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.

What the Miami Herald did to children: Group home abuse illustrates price of foster-care panic

Judge calls latest horror “a cockfight … between foster kids”

A story in the Miami Herald  this week begins this way:

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."

A wrecking crew does to the former headquarters of the Miami  Herald
 what the Herald did to journalistic standards in its child welfare
coverage.  Photo by Phillip Pessar http://bit.ly/1J0P3bl 

 I'll come back to this story below.  But first some context - in particular concerning the role of the Miami Herald itself in creating conditions that make such abuses more likely.

From time to time on this blog I have highlighted the failings of news organizations whose work has falsely scapegoated family preservation for child deaths.  That has led to foster-care panics, sharp sudden spikes in the number of children removed from their homes. 

That does terrible harm to the children needlessly taken, of course, but it also overloads the child welfare system.  That means caseworkers have less time to investigate any case properly.  As a result, even as more children are forced to endure needless foster care other children, in real danger, are overlooked.  That’s why foster-care panics make all children less safe.

There have been many such journalistic failures over the years.  But one is in a class by itself – at least so far in this century.  Yes, it's the Miami Herald.

The Herald has been crusading against efforts to keep families together for at least five years.  The apotheosis of the campaign was a series published in March 2014 called Innocents Lost.  The stories blamed family preservation for child deaths.  The Herald’s journalistic failures have been so egregious that NCCPR created an entire website to respond, including a comprehensive rebuttal to Innocents Lost. 

The results were great for the Herald – it won a bunch of awards, and spawned at least one imitator in another state.  The newspaper got to claim credit for the usual changes in law to “crack down on child abuse” that follow this kind of reporting.

Now, nearly two years after Innocents Lost was published, the results are in for the children.  Those results are not so great,  

Florida has a long tumultuous history in child welfare – just as one would expect from Florida.  But for several years before the Herald started on its crusade, the state actually was making impressive progress.  The number of children taken from their parents was reduced and a series of independent evaluations found that child safety improved.

The Herald destroyed all that. 

• 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.

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  this image.

In short, as we noted on our Florida blog, 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.

And then, this week, we got that example of the human toll behind the figures:

  

One of the things that happens when you have a foster-care panic 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. 

With that in mind, let's look again at what the Herald reported this week:

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 lead writer for Innocents Lost) 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.

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, those 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.  

Worse than foster care: Why can’t orphanages just say ‘no’ to drugs?

Yesterday's post to this Blog discussed stories in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about widespread abuse in Georgia's privately-run publicly "regulated" orphanages – the assortment of group homes, shelters and "residential treatment centers" that are typical of most states.

At about the same time, The Miami Herald ran two stories that illustrate both the tragedy of relying on orphanages and the power of the orphanage industry. Both stories, by reporter Carol Marbin Miller, revolve around an issue the Herald has focused on for nearly a decade, the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medications on foster children.

One story is about Denis Maltez, who was institutionalized at age 8. Four years later he died, and the Miami-Dade medical examiner says the cause of death was a side effect of being overmedicated.

Much of the story focuses on the psychiatrist who prescribed the medications.

But the biggest failing in this case occurred before the doctor ever was involved.

No one so much as accused Denis' mother of abusing or neglecting him. But this also was not a case in which the Florida Department of Children and Families took away the child. DCF wasn't even involved in that decision.

Rather, this case is more like the kinds of cases at the heart of the "Safe Haven" debacle in Nebraska. Denis' mother couldn't cope with her autistic son's "volatility and violent outbursts." Another Florida agency, the Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD), apparently had only one suggestion: Institutionalize him.

So technically, this was a voluntary placement. But it wasn't really voluntary at all.

THE WORDS AN ANGUISHED MOTHER NEVER HEARD

When the mother of this boy went to APD, at the end of her rope, here's what APD should have said:

You don't have to deal with these problems alone, and you don't have to institutionalize your child to get him help. We have a program called Wraparound which brings everything a group home can offer right into your own home. We will give you all the help you need to take care of your son, without you ever having to surrender custody, and without him ever having to be institutionalized.

