Remembering George Sheldon …

… Including the legacy the Miami Herald wants you to forget

George Sheldon

When former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, then a Republican, named one of the state’s most prominent Democrats, Bob Butterworth, to run the state Department of Children and Families, a joke made the rounds: “Nobody can fix DCF,” the joke went. “Now a Democrat will be blamed for the failures.”

Butterworth brought in another prominent Democrat, George Sheldon, to be his deputy. But if the joke was right about Crist’s secret plan, the joke was on him. Together, Butterworth and Sheldon engineered one of the largest transformations of any child welfare system in America. What was once the nation’s most prominent example of child welfare failure, became, relatively speaking, a remarkable success. 

When Butterworth left, there was speculation that Crist would never name Sheldon to the top job – after all, Crist had defeated Sheldon in two statewide election campaigns.  But he did.  And Sheldon expanded on the reforms begun under Butterworth.

During the Obama Administration, Sheldon became the nation’s highest-ranking official in child welfare, running the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services. While there, he championed real child welfare finance reform.

The term “hero” is overused.  So is the term “champion for children.” But they both apply to George Sheldon, who died last week at the age of 71. 

Reading the tributes to Sheldon it is striking how many of them come from former foster children.  They knew that, finally, they had a real friend in a position of power.

Sheldon’s greatest accomplishment

Sheldon moved aggressively to curb the use of psychiatric medication on foster children, and he prohibited the use of foster children in drug trials.  He championed “normalcy,” working to clear away the bureaucratic barriers that made it hard for foster children to enjoy the smallest pleasures in life, such as a sleepover at a friend’s house.  And Sheldon and Butterworth took DCF out of the bunker, opening records and speaking candidly about the agency’s failures.

But their single greatest accomplishment was this: Sheldon and Butterworth dramatically reduced the number of children torn needlessly from their families – and independent monitors found they did it without compromising child safety.  The dramatic transformation was featured in The New York Times.  

Yet this appears nowhere in the Miami Herald’s obituary for Sheldon. 

The obit is filled with warm reminiscences and wonderful stories, like this one, from former journalist Martin Dyckman, about Sheldon’s time in the Florida Legislature:

In the 1970s, when the Legislature passed financial disclosure laws, Sheldon often ranked dead last among his colleagues in the House. One newspaper led a story about the financial worth of lawmakers by noting that then-Miami-Dade Rep. Elaine Bloom disclosed ownership of a pure-breed dog whose declared worth was greater than Sheldon’s, Dyckman recalls.

But the obituary profanes Sheldon’s memory by leaving out entirely his single greatest accomplishment in Florida. In 2,000 words, reporter Carol Marbin Miller found no room to even mention his work to safely and successfully keep more children out of the chaos of Florida foster care.  But, of course, Miller has led a crusade against those changes. Now, she wants to pretend they never happened.

But they did happen.  And the best way to honor George Sheldon would be for the people of Florida to turn their backs on the Miami Herald’s fearmongering and demand that DCF return to George Sheldon’s vision of child welfare reform.

The Miami Herald story that amounts to a scathing indictment – of the Miami Herald

As far back as 2011, Miami Herald reporter Carol Marbin Miller was scapegoating efforts to keep families together for child abuse deaths.  The headline on a story that year summed up Miller’s false claim perfectly: “State steps in less and more kids die.”

That also was the claim throughout  Miller’s 2014 series, Innocents Lost. 

After that series was published, the Herald got exactly what it wanted: The state stepped in far more.  The number of children torn from their parents soared.  So problem solved, right?  No more child abuse deaths.  Or at least, now that the state is stepping in more, fewer kids are dying, right?

But that’s not what happened – according to a story in the Miami Herald, by Carol Marbin Miller.

The story, published on August 10, looked back on the tenure of DCF Secretary Mike Carroll, who had announced plans to resign effective September 6.

