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 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.

NCCPR in Youth Today on forced, illegal separation of children from their parents - in Florida

Young children torn from their parents, sleeping in a different bed every night. Families torn apart needlessly - and illegally -- over and over again.  But this time it's not the U.S.-Mexico border.  This time it's Florida.

Who says it's illegal? A report commissioned by the state itself.

Why is it happening? In part because caseworkers are terrified of "media consequences" if they leave a child in her or his own home and something goes wrong.

Details in NCCPR's latest column for Youth Today

The price of foster-care panic keeps getting higher

Now children are being forced to spend their days in cars – in a convenience store parking lot

UPDATE, FEBRUARY 9: Guess what: Gov. Rick Scott claims he's oh, so concerned about the WFLA-TV revelations. “DCF is going to hold people accountable,” Scott said in a follow-up story.  Really? And who is going to hold DCF accountable for the foster-care panic that allowed this to happen in the first place?

All over the country there have been times when foster-care panics – sharp spikes in children removed from their homes in the wake of high-profile tragedies - led to children being forced to spend their days, and sometimes nights, in child welfare agency offices or hotels. 

But as far as I know forcing foster kids to spend all day in a car in a convenience store parking lot is a first. Congratulations, Florida, once again you’re a trendsetter.

And once again, reporter Mark Douglas of Tampa television station WFLA-TV is focusing on problems the Tampa Bay Times not only ignores, but also helped to create.  Because the foster-care panic is at the root of all of this.

The Miami Herald started the panic with “Innocents Lost,” a series filled with distortion and misrepresentation. The Times has been fanning the flames.

Recall previous reporting from WFLA-TV on how the state admitted to taking away children solely because their parents are poor – and how, in one such case the child died in foster care. And recall the new Florida study showing that 40 percent of cases referred to court for either a foster care removal, intensive services or both could have been handled with less-intrusive options.

Congratulations, Tampa Bay Times, you got just what you wanted (aside from the part where the child dies in foster care, of course).

“When in doubt, take the kid from abusive home,” said the headline on the Tampa Bay Times editorial on September 29.

“Take the kid,” the editorial begins.

That is once again the lesson from another death in Florida that could have been avoided if child welfare workers would have erred on the side of caution rather than on keeping a dysfunctional family together.

It is at least the second such editorial in the Times, which marches in lockstep with the Miami Herald – creating a near monopoly on child welfare reporting in Florida, and shutting out almost all dissent.

In fact, the Florida child welfare system already has been following the Times’ advice, with a vengeance. Statewide, removals of children from their homes are up 19 percent since March, 2014, when the Miami Herald ran its exercise in journalistic demagoguery Innnocents Lost. The number of children trapped in foster care on any given day is up 31 percent.

And even as that Times editorial was written, an infant named Kwon McGee was in the Tampa Bay area foster home where he would lose his life.

As far as I can tell his death has not even been covered by the Times.

But it was covered by WFLA-TV.

From the story on the television station’s website:

It all started on July 29 when [the child’s mother, Shira] Sangamuang gave birth at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater and social workers began talking to her about where she would live after she left the hospital. Sangamuang was unemployed and broke and needed temporary shelter, but had plans to move to Connecticut with Kwon to live with her mother. 

Days later, those same social workers came to the Travelers Inn in Clearwater where Sangamuang was staying and demanded that she hand over Kwon. “She’s like, well two officers, two sheriffs came up and said, ‘look ma’am if you don’t give me your baby, I will arrest you and take you to jail and you will no longer have your baby,’”

Sangamuang said. The baby ended up in the care of foster parents in Pasco County while Sangamuang tried to arrange for counseling and other directives ordered by a judge to get her child back.

OK, let’s stop there for a moment. Why was the mother forced to get counseling? What she needed was housing and a job.

Now, back to the story:

The child’s father, Ladell McGee, was away when Kwon was born and says he never had a chance to see his son.

The reason for that is, of course, that the son is dead.

Again, from the WFLA-TV story:

The family’s rough patch turned utterly tragic Oct. 24, when the foster parent reported putting Kwon down to sleep in an adult bed after a feeding and later found him unresponsive. 

[Eckerd Connects, the private agency that runs child welfare foster care in the county] says the foster parents failed to follow Eckerd’s baby safety checklist that says all infants should sleep in a crib with a firm mattress and tight-fitting sheets without other materials that might suffocate a baby. 

“Our guidelines weren’t followed in this particular case and that’s the tragedy here. We feel this death could have been prevented if the child had been put in a crib,” Tobin said. …

This death also could have been prevented had Eckerd Connects or the Florida Department of Children and Families or the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, which does child abuse investigations in that county, simply said: Hey, wait a minute, all this mom needs is a rent subsidy and help to find a job – or simply some cash so she could move to Connecticut.

When anecdotes collide …

To conclude that this one case “proves” Florida is taking away too many children would be to make the same mistake as the Herald and the Times keep making – reaching sweeping conclusions based on horror stories.  When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.

What proves that Florida is taking away too many children is the fact that, when Florida took fewer children independent monitors found that child safety improved – a pattern that has been repeated across the country in the few places that have embraced safe, proven alternatives to foster care.

Rushing to “take the kid” is not erring on the side of caution – it is a profoundly reckless act.  Of course most children won’t pay the ultimate price, as Kwon McGee did. But they will pay a price.  The research is clear that in typical cases, even when there has been maltreatment – and there was none in this case – children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably maltreated children in foster care.

And while this child apparently died as a result of a tragic accident, study after study has found high rates of abuse in foster care – another reason not to throw children there just because their parents are poor.