Such programs really do exist; I'm sure there is some of it in Florida, probably more now than before the state's recent child welfare reforms, which began after Denis was institutionalized.

This approach costs less than group homes and institutions, and it has succeeded with young people who have far more serious problems than this boy. This previous post includes a link to a video of a wonderful presentation by the "father of Wraparound," Karl Dennis.

But Denis Maltez' mother apparently wasn't offered that option. So, according to the Herald, she followed the recommendation of APD and decided

to move him into a sparkling new Miami group home called Rainbow Ranch. Administrators for the Agency for Persons with Disabilities had recommended the home, run by a man who had once pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license.

The group home discontinued Denis' treatment by a team from a local hospital and instead handed over his care to the same psychiatrist who "treated" all the other residents – and I do mean all of them. After Denis died, APD discovered that 99 percent of the residents were on psychiatric medication. The psychiatrist never met with Denis' mother, and described the boy as ``hyper, needy, pesty.''

According to Herald columnist Fred Grimm, after Denis died:

A dossier was compiled [by state regulators] against the three licensed Rainbow Ranch group homes, listing grotesque incidents in which disabled children in the homes were haphazardly fed, neglected, overmedicated and so under-supervised that the kids physically abused one another.

Except for the absence of either a full-scale riot or an exorcism, that sounds remarkably like what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution kept finding in orphanages in Georgia.

But none of this should come as a surprise. All over the country, newspapers have exposed the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medication on foster children.

The Herald began reporting on the topic in earnest in 2003. That led to a law intended to make it harder to use the medications just to keep kids docile for overwhelmed caretakers. But DCF ignored the law.

Then the Herald reported that psychiatric medication may have caused the death of a foster child, Gabriel Myers.

This time the response has been different. Reform-minded leadership is in charge at DCF, and they've probably responded more forcefully, and more candidly to the problem than any other state. They've set up a special section of the DCF website to post results of investigations and committee meetings, recommendations and what's being done about them, and they even include links to news coverage critical of DCF.

In other words, this time, there is a serious effort to curb these practices, not because of a new law, but because of new leadership.

GRANDMA VS. THE Rx PAD

But there is only so much government can do when it is trying to substitute for family. That lesson is driven home by the data DCF uncovered while investigating the Myers case.

It found that when foster children are institutionalized, 26 percent of them are medicated. When they're placed with strangers, it's 21. But when foster children are placed in kinship care, with extended family, usually a grandparent, only four percent are prescribed psychiatric meds.

It's not hard to figure out why: Grandparents and other relatives are more likely to love these children, and so will tolerate more difficult behavior before demanding a prescription. And that's just one indication that the best solution to the misuse and overuse of meds on foster children is not a new law – it's grandma; or, better yet, keeping more children out of the system in the first place.

Still another indication came from another Herald story. It described how, apparently with no difficulty at all, residential treatment providers got the sponsor of such a proposed law to weaken it so drastically it might actually be worse than existing law. Under the proposal, as amended, once a child is in an orphanage, the people running the place would have what amounts to a three-day free pass to dope up any child, no questions asked.

Here again we see what we see in Georgia: the enormous power of the foster care-industrial complex to put its interests ahead of those of children.

And that's what the Herald itself still doesn't get. Even as it runs stories about the terrible things the foster care system does to children once it gets hold of them, the same reporter has been writing misleading stories attacking the reforms - reforms which, according to independent evaluations, have safely reduced the number of children taken from their parents. And some of the same people are sources for both sets of stories. It's a bit like sounding the alarm about a fire and then throwing up barricades in front of the fire engines.

UPDATED 10:20 PM: Florida foster care: Horrors! The Miami Herald cries wolf, while DCF takes the road less traveled

UPDATE, 10:20PM: Ah, Florida: where the bureaucrats are candid and the journalists are stonewalling.

The post below deals with a detailed point-by-point rebuttal issued by the Florida Department of Children and Families to a story in Sunday’s Miami Herald.  The Herald has published a follow-up story.   Three general sentences from the DCF rebuttal are included far down in the story.  When it comes to DCF's specifics refuting the Herald’s allegations, there is not one word.