Carroll took over after the publication of Innocents Lost in 2014  – and he did exactly what the Herald wanted – oversaw the removal of far more children.  But, according to the Herald’s own story, Carroll

…was unable to stem the tide of high-profile calamities, especially the deaths by abuse of vulnerable children,

Missteps by the department often made state and national headlines: a youngster whose father's mental deconstruction was well-known was tossed into Tampa Bay; an adolescent foster child suffering a long-documented emotional collapse hanged herself from a Miami Gardens foster home while livestreaming on Facebook. …

Back when Florida was emphasizing safe, proven approaches to keeping families together, under the leadership of Bob Butterworth and George Sheldon, Florida made a very different kind of national news – as in this assessment from The New York Times. But thanks to the Herald, and Carroll’s willingness to pander to the Herald, all that was wiped out.

And again, the Herald itself says that didn’t work out too well:

…When Carroll took the top slot, he stated that any child's death was "unacceptable" and that the department needed to improve.

But under Carroll's tenure, the agency continued to struggle with high-profile child deaths. In 2015, an agency report documented missed opportunities in the case of 5-year-old Phoebe Jonchuck, who was killed after her father dropped her from a St. Petersburg bridge into Tampa Bay.

That same year, Carroll also acknowledged "system failures" in the brutal deaths of two other Tampa Bay-area children. As recently as May, a scathing report faulted several — including agency investigators — in the January scalding death of 1-year-old Ethan Coley of Homestead.

So, now that the state is "stepping in" so much more and, the Herald itself admits, kids are still dying at such a rate that Carroll couldn’t even “stem the tide,” maybe it’s time to finally reconsider why this keeps happening – and stop scapegoating the only approach that ever actually made Florida children safer and Florida child welfare better.

The real reasons children known to the system sometimes die are the same as they always were – caseworkers overloaded with so many false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect, that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly.

But don’t take my word for it. Innocents Lost actually said as much – well, sort of. The series cited Alabama as a success story, without telling readers that Alabama created this success by emphasizing family preservation – and taking away children at a far lower rate than Florida. Here, again, The New York Times got the story right.

It is not clear, however, who is going to challenge the Herald, and the way that newspaper has hurt Florida’s most vulnerable children.  It’s unlikely that Carroll’s replacement will be any more willing to stand up to the Herald than Carroll was.

And with all the cutbacks in news gathering, the Herald and the Tampa Bay Times which is, if anything, even more extreme in advocating a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, have a virtual monopoly on child welfare coverage. 

So Florida’s most vulnerable children still have no champion.  And after Mike Carroll’s successor leaves the job, the Herald can write the same story all over again.

The Florida foster-care panic: Still another child pays the ultimate price

Florida DCF seeks to evade responsibility for misuse of
psychiatric drugs on foster children.

For the third time in less than a year, a Florida foster child has committed suicide.

16-year-old Guilianna Ramos Bermudez hanged herself in a group home where she’d been bullied.  She’d also suffered another trauma; Her own daughter, who had been allowed to live with her at the group home had been taken away.

On the night she died, she had argued with the group home staff, refusing to take her psychiatric medication.

Giulianna’s best friend told the Miami Herald:

“She would always refuse her meds. ‘Mazzy, it makes me feel like a zombie,” Mazzelyn said. “The meds made her depressed. She wasn’t depressed.”

Would this tragedy have taken place even had the Herald not launched a crusade to tear apart more families, overloading the entire system?  We’ll never know. But this tragedy would have been less likely for at least two reasons:

The price of panic: It all starts at the hotline

Before Carol Marbin Miller and her colleagues at the Miami Herald set off a massive foster-care panic in Florida by distorting almost every issue in child welfare in its series Innocents Lost, before the Herald used the same tactics in its distorted coverage of the tragic death of Nubia Barahona, the Herald went after the Florida child abuse hotline.

The tactics were the same – broadbrush conclusions from horror stories and highly selective use of documents and data – as NCCPR documented here and here.

And now, once again, we see how the Herald’s distortions hurt children. 

