at stabilizing families to prevent abuse.
The governor’s track record in his previous budget requests to the Legislature has been to reduce funding to the child welfare agency. In his first budget proposal in the 2011-12 budget year, for example, the governor recommended reducing funding for DCF by $238 million below its current levels at the time.
In 2011-12, Scott recommended increasing the agency budget by $1.7 million over the level approved by lawmakers a year before but, in 2013-14, he recommended reducing the budget again — by $75.7 million — below what lawmakers had approved the year before.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/01/13/3869179/gov-scott-to-propose-increased.html#storylink=cpy

The raw truth about
power and ambition in Florida.

Foster Care Children, Now Grown, Tell Their Stories

The Calizaire sisters lived with countless families, and say they were abused by some of their foster care parents

Sophia and Princess Calizaire were introduced to foster care when they were seen wandering the streets looking for their mother, who had left them alone in a South Florida motel.

“We heard this big bang at the door,” said Sophia Calizaire. “We were trying to figure out who it was.”

It was the Florida Department of Children and Families coming to take them away, and they became foster care files that night, when they were just four and seven years old.

Sophia

The Calizaire sisters lived with countless families and were moved from one school to another. They say they were abused while staying with some of those foster care parents.

“She took a belt, she started beating me with the belt, picked up a hanger, she started beating me with the hanger, picked up a heel and started beating me with the heel,” said Sophia.

Her sister, Princess, was outside the room and could hear everything.  “I couldn’t do anything about it,” Princess said, with tears coming down her face.

The Calizaire sisters remember one foster care parent making them sleep in a dog house and eat dog food. They say some foster care parents wouldn’t feed them, would keep locks on the refrigerator and would sometimes starve them as a form of punishment.

“She told me to eat in front of my sister while she watched and my sister is hungry. I took out the chewed up piece of chicken from my mouth and gave it to her,” said Sophia, who said she was caught by her foster care mother. “She filled up the bathroom sink and she took my head and started drowning me. She kept drowning me until she felt she was ready to stop.”

Princess says the abuse not only came from the parents. “I stayed in a foster home down south where this boy used to try to rape me every night before I would go to sleep,” she said. “I used to be scared to go to sleep at night. I ran away from there.”

Mez Pierre, now 24, had a similar experience in foster care when he was a little boy. He says he was sexually abused by one of the teen foster kids staying in the same home.

“I was a little kid, they knew they could take advantage of me and I couldn’t fight back,” said Pierre. “But I did tell, I did tell someone and she didn’t do anything, she didn’t do anything.”

In 2005, DCF completed privatizing foster care. They contracted with 20 lead agencies throughout the state to oversee the care and needs of children in foster care.

Our Kids manages Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, while Child Net handles Broward County. The abuse endured by Pierre and the Calizaire sisters happened before the agencies took over, but they still say the system is far from perfect.

Some child advocate attorneys say the current privatized system does not work because lead agencies like Our Kids sub-contracted other organizations to monitor foster care children.

“So you have multiple corporations and agencies who supposedly are in charge and responsible for the lives of the children but tragically these children, real human beings, fall through the cracks in the system,” said attorney Howard Talenfeld.

DCF disagrees and says when it was a statewide agency it became quite unmanageable.

“Out of the one or two cases that you hear which are horrible cases and we need to learn from, there are thousands of children and families that DCF and Our Kids helps on a yearly and daily basis,” said DCF’s southern regional director, Esther Jacobo, who added that DCF is taking steps to improve the system.

Esther Jacobo

Jacobo said case managers have to see a child in care every 30 days and must have private conversations with that child so they feel comfortable opening up. She says there is an electronic monitoring system in place for case workers, which snaps a picture of the child with a time, date and location.

“It’s kind of like a GPS and statewide Tallahassee monitors that so you know what is happening in terms of the child visit,” Jacobo said.

Currently, there are just fewer than 20,000 children in foster care statewide, according to DCF. During a two-month span between August and October, there were 127 verified abuse cases across the state, 17 of them in the South Florida area.

http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Foster-Care-System-Through-The-Eyes-of-The-Ones-Who-Lived-It-140874593.html

Sheriff Dawsy, Sen. Dean At Odds Over Child Protective Services

Sheriff Jeff Dawsy

 

INVERNESS --  Citrus County Sheriff Jeff Dawsy is on a mission and he has a blunt reason for it.
"This action that the state is taking right now endangers your kids.”

Sheriff Dawsy is making a push in Tallahassee to restore a contract with the Citrus Co. Sheriff's Office and the Florida Dept. of Children and Families to retain control of child protection services in Citrus County.

The sheriff's office has had the contract since 2007, but it was cancelled this last legislative session.

