An open letter to two Florida columnists

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.

  

Dear Ms. Carlton and Mr. Romano:

            I am writing to you because you’ve both written columns about the tragic death of Jordan Belliveau, another child “known to the system” in Florida – apparently on the same day.  More particularly, I am writing because your columns were not the usual quick-and-dirty “Boy do I hate child abuse!” rants – the kind of column that is filled with scapegoating; the kind that’s really just a cheap and easy way to meet a deadline.  On the contrary, the anguish in your columns is real and you both seem seriously interested in answers.

            Indeed, I first got in touch with you, Ms. Carlton, after you wrote a brave, counterintuitive column on some of these very issues. That was in 2010, a time when Florida child welfare finally was starting to improve.  As you may recall, when I wrote to you then, I predicted a backlash against reform.  Sadly, that’s exactly what happened.  I did not predict that it would be led by the Miami Herald – and the editorial board at the Tampa Bay Times.  But that’s also exactly what happened.  So the need for bold, counterintuitive thinking is even greater now.

            I am using the open letter approach because you’re certainly not alone in agonizing over how to fix child welfare in Florida.  And I am hoping that your interest in answers includes a willingness to look past the usual failed solutions – just as you did, Ms. Carlton, in 2010. Because those “solutions,” and the false premises that underlie them, are a large part of what has gotten Florida, and much of the country, into this mess in the first place.

            Among those false premises is one that both of you mention in your columns.  That’s understandable, since it is probably the most common misconception in all of child welfare: The idea that family preservation and child safety are inherently at odds – competing interests that somehow have to be “balanced.” The implication, of course, is that if you leave a child in or return a child to a home where abuse or neglect has been alleged, that’s inherently risky. Keep the child in foster care and it may ruin his psyche, but at least he’s physically safe.

            That is not true. 

What I will argue in this long letter is that in the overwhelming majority of cases family preservation isn’t just more humane than foster care, it’s safer than foster care.  And the real reason for horrors such as the death of Jordan Belliveau has nothing to do with any supposed “policy of reunifying families at all costs” at Gay Courter, a volunteer “guardian ad litem (what most states call a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA)) claims in a Times op-ed column.

On the contrary, it’s almost always because of caseworkers so horribly overloaded with cases of children who don’t need to be in the system that they lack the time to properly investigate any case.  As a result, they make terrible mistakes in all directions.  Even as they take many children needlessly they leave others in, or return them to, dangerous homes.

            Those false premises are laid out most clearly in Ms. Courter’s op-ed.  Since I’ve followed Florida child welfare for about 30 years now, and NCCPR has issued reports on child welfare dating back to 2000, I am familiar with Ms. Courter’s work. I know that, like most people in child welfare, she has only the best of intentions. I also know that at least one of you has written admiringly about her in the past.  I, on the other hand, am that guy who keeps saying those terrible things about the whole approach to child welfare taken by the Times and the Miami Herald. I make no apology for that. When children’s lives are at stake - literally – good intentions aren’t enough.

The Times and the Herald didn’t make a good child welfare system bad. But they helped make a bad child welfare system worse – and they helped to halt and reverse what had been the first real improvement in that system in decades.  You are in a position to do better.  And if you are willing to reconsider old assumptions then you can help break the cycle of tragedy-investigate-repeat that Ms. Carlton aptly described in her column.

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.

From a Florida child saver: A startling admission and a new low in smears

No, Maj. Shingledecker, every parent who loses a child to foster care is NOT a likely murderer

I don't think even HE would say what Maj. Connie Shingledecker said.
Photo by Gage Skidmore

Anyone who still doubts that the Florida Foster-Care panic – the huge surge in removals of children in that state in the wake of shoddy reporting by the Miami Herald - is causing more children in real danger to be overlooked should read this column by Tom Lyons in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The headline is: “Child abuse crises created by those we think are fixing it.”

He cites remarks by none other than Major Connie Shingledecker of the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office.  Manatee is one of a handful of counties in which the Sheriff, rather than the state Department of Children and Families, handle child abuse investigations.

Shingledecker is in charge of that division.  For many years she also chaired the state’s Child Abuse Death Review Committee, where she constantly pressured the state to broaden the definition of neglect to the point where almost any parent in the state would be covered.

Shingledecker is probably the second strongest proponent of the take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare in Florida’s recent history (just behind disgraced former DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney).  Like Kearney, Shingledecker means well.  But like Kearney, she fits the mold of those who, in the 19^th Century, proudly called themselves “child savers” as they tore apart the families of impoverished immigrants.