The information does not come from the Herald, of course.  Rather it comes from the Palm Beach Post in partnership with WPTV television.  Their story deals with why caseworkers for the Florida Department of Children and Families are quitting in droves, and why those who stay are cutting corners – and worse.

As the story puts it:

…an inundation of paperwork, an ever-expanding job description and a ballooning number of cases have led to what some are calling a “mass exodus” of investigators statewide. “Out all night, up all day, you aren’t getting any sleep. How can you make a sound decision about a child’s safety?” a current investigator said.

As a result, some investigators told the Post, “the only way to do the job is to falsify records.”

But most revealing is what the workers themselves say is causing this inundation:

Employees interviewed pointed to the Abuse Hotline’s reluctance to throw out a complaint for the constant stream of new cases. … A former employee argued that investigators are assigned cases that have “absolutely 100 percent nothing to do at all with child safety.” Some blame a “knee-jerk reaction” and a fear of having a child fall through the cracks for leading to the inundation of cases. …
 Even when investigators question whether a case involves a child’s welfare, they are required to investigate — and fill out paperwork — as they would any other case. “When you get two or three cases a day, you literally cannot do what you need to do to make sure that you’re doing a good job. You can’t do it,” a former investigator said.

So some workers falsify documents, others quit, and none of them has the time to investigate any case carefully – making it both more likely that children will be taken needlessly and more likely that other children in real danger will be missed.

Mike Carroll: "It is what it is."

But what is truly bizarre is the response to all this from Mike Carroll, whose job title is Secretary of Post:

the Department of Children and Families. He told the

“We can’t shut off the hotline. It is what it is.  And as people call, we are mandated to get out there.”

Except that’s not true.  As in other states, the Florida hotline is supposed to screen out calls that are obviously false, or don’t meet the law’s definition of child abuse, or for which the caller lacks reasonable cause to suspect abuse.

In some cases, yes, they are “mandated to get out there,” in others not.

There is good reason for this. Needless child abuse investigations traumatize children – and divert time from finding children in real danger.

The real problem is exactly what the frontline caseworkers say it is: A knee jerk reaction and fear of being on the front page of the Herald if they screen out a call and a tragedy occurs.

But there will always be screening in child welfare. Either it will be rational screening at the hotline, or irrational screening by caseworkers cutting corners because they can’t keep up.

As for Mike Carroll, no doubt the vulnerable children of Florida sleep better at night knowing that they have a dynamic forceful leader always ready to confront a problem by declaring “It is what it is.”

But then Carroll doesn’t really run DCF.  For all intents and purposes Carol Marbin Miller does. The agency cowers in fear of her next story, and jerks its knees accordingly. 

Perhaps it’s time to consider how well that’s working out. Miler got what she wanted. The decline in entries into care – a decline that independent evaluators said improved child safety – is long gone. More and more children are torn from everyone they know and love.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported on how, in New York City, foster care has become the new “Jane Crow.” It told story after story about children needlessly taken from their homes because their parents are poor.  It is, of course, the kind of story Carol Marbin Miller would never write, even though the rate of child removal in Florida is more than two-and-a-half times as high as the rate in New York City. So all the horrors inflicted on New York City children by their equivalent of DCF are happening at least two-and-a-half times as often in Florida.

Raise your hand if you think that’s made Florida children safer.  Raise your hand if you think child welfare in Florida is better now than it was before Miller started on her crusade against keeping families together.

Tomorrow: The kind of caseworker DCF chooses to fire - and the kind it chooses to keep

“I Don’t Wanna Live No More”

The Florida foster-care panic did not cause Naika Venant to die. It just made it more likely

UPDATE, March 14: The Florida Department of Children and Families has now issued a report in which it portrays the birth mother as brutally abusive and neglectful. The mother’s attorney – and no friend of family preservation – Howard Talenfeld – says the report is inaccurate.

But let’s assume that the report’s portrayal of the mother is accurate. Does that let the Herald off the hook?  No way. It would mean only that the place in a good, safe foster home that should have been taken by Naika Venant instead was occupied by some other child who was a victim of the Florida Foster Care Panic and never needed to be taken away.

