The price of foster-care panic: Kids forced to fight at Florida group home

Judge calls it “a cockfight … between foster kids”

Judge Michael Hanzman

 One of the things that happens when you have a foster-care panic – a sharp sudden spike in the number of children taken from their homes, like the one going on in Florida right now as a direct result of Innocents Lost – is that the agency taking the children runs out of places to put them.

The “shortage” of placements forces the state to rely more on the worst form of “care” group homes and institutions, and to turn a blind eye when those institutions become abusive.

Perhaps that explains what the Miami Herald reported yesterday afternoon:

A Miami group home for foster children is under fire after a video circulated on social media showing two 11-year-old boys in a violent brawl — egged on by the facility’s adult supervisor as other kids cheered.

“I saw a cockfight … between foster kids,” Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman said in court last week, describing the video as showing the employee “provoking and encouraging violence” while “these two boys battled it out and beat each other up. …

“She encouraged the kids to fight. She said, go ahead and fight, just don’t use weapons. Let’s have a fight. She circled everybody around. Got the kids all riled up.”

The home was one of many run by the Children’s Home Society of Florida, (CHS) a venerable, and powerful player in the Florida system.  Children’s Home was contracted to run the group home by Our Kids, the private “lead agency” responsible for foster care in Miami.

According to the Herald story (written by David Ovalle, not Carol Marbin Miller) the fight wasn’t the end of the trauma for one of the children, identified in court records as J.W. 

After the staffer [who organized the fight] summoned police, officers committed J.W. against his will to a hospital for days for psychiatric evaluation under the state’s Baker Act. Hanzman said the staffer clearly “lied to” officers about what happened.

“This kid is going to be labeled as having a mental illness his whole life. Probably won’t be able to get a job,” he said. “All because you have a stupid, inept case worker at your facility that encourages 11-year-olds to engage in brutal violence and stands around watching and cheering.” 

But others told the court the problem goes well beyond one staffer.  Again from the story:

There is reason “to believe that the incident in the case is not isolated, and that all of the children in the care of CHS are potentially in danger of similar abuse,” Eugene Zenobi, head of the publicly funded Regional Counsel office, wrote in a motion filed to the court Friday.

  

Group homes and institutions are particularly damaging for younger children. In fact, the federal government rates state child welfare systems in part on their ability to reduce the number of children under age 12 in institutions.  Which raises the question: What were those 11-year-olds doing in a group home in the first place? 

One likely answer: With so many more children entering care and trapped in care for a longer time because of the foster-care panic caused by the Herald, the state Department of Children and Families and the “lead agencies” are begging for beds.  Beggars can’t be choosers.

Our Kids has a disturbing record when it comes to institutionalizing children. The proportion of children under Our Kids jurisdiction in group homes and institutions is 35 percent above the state average, and it’s increased by nearly 30 percent since April of 2010. 

Another part of the problem is that so many in Florida, including the judge in this case, have bought into the false narrative created by the Herald in Innocents Lost.  So the judge declares:

“What is really sad is these kids are abused, abandoned and neglected. And then they get taken from their parents. They come in expecting refuge,” the judge said. “And what they are subjected to is more abuse and neglect at the hands of ineptitude, and agencies who throw them in these group homes with incompetent people who stand around watching them have cockfights.”

He got the second part right.  But while some of the children taken from their parents are “abused abandoned and neglected,” others are not.  And the proportion who are not is likely to rise during a foster-care panic, when caseworkers rush to take away more children to avoid being on the front page, or the home page, of the Herald.

So, just to review. In the wake of Innocents Lost:

• Thousands of children who otherwise would have remained in their homes have been consigned to foster care.
• This was supposed to reduce child deaths.  In fact, such deaths, including deaths of children “known to the system” have increased.
• And now we have the horror reported by the Herald yesterday.

By now some readers, especially in Florida, may be wondering: Are you really going to blame every new horror in Florida foster care on the Herald?

Actually, yes – in part.

Since at least March 2014, when Innocents Lost was published, the Herald has, in effect, dictated child welfare policy in Florida.  That’s partly the fault of the Florida Legislature, the governor and DCF, which have allowed the Herald to tell them how to run child welfare.  It’s also true that there were horrors before Innocents Lost, even during the years when Florida was reducing foster care and, a series of independent evaluations found, improving safety overall.  And there are horrors in every child welfare system in America.

 But the take-the-child-and-run approach advocated by the Herald has made everything worse. So the Herald shares responsibility for the results.