Jun
17
State counters rise in child removals; DCF aims to salvage families after abuse and cut foster cases
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Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday, June 17, 2007.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Hundreds of times every month, investigators are called to the homes of vulnerable children in Palm Beach County and asked to predict the future.
If they leave them with their parents, the children could be beaten, neglected or in rare cases even killed.
But if they cannot find a willing relative and have to take them into foster care, the children face a scary and uncertain future far from everyone they know. In the worst cases, they are separated from brothers and sisters, raised by changing shift workers at shelters and moved so many times they lose the ability to love. Some never find a parent to adopt them and are turned out at age 18 – angry, frightened and alone.
In 2003 and 2004, the Department of Children and Families pushed to get children out of foster care as it transferred cases to the contracted private agency Child and Family Connections. But the number of children living apart from their birth parents climbed from 1,315 on July 1, 2004, to 1,560 at the end of May.
State data show sharp spikes in removals of children after news of a tragedy here. In 2004 and the beginning of 2005, the state took an average of about six or seven children out of every 100 reports of alleged abuse.
The number of children entering foster care peaked at 14 per 100 reports in July 2006, double the rate it had been two years before. That month, 111 Palm Beach County children were taken from their families.
That spike came in the weeks after a DCF supervisor with two decades of experience and glowing performance reviews was demoted for failing to do enough in the case of Charles Edward Tyson Jr., whose father was charged with smashing him against the hood of a car, then throwing him into a canal to die.
John Brewer, a local attorney who represents parents who face losing rights to their children, believes such cases have an effect on DCF workers.
“I fight with them every day, but I see that they are put in an untenable position,” Brewer said. “They are charged with predicting the unpredictable, and when it goes awry, a huge hue and cry comes of it. And subsequently, they shoot first and ask questions later on some cases.”
The cases of children unnecessarily separated from loving families that could have been helped are also tragedies, said Richard Wexler, who advocates keeping families together as head of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. But those cases rarely, if ever, become known.
Under Florida law, records of the state’s involvement in a child’s life become public only when a child dies of abuse or neglect. Even if parents allege their living child was wrongfully taken, the state cannot legally comment on its role or release any files.
As a result, Wexler said, “in all the years I’ve followed child welfare, I have never seen a caseworker fired, suspended, demoted, slapped on the wrist – or attacked in a newspaper – for taking away too many children.”
Child and Family Connections leaders are mindful of the harm that foster care can cause to children of all ages, agency spokeswoman Brenda Oakes said. It is crucial for babies to bond with a caregiver, she said, which is disrupted if the baby is in a shelter with shift workers. And it is critical for teenagers to learn independence, which is hard to do in a system that requires background checks if they want to spend the night at a friend’s house.
Child and Family Connections Executive Director John McCarthy and DCF District Administrator Ben Shirley are working together with experts from around the state to roll back the tide of removals.
Shirley said alcohol or drug abuse is the main problem for at least two-thirds of the parents who lose their children.
One of the most common circumstances, he said, is that the parent went on a binge and neglected the child, leading to an accident or other harm. Also common are parents who threaten harm to children or fight around the kids, he said.
Some children can be left at home if the parents get treatment and counseling, Shirley said.
Child and Family Connections spends $800,000 a year on a crisis intervention program to help keep families together. Since July 1, 676 cases have been referred and 466 were accepted.
The majority of families that participated did not lose their children to foster care, whether they officially finished the program or not, McCarthy said.
The foster care agency and DCF also are trying a strategy that has worked well in other parts of the state: getting together in a phone conference before a child is taken from home.
John Cooper, district administrator for the region around Ocala, began that strategy after tragedies there helped swell the number of children in state care from 3,000 to 4,300.
Now the DCF investigator, supervisor and attorney sit down weekly with up to a dozen other advisers, Cooper said.
At the meeting, everyone can propose resources to help the family that a single investigator might not have thought of, and more people shoulder responsibility for a difficult decision.
“I don’t know if this is a solution for (Palm Beach County),” he said, “but it is something that worked for us.”
Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
June 17, 2007 Sunday
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