“Remember, this was a budgetary item, not a personal issue," Former Citrus County Sheriff and current State Sen. Charlie Dean said.

State Sen. Charlie Dean

Sen. Dean supported cancelling the contract as a way to balance the budget.

Sheriff Dawsy said he believes if Sen. Dean will change his mind, the funding will return to his department. He said he doesn’t believe it’s about the money.

In fact, he believes his agency can provide more for the money than the state can.

In paperwork provided by the sheriff, the agency was rated in the top three percent by state evaluators and has the highest ratio of seeing children in the first 24 hours after a complaint.

“It’s all about the kids," Sheriff Dawsy said. "It has nothing to do whether or not some legislator doesn’t like me or if he does like me.  This is a good business practice.”

“Every child is going to be protected," Sen. Dean said. "Every child is going to be looked into. That’s our responsibility.”


 Sheriff Dawsy believes it matters who is looking after the kids in the county.

Dean said it was a choice between funding the contract with the sheriff's office or a mental hospital in Baker County.

Having DCF handle child protection services isn't unheard of. Six other counties in Florida already have the system in place.

http://www.baynews9.com/article/news/2011/october/329297/Sheriff-Dawsy-Sen-Dean-at-odds-over-child-protective-services.html#.Tpi340zZJps.facebook

Robin K Jensen owns a business: Dive Adventures LLC which has a location at 8803 Cortez Rd. W, Bradenton, FL 34210,  1 941.727.3483, http://www.dive-adventures.net (Active officers include Erik E Jensen and Robin Jensen. Dive Adventures LLC filed as a Florida Limited Liability on Monday, October 22, 2007 in the state of Florida and is currently active. Robin Jensen serves as the registered agent for this organization) that she obviously loves and gets wonderful benefits.

Palm Beach County's New Anti-Corruption Inspector General Selected Sheryl Steckler

By Jennifer Sorentrue Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Updated: 7:53 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24, 2011
Posted: 5:50 p.m. Wednesday, May. 5, 2010  
WEST PALM BEACH — The woman responsible for ferreting out corruption for the state's Department of Children and Families was chosen today to serve as Palm Beach County's first-ever inspector general.
Sheryl Steckler, 48, was one of eight finalists for the newly created post, which will watchdog over the kind of waste and misdeeds that have sent five local elected officials to federal prison.
A seven-member selection panel consisting of the county's ethics commission, State Attorney Michael McAuliffe and Public Defender Carey Haughwout chose Steckler after two days of interviews.
The selection marked one of the final steps in a year-long effort to rid the county of its corruption-tainted image.
"I think it is meaningful benchmark of success," McAuliffe said after the selection. "…We are on are way. What a difference a year makes."
County attorneys plan to meet with Steckler Thursday morning to begin negotiating the terms of her contract. County commissioners will have to sign off on the contract before it becomes official.
Steckler has spent seven years working as the inspector general for DCF in Tallahassee, where she oversees a staff of as many as 150 employees and makes $107,000.
Steckler could not be reached for comment Wednesday. She graduated from Twin Lakes High School in West Palm Beach. In her application for the post, she pointed to her decades of management experience and work with the National Association of Inspectors General, where she currently serves as second vice president.

"My responsibility has always been to enhance the public trust in government," Steckler wrote. "My integrity and strong work ethic have never wavered, even in the most difficult times."
DCF Secretary George Sheldon praised Steckler's work for the department, saying she has been "very aggressive" in ferreting out "all kinds of issues." She has also worked to close loopholes that have led to fraud and waste, he said.
"When you have 4,500 employees you are going to get some bad apples," Sheldon said. "What you have to do is put some systems in place that identify when it does happen without putting the good employees in jeopardy."
In Palm Beach County, Steckler will lead a newly created inspector general unit. She will have the power to conduct audits and require reports from all county offices. She will also have unrestricted access to county records.
County commissioners agreed to create the inspector general post last year, after a grand jury convened by McAuliffe recommended the county enact tougher ethics laws. The inspector general and ethics commission topped that list.
Last month, the county's ethics commission chose Alan S. Johnson, the county's top corruption prosecutor, to serve as its executive director.

"It is hard for me to believe that we are where we are today," said attorney David Baker, who helped create a coalition to push for county ethics reform.
Baker said the coalition is also working on amendments to the county's charter that would allow the inspector general to investigate cities and towns, and not just county offices.
"There is still a lot that the new inspector general and the new executive director are going to have to do," Baker said. "They will need some help."