The overload of the system with children who don’t need to be there leaves no room in good foster homes for children in real danger. Perhaps Naika Venant was one such child; perhaps not.

Either way, the Herald and its acolytes in the Florida media, especially the Tampa Bay Times, still share responsibility for another child welfare tragedy.

            Late Saturday night Naika Venant wrote on Facebook “I Don’t Wanna Live No More.” A few hours later, she walked into a bathroom in her Miami Gardens foster home and hanged herself outside a shower stall. She livestreamed her suicide on Facebook.

            Would this tragedy have occurred even had the Miami Herald not effectively collapsed the Florida child welfare system by setting off an enormous foster-care panic? Perhaps.  But the panic made it far more likely.  And that means, once again, the Herald, and its acolytes in the Florida media, especially the Tampa Bay Times, share responsibility for a child welfare tragedy.

The roots of tragedy

            Contrary to the Herald’s claims that Florida had made too much of an effort to keep families together, the state never has done enough.

            That can be seen by how Naika came into foster care in the first place. She was seven-years-old and the allegation was “excessive corporal punishment.” That can mean many different things. But, according to the Herald, even the lawyer for Naika’s mother, Howard Talenfeld – no friend of family preservation – said, in the story’s words, that the removal “was the first time the system failed Naika.”

            I’m not sure what he meant. Since the story was co-authored by Carol Marbin Miller, obviously she won’t pursue any angle that suggests any child was taken needlessly. But, to use a phrase the Herald loves, the case “raises questions,” about whether the initial removal was necessary and/or whether there were better ways to be sure that Naika did not suffer excessive corporal punishment. (Special note to Tim Nickens of the Times, who has suggested that nearly every removal is justified because judges rubber stamp almost all of them: A judge almost certainly approved this one, too.)

            This initial removal was not the fault of the foster-care panic – it happened in 2009, while Florida actually was making progress in curbing wrongful removal.  But not enough progress.

Florida never got its rate of removal down to the level of Alabama, for example, the state that Miller herself claims, in Innocents Lost, should be a model for Florida. (Of course, her story about Alabama never actually mentioned the low rate of removal.) So even at its best, Florida was taking many children needlessly.  Now, it’s much worse.

            One thing we know for sure: What happened to Naika after the State of Florida became her parent was far worse than anything that happened  before.  She was raped by a 14-year-old boy in the same foster home.

            When Naika was returned home, her mother couldn’t cope with the emotional harm the rape had done to her daughter.  The Florida child welfare system failed to help Naika’s mother help her daughter. She ran away and was returned to foster care. Again she got no help, but was sent back to her mother in 2014.

Here’s where the panic made things worse

            And 2014 was when the Herald started the foster-care panic. So this time, when Naika ran away she was consigned to a child welfare system so overloaded with children needlessly removed that it was far less able to cope with her than before.  During just the nine months before her suicide, Naika was moved ten times.

            No wonder that, in the hours before her death, she wrote to a friend on Facebook “Im Just Tired My Life Pointless I Don’t Wanna Do This Any More.”

            Of course the Herald and the Tampa Bay Times won’t face up to their role in all this. And Talenfeld isn’t helping. Instead, he’s blaming the fact that starting during the administration of former Gov. Jeb Bush Florida privatized child welfare services.

            That is, to use the polite term, nonsense.

            I’m a big government tax-and-spend liberal. I am no fan of privatizing public services.

But, as NCCPR said from the moment privatization began: It’s not good, it’s not bad – it’s irrelevant. There is no evidence from anywhere in the country that privatization makes child welfare systems better – or worse.

            Florida child welfare improved under privatization – when DCF was run by visionary leaders like Bob Butterworth and George Sheldon who emphasized safe, proven approaches to keeping families together. Then Florida got worse under privatization when their successors effectively let the Miami Herald dictate child welfare policy.

            Safe, proven alternatives to foster care make child welfare systems better. Foster-care panics make child welfare systems worse. Privatization does neither.