And the Herald repeats misleading claims from the original story.  The follow-up boils down to “it’s our story and we’re sticking to it.”

In a previous post to this Blog, I said that the Miami

Herald relied on innuendo, data out of context and horror stories to stack the deck in what amounted to an editorial-disguised-as-a-news-story calling for screening out fewer calls to the Florida child abuse hotline.

I was wrong.

Turns out, the "horror stories" are out of context, too.

With swiftness and detail almost unheard-of from a child welfare agency, (people in every other state should be demanding the same from theirs) the Florida Department of Children and Families issued a point-by-point rebuttal and an overview from DCF Secretary George Sheldon. I've posted the memos on the NCCPR website.

Whether one agrees with how DCF handled the cases or not, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: The Miami
Herald failed to give readers the information they needed to make up their own minds. In every case, the full story is different from the impression left by the Herald.

CASES IN POINT

Here are two examples:

●What the Herald Reported:

Sept. 16,[2009] 2:02 p.m.: A Broward sheriff's deputy calls the Florida child-abuse hot line to report that a 4-year-old had been molested by a babysitter as the sitter's boyfriend videotaped the assault. A hot-line counselor declines to forward the report to an investigator.

What the Herald left out:

The allegation concerned an incident that occurred in 2005. The September 2009 information indicated that neither the babysitter nor the babysitter's boyfriend had any access to the child who was the victim of the molestation. There were actually two children who were the subject of concern. For the child who was the victim of the molestation, the call was taken on 9/16/2009 as a prevention referral to determine if the victim or the victim's family needed services. It was subsequently determined that the child was receiving appropriate therapy [for the molestation in 2005] and was being appropriately cared for after the report was subsequently opened on 10/9/2009.

In the same call on 9/16/2009, it was determined that the babysitter and boyfriend had a child. The concern was that if they had molested one child then their infant could be at risk. This case was properly opened and investigated. It was further determined that law enforcement had an open and ongoing investigation related to the perpetrators in this case.

●What the Herald reported:

The hot line rejected a call from one of the agency's own child-abuse investigators: On Oct. 15, a state child protective investigator filed a report on behalf of an infant whose babysitters' own 4-month-old suffered ``significant head injuries.''

What the Herald left out:

Actually, the physical injuries had occurred to the child being babysat, not the babysitter's child. The concern in this case was that a babysitter was potentially involved in a case where a child was injured. Subsequently an investigation was opened to determine if the babysitter's own child was at risk of being harmed. It was determined the babysitter's child was not at risk and the babysitter was not determined to have caused the injury to the 4-month old. The original call regarding the babysitter's child was received at 5:37 p.m. on 10/15/2009 and the report was entered on 10/16 at 3:12 p.m.

THE REPORTS WERE, IN FACT, HEEDED

More generally, the two rebuttal documents make clear that it is flat wrong to suggest, as the Herald did, that these cases and others cited got no response, or even that they got only a form letter. DCF offers considerable evidence to support Sheldon's claim that "…in every specific case cited in the article, except one where we previously acknowledged error, the cries for help were in fact heeded and the agency did respond. … None of the calls were "turned away," or "rejected" or "unheeded." In addition:

●The rebuttal shows that DCF has an effective mechanism to "backstop" calls that become "prevention referrals" instead of full-scale investigations. If DCF workers at the district level disagree with the decision they can have the case "upgraded" to a full-scale investigation. In contrast, DCF workers have no power to "downgrade" a call passed on for investigation to a prevention referral. So if anything the imbalance in the system favors needless investigation.

● Twenty-five percent of calls that are not accepted for full –scale investigation become prevention referrals. This means that not only does Florida accept calls for full-scale investigation at a rate that is roughly the national average, (something discussed in detail in a previous post) an additional 25 percent of calls get some kind of response from DCF.