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/countys-new-anti-corruption-inspector-general-selected-672448.html  

Alan S. Johnson

Best Interest Of the Child Or Their Wallets, You Decide

South Florida children's councils: They help kids, pay their officials big salaries

May 21, 2011|By Sally Kestin, Sun Sentinel

Property owners in South Florida are taxed millions of dollars each year to pay for programs to help children, but a chunk of that is spent not on kids, but on the bureaucracies created to aid them.
The Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County pays more than $1.3 million in salaries to its top 10 executives, with CEO Tana Ebbole making $220,000.

Salaries at the children's council in Broward are more modest — the CEO makes $142,000 — but employees are eligible for bonuses that so far this year have totaled $64,000.
In both counties, money that voters approved for children's services went toward construction of sprawling headquarters — a $17 million complex in Boynton Beach for the Palm Beach County council, and in Broward, an $8.4 million building in Lauderhill.
Some state lawmakers at this spring's legislative session criticized salaries and bonuses at child welfare agencies, and said they also were concerned about administrative spending at the children's services councils.

"People are making money off children,'' state Sen. Ronda Storms, a Valrico Republican and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Children, Families and Elder Affairs, told the Sun Sentinel. "They take these teddy bears and hold them up and say they're doing it for the children.''
Council representatives say the criticism is unwarranted. Administrative costs represent less than 10 percent of the total budget of $62 million in Broward and $112 million in Palm Beach County.
"I don't like paying taxes any more than the next guy,'' said Rod Macon, a retired FPL executive who is chairman of the council in Palm Beach County. "We work really hard to keep overhead down, to be as efficient as we can for the taxpayer.''
Eight counties in Florida have established children's councils with taxing authority to raise money for kids. The amount they collect is just a small portion of the average property owner's bill — $70 on a $200,000 homestead in Broward, and $113 in Palm Beach County — but adds up to millions.
The vast majority of the money goes toward paying for programs, such as preventing child abuse, improving the health of pregnant women and keeping delinquent kids out of trouble. But when it comes to other spending, some of it is far removed from kids, a Sun Sentinel review found.
The Palm Beach County council's budget this year includes $1 million for public affairs, $500,000 for consultants, $279,000 for travel and $154,000 for lobbyists.
Those expenses are necessary to get the council's message out, monitor the performance of agencies that receive its funds and lobby lawmakers in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., to "ensure that Palm Beach County's children don't get short-changed,'' Ebbole said.

The council has cut travel by about $70,000 and has "been consciously working to decrease those kinds of costs,'' she said.
Of all the children's councils in Florida, Palm Beach County's pays its employees the most.
Ebbole's salary is $44,000 more than the next highest paid CEO, Modesto Abety of the Children's Trust in Miami-Dade, and puts her among the top-earning public employees in Florida. In state government, only two people are paid more, and the governor's job comes with a salary of just $130,000.
On top of Ebbole's paycheck, she gets a 2008 Mazda CX-7 that the council leases, $22,000 a year in deferred compensation and $6,500 toward a long-term-care insurance policy.
Besides Ebbole, 15 other employees at Palm Beach County' children's council are paid more than $100,000 a year. In Broward, only the CEO makes six figures, records show.
"I don't know why our salaries are higher, but I can tell you that every penny we pay that lady [Ebbole] is well worth it,'' said Palm Beach Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez, vice chairman of the council. "We probably have one of the best children's services councils in the whole state, and it's due to her efforts.''
Ebbole came to the council in 1989, three years after voters agreed to create the taxing district, and became CEO in 1994. She said her many years on the job have driven her salary up.

"I think that the longevity in terms of being in the position for this long, for this many years, certainly contributes to that,'' she said.
In Broward, CEO Cindy Arenberg Seltzer has been at the helm since the council was approved by voters in 2000. Her $142,000 salary includes a $7,800 car allowance.
"My salary is what it is because I said: 'stop,' '' said Seltzer, who has a law degree and a master's in public administration. "I'm certainly worth more, but we're dealing with public dollars.''
The 55 employees of the Broward council were eligible this year for bonuses, called performance pay, of up to 5 percent. Seltzer got the most, $5,000, and 20 other employees have received bonuses of $1,600 and up, records show.

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-05-21/news/fl-children-service-tax-district-20110521_1_councils-salaries-kids

Are The Children Only Worth $5,000,000 After They Are Murdered By DCF

March 20, 2011 

This article is not right on so many many levels. First are our children only worth 5,000,000 dollars? Is this the 30 pieces of silver conscienous money because DCF always fails the children? And why is Our Kids Inc not held to the same accountablity as DCF. They after all are the outsource agent for killing children. They are the ones who received, 100,000,000 dollars to steal children from the state and federal government. Yes, your tax dollars at work. If this bill passes more children will die, and be abused and once again no one is held responsible. Time to say enough!
By MARGIE MENZEL
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
Published: Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 11:40 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 11:40 p.m.
( page all of 3 )
TALLAHASSEE | A measure that would cap damages for pain and suffering by children in Florida’s child welfare system was approved by a House committee Wednesday after impassioned testimony from both supporters and critics.