So why did the caseworkers and the sheriff’s deputies ignore the research? Why did they so easily confuse poverty with “neglect” They probably were too terrified of being the subject of the next front page story in the Miami Herald or the next editorial in the Tampa Bay Times demanding they “take the kid.”

So they took the kid.

Now the kid is dead.

The column the Tampa Bay Times doesn’t want you to see

One of the dangers from all the cutbacks and consolidations sweeping through the newspaper industry is that it becomes that much easier to monopolize the marketplace of ideas.

So in Florida, there is far less room now to get a word of dissent in edgewise than there was just a decade ago.

The only papers in Florida still big enough to cover child welfare on a regular basis are the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times.

In 2008, the papers combined their statehouse bureaus – and state government is, of course, the source of much child welfare news. 

Then the Times republished Innocents Lost.  And ever since, the Times editorial page has marched in lockstep with the failed thesis behind that series, declaring in a January 2016 editorial “when it doubt, take the child.”

When I tried to get in a few hundred words of dissent at that time, it was disappointing that I got no response from Herald editorial page editor Tim Nickens or perspective editor Jim Verhulst.

Then in May, the Times bought out and shut down another possible venue for dissent -  the Tampa Tribune. That newspaper tended to be more amenable to sharing a wide variety of viewpoints on child welfare with readers. 

Last month, after the Times reported that, in Hillsborough County, so many children are being torn from their homes that they sometimes have to sleep in offices, I updated the column and tried again. Still no response. If the Times has published dissent from some other source that says too many children are removed needlessly, criticizes Innocents Lost, and calls for less use of foster care, I haven’t seen it.

I was reminded of the Times’ no dissent approach when I saw this story about a tragic child death in Tampa – the kind of death the Florida foster care panic was supposed to prevent, or at least reduce. In fact, in 2015, such deaths increased.

The Times is, of course, entirely within its rights to advocate for a position and ignore dissenting voices. As A.J. Liebling famously said “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” – and NCCPR doesn’t own one.

But we do have this blog.  So here’s the column.  You can decide for yourself if it was so utterly beyond the pale that the Times was right to be sure its readers never were exposed to it:

“When in doubt, take the child” is formula for more tragedy

            It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

            Nowhere is that more apparent than in Florida child welfare.

            In 1998, the headlines were about a little girl named Kayla McKean.  Just two months after Kayla’s death, Kathleen Kearney was named to run the Florida Department of Children and Families.  Her mantra: When in doubt, take the child.  The number of children torn from their families skyrocketed – increasing by 50 percent in a single year.  With no place to put all those children, some slept in offices.  And because the system was so overloaded, deaths of children “known-to-the-system” increased.

            In 2014 came Innocents Lost, the series of stories in the Miami Herald and the Times about children who died after their cases were known-to-the-system.  The Legislature said, in effect, when in doubt, take the child.  Once again the number of children taken from their parents is soaring.  And once again, deaths of children known-to-the-system have increased.

            Yet in January, in the wake of its reporting on another tragedy, the death of Phoebe Jonchuck, the Times told us the answer is “When in doubt, take the child” [Editorial, Jan. 15].

            Authorities listened.  Hillsborough County is taking children at a rate even higher than the state average.  And once again, children have slept in offices.

            It’s not some bizarre coincidence that this approach never works.  It’s a misreading of the problem.

            We look at a case where a child died, and it turns out the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade.  So we think, Aha! There must be a “bias toward family preservation.”  But there is no such bias, and there never has been.  Florida consistently has taken away children at a rate at or above the national average, far above the rate in systems that have been nationally-recognized as models for keeping children safe – systems like Alabama, the very state Innocents Lost said Florida should emulate.

            The real reason for tragedies such as the death of Phoebe Jonchuk almost always is more frustrating, more mundane and harder to fix.  Children die when undertrained, underprepared caseworkers are overloaded with too many cases. They can’t investigate any case properly.  So even as they take more children needlessly, they also miss more children in real danger.  Despite being one of the primary proponents of the take-the-child-and-run approach, even Maj. Connie Shingledecker, who is in charge of child abuse investigations in Manatee County blamed this overload for a death on her watch.

            In contrast, the only time independent evaluators ever concluded that Florida children actually were getting safer was when Bob Butterworth and then Geroge Sheldon ran DCF.  They moved to curb needless removal of children – not because of some “bias” but because it’s the only answer that works.

            “When in doubt, take the child” is one of those fear-fueled, feel-good responses to tragedy – like “Carpet bomb our enemies” or “Ban all Muslims.”  But all of those strategies do enormous collateral damage to innocents.

In the case of child welfare:

● When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates.  For a young enough child it’s an experience akin to a kidnapping.  Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished.  The emotional trauma can last a lifetime. 

So it’s no wonder that two massive studies involving more than 15,000 typical cases – not the horror stories – found that children left in their own homes fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

● That harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one.  The majority are.  But multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes.  So when we say “when in doubt, take the child” we’re really saying “take the child and roll the dice.”

And then there’s that other collateral damage: a system so overwhelmed that workers overlook children like Phoebe Jonchuck.

            None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents.  But foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. 

Every time Florida tries upping the dose, it backfires.

            Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.  NCCPR’s full response to Innocents Lost is available here: http://bit.ly/1ZKzYCg 

More children forced to pay the price of panic

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.

Once again, all that suffering is for nothing – except the greater glory of the Miami Herald and the desire by public and private agency officials to protect themselves from the wrath of the Herald – and the Tampa Bay Times, which encouraged the panic in an editorial in January.

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.