A Foster Care System in Crisis. . . . . s t i l l
A Tale of Two SistersTWO SISTERS in Miami-Dade County who were in foster care limbo for 13 years are suing Florida. Their story demonstrates the consequences of incompetence in a bureaucracy that cares for about 2500 children in Miami-Dade County with an annual budget of over $317 million. The lawsuit is called Two Forgotten Children vs. the State of Florida. A senior judge has come out of retirement to preside over the case.
“Melinda” and “Karina” entered the foster-care system in June 1986 when someone found them wandering alone in a city park. They were 4 and 2. Their father was in prison. Their mother disappeared but eventually turned up dead in 1995.
Within a few months that first year the teenage son of one foster family sexually molested 3-year-old Karina. The state sent them to separate homes. They wouldn’t see each other again for three years.
Melinda was 9 the first time she tried to kill herself. She tried to stick a fork into her head. She had been raped. She had syphilis. Between January 1989 and March 1990 Melinda was repeatedly raped at a foster home where a previous child had complained about fondling. That home was closed in 1991. Karina, too, said she had been beaten and sexually abused.
The girls moved in and out of more than 30 foster homes over the years. Florida’s child welfare system failed to give them the one thing that would have given them the best chance at a decent and productive life: a real family.
Now in their teens, both girls have children. Both can read only at elementary school levels.
One final irony:
MELINDA AND KARINA may never see any of the money that a jury might award them because Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration has placed a lien on the future assets of both. The agency wants to be repaid for the more than $700,000 spent on residential care over the years.
Soaring Caseloads
CASELOADS ACROSS FLORIDA continue to soar, sometimes to dangerous levels. Some caseworkers are doubling their workload even after new laws have been enacted to reform the overburdened system. In Tampa, caseloads for child protective investigators climbed from an average of 24 to 45 in a year. There were 541 open investigations on October 1, 1998, compared with 961 as of October 1, 1999.
Careworkers are being overwhelmed and the chances of a child getting hurt or dying are increasing as the situation worsens. Florida’s latest child abuse reform effort, the Kayla McKean Act, requires allegations of child abuse to be investigated more carefully. The law was named for a 6 year old girl fatally beaten after social workers failed to act on signs of previous abuse in her Lake County home.
Under provisions of the new law, an allegation indicating a child has suffered an injury, even without visible marks, requires a caseworker to arrange a medical exam. Also, more cases are ending up in court as workers file petitions to observe children in homes where there is drug abuse, domestic violence, or teen parenting. The act was expected to increase reports of abuse, but administrators in Tallahassee didn’t anticipate the extent of the impact.
Additional funding didn’t accompany the law.
In less than a year after the murder of Kayla McKean, two more children died at the hands of abusers despite the fact that DCF had been warned the children were in danger. The slide has continued. Nearly 700 more children are in state custody in Orange, Seminole, Osceola, and Brevard counties. Yet the area has gained fewer than 50 foster homes in that same time. Dozens of children are losers in the daily game of musical chairs, shuffling from home to hotel room and back to a caseworker’s office, hoping the next stop will be the last.
Placement workers are forced to call foster families several times a day, counting on a weak moment when a mother or father agrees to take another child into a home already far over its state-licensed limit.
And caseworkers, worried that any misstep will prove fatal to a child, have been running scared, pulling kids out of homes in larger numbers than ever.
System Continues to be OverwhelmedAn abused child will spend the first anniversary of Kayla McKean’s death sleeping in a Florida motel because there is no room in any nearby homes licensed to provide emergency shelter. Florida’s system of caring for abused children is being overwhelmed — partly because of the tough law legislators passed this spring in an effort to protect children from the “gruesome brutality” Kayla endured until her death.
Despite the new law, the situation facing Florida’s abused children is going to get worse unless the state does more to help troubled parents and care for abused children. Floridians need to pay as much attention to the state of the state’s child-protection as they would to a hurricane or tropical storm in the Atlantic.
People who work on the front lines are describing an overburdened system, a system in which available resources simply cannot cope with the flow of cases.
Statistics from the state Department of Children and Families support those observations. The number of children removed from their homes and placed in emergency shelters surged 80 percent in three months.
Some children are being crowded into shelters. But not all of them. In Central Florida DCF is renting motel rooms for some children they’ve removed from the home. Children are sleeping in child-care centers on infant cots overnight and then in the morning being brought to the offices of the Department of Children and Families to spend the day. Sometimes children are driven around all day as state workers try to find a place for them.
Food and shelter is just the beginning, of course. The reason they were removed is because there has been an allegation of damage — so they don’t just need a place to sleep and something to eat. Placement needs to be the beginning of a process that tries to mend a torn life.