And because Shingledecker has been at it for such a long time – nearly two decades now – she may have done even more damage.  Indeed, year after year, Manatee County has had one of the highest rates of child removal in Florida.

So it was startling when, after a high-profile tragedy for which her own department shared responsibility made headlines, she effectively blamed the very foster-care panic she did so much to encourage.  Then she tried to divert attention from her own office’s failings by offering up a smear of birth parents so rotten I don’t think even Donald Trump would sink so low.

It happened at a forum on child abuse in which there was much discussion of the death of Janiya Thomas, an 11-year-old Manatee County girl who was missing more than a year before her body was discovered.

A state report on the case documented blunder after blunder by Shingledecker’s officers – with many of the crucial mistakes made in the spring and summer of 2014 – right after the Herald stories were published, setting off the current foster-care panic.  The body was not discovered until 2015.

As a result, removals of children in Manatee County skyrocketed during the same months Shingledecker’s deputies were making crucial mistakes.  In the four months after the Herald stories were published, the number of children torn from their families in Manatee County was more than double the number the year before.  Even as so many children were taken needlessly, Janiya Thomas was overlooked.

Asked to explain her agency’s failures, Shingledecker came startlingly close to admitting it was because of the panic.  According to the Sarasota Herald Tribune:

Shingledecker declined to discuss specifics about the case, which remains under investigation. Yet she outlined what child protection detectives in Manatee dealt with overall in 2015, a year in which the death of Janiya Thomas became “an anomaly.”

“It was an unbelievable year for us,” Shingledecker said.

The Sheriff's Office … received a record high 4,300 reports of suspected child abuse or neglect from a state hotline last year.

Of those, 22 percent were verified, with the leading reasons being substance abuse by the parents and family violence.

Investigators removed from their homes and arranged shelter for 652 children, 56 percent of whom were age 5 or younger.

 It was up to Tom Lyons to point out something else about that 652 figure -  it was up from 387 the year before.  Lyons wrtites that  

Big increases in children taken into state protection almost always reflect changes in policies and pressures on caseworkers to err in that direction, not changes in the threat level.

 So, to review: Shingledecker’s officers faced a deluge of child abuse reports, 78 percent of which, by the officers’ own estimate, had no merit.  So they spent more than three-quarters of their time spinning their wheels.  They also wasted a huge amount of time needlessly removing vastly more children.  And while workers were overwhelmed doing that, they missed crucial warning signs in the case of Janiya Thomas.

The same thing was playing out all across Florida, which may explain why child deaths among children previously “known to the system” increased in Florida in 2015.

But Shingledecker learned nothing from the foster-care panic.  By the same period this year removals were up another 35 percent.  And this past October, when the death of Janiya herself finally was discovered, removals skyrocketed again.  Manatee County tore apart 74 families in that month alone, nearly quadruple the number in the same month two years earlier.

But of course while Shingledecker strongly implies that the overload caused the blunders that contributed to Janiya’s death, she doesn’t acknowledge the role of foster-care panic in causing the overload.  And that’s where the smear comes in.  Lyons writes:

If you wonder if [all those additional removals of children] means someone was being overzealous, you should. But here is what Shingledecker said about that:

“We saved 652 lives last year.”

That's so far from true that I'm amazed she said it. Even taken as forgivable exaggeration to make a point, it is alarmingly misguided.

 Lyons is more forgiving than I.

To me, smearing every birth parent who loses a child to foster care as a likely murderer ranks right up there with Donald Trump suggesting every undocumented immigrant is a rapist (although even Trump said that “some, I assume, are good people”).

This is exactly the kind of stereotyping that foments foster-care panic in the first place.  These are the smears that allow hundreds of thousands of children nationwide to be consigned needlessly to the chaos of foster care, often because their parents are simply too poor to provide adequate housing, or too poor to afford child care so they leave a child home alone while they work to make ends meet.

And, of course, these are the kinds of smears that encourage the overload of the system, so more children in real danger are missed.

When taken together with all the other harm Shingledecker’s well-intentioned crusade has done to the children she intended to help, it’s not forgivable – not yet anyway.

It will be forgivable if she admits she was wrong.  It will be forgivable if she acknowledges the damage those kinds of comments do to children.  And it will be forgivable if she changes course and abandons the take-the-child-and-run approach she has practiced for nearly 20 years.

The prerequisite for forgiveness should be saying “I’m sorry.”

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.