Related Links:Two Children Reunited With Mother After Found Living in Squalor
Tampa Police Find 7-Year-Old Living in Filth
Baby Daughter Stuffed in Gym Bag in Jacksonville Woman’s Car
1-Year-Old Miramar Girl Left in Car Dies
Rep. Scott Plakon, R-­Longwood, the House sponsor, told the Health and Human Services Access subcommittee that HB 1019 would reduce “frivolous” lawsuits against agencies with state contracts to provide foster care and adoption services.

That in turn would allow the contractors to put more money toward serving children and less toward liability insurance or lawyers’ fees, said Shawn Salamida, the CEO of Partnership for Strong Families, the lead community-based care organization for 13 Northeast Florida counties.
“I’d rather take that money and hire two new caseworkers,” said Salamida.
Mike Watkins, CEO of another contractor, Big Bend Community Based Care, Inc., said his agency’s liability insurance had just been cancelled. The carrier, Watkins said, had told him to expect a 100 percent increase in premiums – and that that was low compared to hikes faced by other CBCs.
“This is probably the greatest threat to community-based care,” said Watkins.
“This is a crisis,” said Plakon, adding that the Children’s Home Society of Florida had recently received notice that its liability insurance would not be renewed.
But opponents said the measure would hurt child victims still more. They invoked the recent tragedy of Nubia and Victor Barahona, the ten-year-old twins who were victims of one of the worst-ever child abuse cases in state history. Nubia Barahona’s decomposing body was found in the back of her adoptive father’s truck on Feb. 14, even as her brother Victor convulsed from toxic chemicals in the passenger seat. He is recovering from severe burns in therapeutic foster care.

“This is really an attempt, truly, to provide legal protection for those who harm children to an extraordinary degree,” said Christina Spudeas, director of the advocacy group Florida’s Children First.
“There are kids in (foster) care that are beaten, that are raped, that are beaten and raped again, that are burned over half their bodies, that are unsupervised and left to fall in and almost drown in a pool — that require long-term, lifetime care … extensive surgeries … and mental-health help to recover,” she said.
The report of an independent panel last week charged Florida’s child welfare system with “fatal ineptitude” in the Barahona case.

“The medical bills that Victor has incurred to date are well in excess of several hundred thousand dollars already,” said Gary Farmer of the Florida Justice Association, which represents the trial bar and opposes Plakon’s bill.

“And we haven’t even talked about the emotional distress that little boy will live with all his life,” Farmer said. “Under this bill, there would be insufficient insurance to cover those lawsuits.”
Plakon’s bill would cap awards for pain and suffering at between $200,000 and $1 million and lower the amount of liability insurance the agencies must carry from $1 million to $500,000.
Economic damages would be capped at $2 million. The measure would also protect the Florida Department of Children and Families, which has sovereign immunity, from lawsuits against its subcontractors, which don’t.

“There’s been an issue of late of multiple parties being listed in these lawsuits trying to sort of drag DCF back into the equation,” Plakon said, “when all they did was, in good faith, appoint that contract to that community-based care agency.”

Salamida said his agency had had no lawsuits during its first four years, but in the last two years has had three, with a possible fourth lawsuit “on deck.”

“Sometimes it’s confusing who does what within our system,” Salamida said. “So what we’re seeing is that when something tragic or bad happens to a child, everyone that’s attached to the case gets named. And the process of going through and sorting out who did what is very time-consuming and costly.”
Farmer also pointed to a supporter of the bill, Our Kids, Inc., the community-based care organization in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties that handled Nubia and Victor Barahona’s adoptions. Farmer said Our Kids had gross revenues of $101 million in 2008, while its CEO, Frances Allegra, earns more than $200,000 with bonuses. Half a dozen other members of the agency’s executive team have salaries hovering around $100,000, Farmer said.

Allegra responded with a statement.
“We are a private, non-profit tasked with running one of the largest, most complex systems in Florida. Our board of community business leaders demand high performance and expect excellence,” she said. “Our responsibilities were previously performed by a state employee with a benefits package offering significantly more paid time off, better health benefits and a pension. In addition, we execute our duties, that were previously a state function, using significantly less staff. In return, we expect high performance.”
Our Kids would be protected under Plakon’s bill, which cleared the committee on an 11-4 vote.

http://www.theledger.com/article/20110317/NEWS/103175066/1374?p=all&tc=pgall