● All of the alleged horror stories come from just one county, Broward, where the county sheriff is responsible for child abuse investigations. As the Herald story itself notes, "For budget year 2008, Florida lawmakers reduced funding to the four sheriff's departments, including Broward, that conduct abuse investigations under contract with DCF by $2.9 million, or almost 6 percent. " That gives those departments a profound vested interest in hyping alleged failure to investigate child abuse.

●
If there's one thing that makes reporters roll their eyes when an agency responds to an unfavorable story it's when the agency says some version of: "we're already looking into that." But in this case, it happens to be true.

A committee whose charge includes reviewing the new hotline procedures and the adequacy of DCF's response to prevention referrals was announced publicly on October 23. Sheldon even included on the committee people likely to support the Herald position – including at least one member of what I have come to call the "Kearney DCF-in-exile" – meaning people I believe prefer something closer to the disastrous take-the-child-and-run approach of former DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney. (Unfortunately, Sheldon left out the two most important people for any such group: A current or former foster child and a parent who lost her or his children to foster care).

THE OTHER CASUALTY

I hope the rebuttal will stop any foster-care panic before it starts. But even if it does, there is another casualty in all this: the credibility of The Miami
Herald, and that hurts everyone who cares about Florida's vulnerable children.

For a decade the Herald led the state in coverage of child welfare. That is largely because of Carol Marbin Miller, the reporter who wrote the hotline story. She is indefatigable, as good at working sources as she is at poring over documents. At one point a competing paper had five reporters trying to keep up with her, and they couldn't. If fewer Florida foster children wind up being doped up on psychiatric medication in the future, the person most responsible will be Carol Marbin Miller (followed, ironically, by the DCF leaders whose work she trashed on Sunday).

But this time, she overreached. She let her righteous indignation get the better of her. This time, and in an earlier hotline story I'll discuss in a future post, the Herald cried wolf.

That hurts everyone. Every government agency needs an aggressive watchdog. But once you cry wolf, it's hard to get the credibility back – readers may even start to mentally "screen out" the newspaper's assertions.

There also is a failing in DCF's rebuttal documents. It is Sheldon's penchant for – believe it or not – taking too much blame. Once again, he says DCF was wrong to screen out reports in the case of Bryce Barros a two-year-old (not one-year-old as the Herald reported) who subsequently died.

Sheldon is mistaken. it's the policy that requires accepting anything sent by a judge, no matter how flimsy, that is wrong. This case was the subject of an earlier Herald story. I plan to discuss the case, and how the Herald stacked the deck in that story too, on this Blog tomorrow or early next week.

FLORIDA STILL TAKES TOO MANY CHILDREN

Bottom line: Sheldon's responses to the Herald actually show that DCF is not doing enough to screen out false reports and trivial cases. And another paragraph in his overview memorandum also shows there has not yet been enough progress. Sheldon writes:

There may be a misconception that the Department is hesitant to remove children from unsafe homes. That is not the case. In November 2007 we removed 1,148 children. In October 2009, we removed 1,159 children. Our approach does not take abuse less seriously. Our success is in uniting children with a permanent family – their own whenever possible, or with adoptive homes or permanent guardianships if reunification is not possible.

That is worrisome. Though Florida takes away fewer children than it used to – and an independent outside evaluation finds it's been done without compromising safety – the most recent data available for all states, from 2008, shows that the rate of removal in Florida still is above the national average and significantly above the rate in systems that are, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe. Success is not just giving children back quickly and safely after they've been taken. The bigger success is allowing them to remain safely in their own homes, without ever having their lives disrupted at all.

And DCF still lets governors politicize child welfare, as in the case of Rifqa Bary.

But at least Florida now is moving in the right direction. And that's never easy.

At the end of his letter, Sheldon notes how much still needs to be done, declaring that "we have miles to go before we sleep." The line is, of course, from a poem by Robert Frost. But there's another Frost poem that is at least as appropriate. It's the one that ends:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

For nearly a decade, the Florida Department of Children and Families trod the well-worn path of take-the-child-and-run. It made Florida a national symbol of child welfare failure. Now, DCF is taking the road less traveled. If DCF stays on that road, for the state's vulnerable children, it will make all the difference.