            And to those who are thinking: Jeez, are you going to blame every tragedy in Florida child welfare on the foster-care panic? Here’s the answer:

Yes. 

Not completely, of course. But foster-care panics make every kind of child welfare tragedy more likely.  So those who promote foster care panics have to share responsibility for the consequences.

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:

The Herald’s shame: Florida child deaths INCREASE in 2015

Nearly two years after the publication of Innocents Lost, Florida is losing more innocents than at any time since the state adopted the current method of keeping track.

In 2015, the Department of Children and Families reports, there were 472 child deaths in Florida, an increase of 28 over 2014 and the highest total since at least 2011.

DCF now uses three different categories to determine if a death was “known to the system.”  In two of those categories deaths went up compared with 2014, in the third they stayed the same: 

● Prior involvement with family in last five years: Number of deaths increased.

● Prior involvement with the child who died: Number of deaths stayed the same.

● Verified prior [report of child maltreatment] in the past 12 months: Number of deaths increased. 

But, of course, that isn’t the only harm done by the Miami Herald: As noted in a previous post, entries into foster care have skyrocketed, with thousands more children needlessly torn from everyone loving and familiar.

The Herald reporters, especially Carol Marbin Miller, had to know that would happen – because she reported on it the last time it happened, when disgraced former DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney instigated the same sort of foster-care panic in 1999.  Presumably Miller somehow convinced herself that another panic would be worth it since, she apparently believed, it would save lives.

But, as the new data make clear, it didn’t save lives.  It may well have cost lives.  All that additional suffering inflicted on all those children needlessly taken from their homes was for nothing.

The Herald should admit it got Florida child welfare all wrong.  DCF needs to admit it got the response to Innocents Lost wrong – before any more children suffer needlessly.

Here’s how to REALLY learn from Alabama

One of the most bizarre stories in the Innocents Lost series was called “How Florida can learn lessons from Alabama.”

The story correctly pointed to Alabama as a model for doing child welfare right – unlikely as that may seem.  But it got everything else wrong – implying that somehow the Alabama reforms were built around doing less to keep families together, when in fact family preservation is the heart and soul of the Alabama reform effort.

Congratulations, Miami Herald, you got your foster-care panic

Too bad you did nothing to make children safer.

 ● Read our full critique of InnocentsLost

The Innocents Lost series has been a huge success – if you happen to be a reporter or editor for the Miami Herald.  The series picked up lots of awards, in part because awards judges generally don't do fact checking.  (The series did not win two of the most prestigious journalism awards – no Pulitzer Prize and no award from Investigative Reporters and Editors.  In both those cases, we sent the judges our rebuttal.)

But it didn’t work out so well if you happen to be a child called to the attention of the Florida Department of Children and Families.

As anyone familiar with child welfare could have predicted, there was a foster-care panic.  And every available measure suggests that children are no safer than they were before.

That's not the result the lead reporter on the series, Carol Marbin Miller, or her colleagues wanted.  Nor were they out to "sell newspapers" - or generate pageviews - or even to win awards.  I believe they genuinely thought their work would help children.  But so did Kathleen Kearney, when then-Gov. Jeb Bush named her to run the Florida Department of Children and Families in 1999.  Kearney promptly set off an even worse foster-care panic.  The results of those good intentions gone awry were tragic then, and they are tragic now.

Innocents Lost did about as much good for  the children of  Florida
 as the Iraq War did for the Iraqis.  So every time the series

won an award, I thought of this moment.

In the first year after Innocents Lost was published, the number of children torn from their families in Florida shot up by 12.5 percent.  If current trends continue, by the time the second anniversary of the series rolls around in March 2016, the increase will be 17 percent.  (Full details and links to data sources are at the end of this post.)

The number of children trapped in Florida foster care on any given day (the “snapshot number”) is up 20 percent.

