An open letter to two Florida columnnists

Their anguish over the death of another child “known to the system” is genuine.  I think they’ll also be open to some new ideas.

A little over a week ago, two columnists for the Tampa Bay Times, Sue Carlton and John Romano, wrote about still another death of a child “known to the system” in Florida.  Often, when that happens, I reach out to the journalists in a letter.  This time, I’m sharing that letter with everyone.

It's on the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog here.

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.