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.”

Foster care in Florida: State’s reforms are NCCPR's latest “Way to do Child Welfare Right”

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 28: Check out Sarasota Herald Tribune columnist Tom Lyons' take on Florida's improvement, and the waiver that did so much to make it possible.

Less than a decade ago, child welfare failure could be summed up in a single word: Florida.  The fact that a five-year-old foster child could disappear for more than a year before anyone at the Florida Department of Children and Families even noticed became a symbol of failure not just in Florida but nationwide.  The case was only the most visible example of how the take-the-child-and-run approach brought to DCF in 1999 had collapsed the entire system.

                Today in child welfare, Florida stands for something else: It stands for openness, innovation, and progress.  And it stands for the fact that you can’t have child protection without family preservation. That’s why today NCCPR adds the transformation of child welfare in Florida to our list of “Ways to do Child Welfare Right.”  

Two changes were crucial: First, in the tradition of a “team of rivals,” Gov. Charlie Crist, then a Republican, brought in one of the state’s most popular Democrats, former Attorney General Bob Butterworth, to lead DCF.  The joke at the time was that when Butterworth failed, Crist could blame the Democrats.  If that was the plan, the joke was on Crist.  For starters, Butterworth and his successor, George Sheldon (another Crist rival) started by dragging the agency out of its bunker, initiating a policy of telling the press and public as much as the law allowed, and interpreting all ambiguity in favor of openness. 

                Butterworth also started listening to current and former foster children – for real, not for show.  And that probably was the single most important factor leading him to reverse the agency’s course and embrace safe, proven approaches to keep children in their own homes.  Sheldon built on that as well.  Most recently, he launched an initiative to try to make foster children’s lives as normal as possible – that is, an effort to reduce barriers to living a normal family life that most of us don’t even think about – like the difficulties in getting a driver’s license or the requirement for background checks before a foster child can sleep at a friend’s house overnight. 

THE WAIVER MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE

                But the Crist administration doesn’t deserve all the credit.  Former Governor Jeb Bush, who did so much to plunge the agency into chaos, also made one crucial decision that made recovery from his own mistakes easier: He accepted a waiver from federal funding restrictions.  Money that, in other states, can be spent only on foster care, Florida can spend on better alternatives as well.   (It’s been argued that Bush’s decision had nothing to do with enlightened public policy and everything to do with him wanting to help his brother, the former President.  But who cares?  It worked).

                It’s all led to a 35 percent reduction in the number of children torn from their families between 2006 and 2009.  Independent evaluations, required by the waiver, have found that child safety improved.  If the Senate follows the House and approves legislation to restore the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services to issue such waivers, it will be easier for other states to achieve similar results.

                But there was one last barrier to adding Florida to our list.  No state could be considered a national leader in child welfare as long as it banned fit, loving parents from adopting just because of their sexual orientation.  The worst kept secret in Florida is the fact that the Crist Administration’s DCF leadership hated that law, but it was not struck down by a Florida appeals court until last week.

            Florida still has a long way to go.  It’s a big state and not every region has gotten the message.  So even with all the progress, the rate of child removal in Florida still was slightly above the national average in 2009, the most recent year for which data are available for every state.  And, as with all good systems, there still are huge mistakes in all directions.  Some children still are left in dangerous homes.  Other children still are needlessly taken from their families.  As we note in the publication we now call Thirteen Ways to do Child Welfare Right: All of the things that go wrong in the worst child welfare systems also go wrong in the best – but they go wrong less often.

                In addition, there is a powerful group of providers, advocates and others who still don’t get it – people who actually view the take-the-child-and-run era as the good old days.  And they never miss a chance to exploit the inevitable tragedies in a huge system to advance their agenda.

                But for now, Florida child welfare is heading in the right direction.  And while other reformed systems had to significantly change direction to start doing child welfare right, for Florida it was even harder.  In Florida it required a U-turn.