Put another way: in the first year after the series ran, Florida took away 1,763 more children than in the year before the series appeared.  By March 2016, if current trends hold, Florida will have taken another 2,314 more children than likely would have been taken if not for Innocents Lost.  That’s 4,077 children in all

● 4,077 more children, many of them torn from homes where the only real crime was poverty.

● 4,077 more children, many of them torn from everyone loving and familiar.

● 4,077 more children, many of them on their way to being bounced from foster home to foster home, only to emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone.

● 4,077 more children, many taken from safe homes only to be placed at enormous risk in foster care.  Several studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.

● 4,077 more children who, if they are typical cases of maltreatment, are likely to fare far worse even than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes as documented in two landmark studies.

And this actually understates the impact.  Because reporting by the Herald in 2011 also set off a foster-care panic.  That year entries shot up by ten percent – they had only just returned to their pre-panic level when Innocents Lost was published.  (Indeed, it was that earlier reporting which prompted NCCPR to create this website devoted to setting the record straight.)

This does not mean that none of those 4,077 children should have been taken from her or his home.  But the paradox of a foster-care panic is that it undermines good decision-making in all cases.  With workers so overwhelmed with so many more cases, they almost certainly made more errors in all directions - taking away more children needlessly and overlooking more children in real danger.  

Consider what the available data show so far:

NO INDICATION CHILDREN ARE SAFER

The Herald reporters probably would argue that all that suffering on the part of children needlessly removed from their homes is worth it because, after all, with all those children swept into foster care, child safety must be improving. 

But it isn’t.

The standard indicators for child safety are reabuse of children after a prior case of abuse, and foster care recidivism – the percentage of children returned to foster care within a year of discharge.  The good news: These indicators have not gotten any worse since Innocents Lost was published.  The bad news: They haven’t gotten any better.

In contrast, when Bub Butterworth and George Sheldon led DCF down a path of real reform and entries into care declined, a series of independent evaluations found that child safety improved.

Both of the measures noted above are vastly better measures of safety than fatalities, and that’s for a reason for which we all should be grateful.  Though each is the worst imaginable tragedy, in a state with more than four million children, the number can rise or fall due to random chance.

But since this is the measure of choice for the Herald, let’s take a look.

Oh, wait.  That’s going to be difficult - because Florida DCF has so vastly altered the way fatalities are measured and results are released that a comparison is almost impossible.

Florida now has come up with three different definitions of “known to the system” – and applied them to all child abuse deaths.  That includes some categories that clearly are due to maltreatment, such as “inflicted trauma,” some that clearly are not, such as “natural causes” and some, notably drowning, that could be either.

So we’re stuck with seeing how many deaths of all kinds involve children in some way “known to the system.”  And even then the picture is mixed, with such deaths declining in one category, down a little in another, and actually increasing in a third.

In short, Innocents Lost did about as much good for the children of Florida as the war in Iraq did for the Iraqis.  That's why every time the series won an award, I thought of George W. Bush in front of his “Mission Accomplished” banner.

THE MIAMI HERALD’S FOSTER-CARE PANIC AT A GLANCE

Innocents Lost was published in mid-March 2014.  To come up with the most accurate comparison of  “before” and “after” I have left that month out of the comparison.  The data below compare the 12 months from March 1 2013 through Feb. 28, 2014 with the 12 months from April 1, 2014 through March 31, 2015.  The 2016 data are based on a projection using data from April 1, 2015 through Sept. 30, 2015.

Number of children taken from their parents:

Year ending February 2014:                          13,908

Year ending March 2015:                              15,671

Year ending March 2016 (projected)               16,222

INCREASE: 17 percent

Number of children in foster care on any given day (“snapshot number”):

February 2014:                                         18,533

February 2015:                                         20,762

September 2015:                                      22,358

INCREASE: 20.5 percent

All data are from the superb database maintained by Florida’s Center for Child Welfare.  For entry data click on the “Child Welfare Services Trend Report,” for foster-care recidivism data click on the “Federal Measures” report and for re-abuse data click on the “Non-recurrance of Maltreatment” report.