Mar
16
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday, March 16, 2008.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
When a single mother of six was killed in Belle Glade, it was up to Alan Abramowitz, then the second-in-command of the county’s Department of Children and Families, to help decide what would happen to the children.
As Robert Barker, then head of Palm Beach County’s foster care agency, Child and Family Connections, remembers it, the father of the four older siblings offered to take in all six, including the two who weren’t his.
A foster care supervisor who visited the father’s home thought he seemed earnest, but on short notice, no one could be sure that he was capable of parenting six kids.
If something went wrong, Abramowitz could have to face bosses, judges and possibly even the media, all demanding to know why he had taken a gamble on the man. But few would blame him, Barker said, if he sent the kids to a shelter.
The decision Abramowitz made on that day several years ago shows how he became one of the most influential proponents of a revolution in Florida’s foster care system.
The six children were sad, scared and alone. They should go to the one parent they had left, Abramowitz decided.
Since 2003, when Abramowitz accepted his first management job at the Department of Children and Families in Palm Beach County, he has become one the state’s most passionate salesmen for the idea that Florida needs to fix foster care by having a lot less of it.
That view, though still controversial, is gaining momentum. After DCF Secretary Bob Butterworth’s first year on the job, he said his conversations with young adults who were in foster care has convinced him that many of them would have been better off with their parents.
In 2007, the number of children removed from their birth parents after a report of neglect or abuse dropped significantly for the first time in a decade, from 21,000 a year to fewer than 18,000.
Though Abramowitz is far from the only state administrator intent on reversing the tide, he may be the most outspoken. And wherever he has gone, the number of children in state care has dropped.
He left Palm Beach County in 2004 to run the state agency’s operations in Flagler and Volusia, then moved to the region around Orlando. In 2007, Butterworth sent him back to Palm Beach County to deal with a crisis at the county’s foster care agency.
During the six months he spent here, about 400 kids, a quarter of Palm Beach County children in state care, were returned to their parents or found new homes with relatives and adoptive families. In January, Butterworth dispatched him to lead DCF in Miami-Dade County.
The dangers of leaving a child with ill-equipped, drug-addicted or potentially abusive parents are clear. But less publicized are the dangers of taking children into foster care, where there is also a risk they will have unstable and chaotic lives, being yanked from their neighborhoods, separated from siblings and repeatedly disappointed by caregivers who say they intend to keep them, then don’t.
Abramowitz said a recent MIT study confirms what he has long felt. It shows that children taken by workers who tend to remove more children than their colleagues have higher rates of pregnancy, arrest and unemployment.
“There are monsters,” Abramowitz says, “on both sides.”
‘JUST PROTECT THE CHILD’
Abramowitz, 46, grew up in a close-knit military family. His brother Sid Abramowitz played offensive tackle for four NFL teams in the 1980s. Another brother, Col. Dave Abramowitz, oversees Iraqi soldiers as chief of staff for the Iraq Assistance Group.
Alan Abramowitz served in the Army Reserves and National Guard, and still wakes up around 3 a.m. on weekdays. His resume matches his restless energy. He served the Peace Corps in Thailand from 1990 to 1992. After graduating from law school at Florida State University, he worked briefly as a prosecutor, then as a public defender in Central Florida.
In 2000, Abramowitz left his job as assistant general counsel for the Department of Juvenile Justice to take a position as an attorney for DCF. There, Abramowitz saw firsthand the dysfunctional cycle that had gripped the department for years.
High-profile murders of children triggered public outrage. Experienced investigators quit under the strain and withering criticism from the media.
Fearful of another death, workers took more children into foster care. Overwhelmed new hires had no time to discern which parents could be helped, and which were potentially dangerous. And more children were hurt.
In that climate, a siege mentality set in. DCF leaders routinely hid behind spokespeople, refused to turn over documents and hunted for scapegoats.
Abramowitz remembers one seminar for DCF workers. In order to protect yourself, the instructor told the workers, protect the child. That focus on self-preservation was dead wrong, Abramowitz said: “Just protect the child.”
LEAPED AT JOB IN 2003
In 2003, when Abramowitz was still an attorney for DCF, the state wanted new leaders in Palm Beach County.
Vern Melvin, the Treasure Coast DCF administrator who agreed to serve as interim leader in Palm Beach County, knew Abramowitz from their days working at the Department of Juvenile Justice. He asked whether he would be interested in the No. 2 position.
Melvin told him he would have to clear the move with his supervisors. The next morning, Melvin’s phone rang at about 5:30 a.m. It was Abramowitz, calling about the job. Melvin suggested he try back at a reasonable hour.
From the time Abramowitz got his formal offer and immediately accepted, he knew that, to change the agency, he needed to change the public perception of it.
In March 2003, a month after Melvin tapped Abramowitz, the pair took the unusual step of issuing a news release to announce embarrassing news. Crews were working on an old DCF office when they found missing child abuse files dating back to 1998 squirreled away above the ceiling tiles.
The cases were old, the worker was gone and the kids were safe, but still, they decided to preempt negative coverage by alerting local news organizations.
Abramowitz has called reporters to notify tell them about child deaths, allowed them to sit in on internal discussions about individual cases and asked the courts to release closed records. He has responded to public records requests within minutes.
His likability comes from the fact that he is the ultimate extrovert: completely unguarded and without reserve, said Children’s Services Council Executive Director Tana Ebbole. You can rely on Abramowitz to say what he thinks and do what he says, Ebbole and others say.
“What you see is what you get,” Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez said.
Abramowitz loves to work a room, usually cracking jokes at his own expense. When he walks intoa meeting, colleagues often jump up to hug him.
Many have pointed out that his boundless energy borders on hyperactivity. Abramowitz says he considered that possibility, and asked a doctor whether he might qualify.
The verdict was negative for attention deficit disorder, but he still wonders whether he might have obsessive compulsive disorder. Abramowitz doesn’t mean that in the sense of tics or hand-washing but rather, in going over and over a problem in his mind, until he can find a solution.
TOO FAR, FAST, SOME SAY
At DCF, much of his thinking has centered on one theme: What can be done to turn the tide of removals?
To help change the way his workers think, he encourages them to treat birth parents as allies instead of suspects and use mediations instead of court hearings in some cases. Decisions about whether to remove a child are made as a group, instead of by individual investigators.
Some in Palm Beach County, including some attorneys who represent foster children in court, have misgivings about Abramowitz’s fervor.
They believe he went too far, too fast here, leaving children in marginal homes before there was time to develop the intense supervision and rehabilitation programs that keep kids safe.
Answers about whether Abramowitz succeeded here may be in data that measure how many children were abused again by their caregivers within six months of the initial report. Those numbers are not yet in for Palm Beach County.
But with a leader such as Butterworth, and a federal policy approved in 2006 that allows Florida to spend money once earmarked for foster care on family preservation, Abramowitz believes there will be major change in the way the Florida treats children and families.
“There is no going back,” Abramowitz said.
Copyright 2008 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
March 16, 2008 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 1C
LENGTH: 1,411 words