The Tampa Bay Times
had
a story this week about how so many children are being taken away in
Hillsborough County that some had to spend a night or two sleeping in offices:
In the story, Lorita Shirley, operations manager for Eckerd
Kids, the private agency that runs foster care in the county, says one of the
reasons is:
…a spike in the number of children being taken into care that month used up available beds, she said. Typically, about 140 children a month are removed from their families because of concerns for their safety and placed with relatives, foster parents or in group homes, Shirley said. In May, that number went up to 195, a surge of almost 40 percent.
But actually, it’s even worse.
In the 12 months before Innocents Lost was published in
March, 2014, 1,265 children were taken from their parents in Hillsborogh
County. During the same 12 month period,
ending in February 2016, the figure skyrocketed to 1,592. And that was before the recent “surge.”
Right now, the rate of removal in Hillsborough County is far
above the statewide average – and that average has gone up significantly since
Innocents Lost.
In other words, in part because of high-profile tragedies in
the county, Hillsborough County has had a panic on top of the statewide
foster-care panic.
The story also provided an official excuse for the spike in
removals;
The decision to remove children from their families in Hillsborough is made by the Child Protective Investigative Division, a unit of the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office. Capt. Jim Bradford said there has been no change in the criteria they use when deciding to remove a child. The increase in May is a result of more calls coming in on the Florida Abuse Hotline, he said.
Foster-care panics often prompt a surge in calls, but a
greater percentage of those calls tend to be false reports – not because of
malice, but because people urged over and over to report anything and everything
tend to do just that. That means
hotlines need to be more discerning about which calls they pass on for
investigation and investigators need to be more discerning about which calls
really require removing a child from the home.
Neither is happening in Florida.
Once again, there is no
evidence that this additional suffering inflicted on children by the Miami Herald’s shoddy journalism and the
response by state and local officials has done anything to make children safer.
