http://www.miami.com/herald/content/news/local/broward/digdocs/006395.htm

Published Sunday, December 23, 2001

Child deaths by abuse, neglect climb
Report says Florida system still failing

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
cmarbin@herald.com

In the months after 6-year-old Kayla McKean's 1998 death shocked and shamed state leaders, child welfare administrators overhauled Florida's system for protecting vulnerable children.

A soon-to-be-released report, however, shows children are dying from abuse or neglect in even greater numbers than before.

The report, which examines the deaths of children who had been the subject of at least one prior child abuse investigation, says that 30 of those youngsters died in 1999, and 30 more in 2000. The children died despite the fact Florida has taken about 3,000 additional children into foster care since 1998 in an effort to better protect them.

The death toll among children already known to the Department of Children & Families was 19 in 1995, 21 in 1996, 34 in 1997, and 26 in 1998.

Among the deaths in 2000 that are detailed in the report by the Florida Child Abuse Death Review Team, comprising 17 state officials and child advocates:

* Twenty-month-old Rosa, whose father brutally beat her, then left her at home to die. Rosa's mother arrived the next morning to discover the toddler, already dead for hours. A prior report said Rosa's father had beaten an older sibling so severely that both the girl's legs were broken. The children were placed in foster care but were returned to their mother's home after she was judged a fit parent -- though she was ordered never to allow the father anywhere near the children. According to the report, she ignored the order.
* Fifteen-year-old Sally, whose father shot her and her mother to death. He then turned the gun on himself. The father was on probation for a domestic violence conviction. Child protection workers investigated two previous reports alleging the girl was in danger but didn't intervene. The teen was killed as her mother was packing to leave her father.
* Twenty-month-old Sam, who was savagely beaten by his mother's boyfriend while child abuse investigators were still looking into an earlier report of bruises on the toddler's face. Medical examiners found 32 bite marks on his chest, back, arms and legs. State Department of Health workers were tracking the developmentally disabled boy, but his mother often missed doctor's appointments. An autopsy showed he might have survived the attack had his caregivers sought prompt medical attention.

The report by the review team -- overseen by the Department of Health -- covers the two years immediately following the passage of the Kayla McKean Law, designed to prevent deaths by abuse and neglect by strengthening the way in which suspicions of child abuse are reported and investigated.

Kayla was killed by her father the day before Thanksgiving, though Richard Lee Adams led police and activists from Central Florida on a massive search for the daughter he claimed had been abducted. The case, which revealed a child protection system in tatters, sparked widespread public outrage. Adams was sentenced to life without parole.

SAFEGUARDS UNHEEDED
Report finds most deaths
in 1999, 2000 `preventable'

Among other things, the 1999 reform law, which bore Kayla's name, required that teachers, police, judges, therapists and other social welfare authorities immediately report all suspicions of child abuse to a hot line.

Of the 60 child deaths in 1999 and 2000 studied by the review team, 48 of them, or 80 percent, were ``definitely preventable,'' the report says. Another eight of the deaths were ``probably preventable.''

The report says child welfare, public health and juvenile justice administrators -- together with neighbors and caregivers -- might have helped save some of the children had they done a better job of intervening. Inadequate child abuse investigations occurred in 45 percent -- or 27 of the 60 -- cases, the report states.

Specifically, child protective investigators failed to observe red flags that should have warned workers that children were in danger, the report says. Had the ``risk factors'' been heeded, the report said, ``appropriate actions [could have been] taken to address immediate child safety.''

The team also warned that a failure to share information among the Department of Children & Families, police departments and state child protection teams may have hindered efforts, as well. The concern was raised last week when DCF released the records of a 9-year-old West Palm Beach boy, disabled since birth, who died in his bed. The boy had been tracked by DCF his entire life.

DCF officials acknowledged last week they had failed to bring together all the investigators, caseworkers and service providers who cared for the boy -- who had been the subject of seven separate investigations since 1991. They insisted, however, that better work by the department likely would not have saved the boy, who was dependent on caregivers for his very survival.

REACTIONS TO REPORT
DCF has `some concerns,'
says it has made progress

DCF spokeswoman Cecka Green said administrators would not discuss the report because it is still in draft form.

``We did express some concerns about the report,'' Green said. ``We would like to see what the final copy looks like.''

In a letter to The Herald last week, DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney, a former Broward juvenile court judge, said her department had made substantial progress in recent years toward ensuring that ``children are kept safe in loving homes.''

``The department has made significant improvements to a child-welfare system that has had many chronic problems. For the first time in decades, we have some momentum going in our fight to ensure that vulnerable children are safe,'' she wrote.

But Jim Towey, who led the agency six years ago when it was called the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, said children will not truly be safe in Florida until lawmakers, policymakers -- and ordinary people -- declare a ``zero tolerance policy'' for the preventable deaths of children.

``These are sobering statistics to hear about that many deaths, year after year,'' said Towey, who now heads the Washington-based Commission on Aging with Dignity. ``Florida just accepts a certain number of child deaths every year. It's a challenge for the Legislature, and a challenge to the community to take an interest in this.''

For more than a decade, state officials have struggled to protect children from dying at the hands of their own caretakers -- a tragedy many have described as a public health crisis. At least nine commissions have been formed since 1985 to study the problem; task force members say few of their recommendations have been heeded.

LITTLE RESPONSE SEEN
Most suggestions of a 1999 study received scant action

Of eight recommendations contained in the review of deaths in 1999, only one was fully implemented: an innocuous suggestion that the group's report be released in December instead of September. The DCF said it lacked resources to improve the ``quality and timeliness'' of its child-death investigations, which was the first recommendation.

The review of deaths in 2000 contains six recommendations, including providing training to local professionals and police on how to recognize abuse and establishing mandatory time frames for caseworkers to follow up on visits.

``The recommendations [in this year's report] are the same recommendations we've made for the last 20 years,'' said Edward Feaver, a former Children & Families secretary who is now a director at the Lawton & Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies. ``We don't have a fundamental commitment to children and families.''

Charles Mahan, dean of the University of South Florida's College of Public Health, has been appointed to two of the commissions.

He says the ``epidemic'' of child abuse deaths will persist until lawmakers dramatically increase funding for prevention programs, such as early childhood education.

``We made a big point of saying this keeps happening over and over again,'' Mahan said. ``There are more and more commissions and nothing ever changes. We're just sort of nibbling around the edges of this problem.''

DEFICIENT INFORMATION
Some DCF districts did not write child-death reports

The death review team also questioned the quality of information provided by the DCF on children who died of abuse or neglect. Some of the districts do not even produce written reports, the team found.

Feaver said the investigation of preventable deaths was too important a task to be handled haphazardly.

``I just think that's fundamental,'' said Feaver, who was a career social service administrator before being tapped to head the agency in 1995. ``It may be that you don't do that kind of stuff because you don't want to know the enormity of the problem. It's easy to pretend it isn't there.''

Towey questioned the role of DCF caseworkers in preparing the documents reviewed by the statewide team -- which includes 17 members, all but one from outside the DCF. ``If I waited for them to come up the line, most memos tended to get pretty well baked,'' Towey said.

``People were either covering their butts or covering up the fact that caseworkers hadn't documented information. Then they would hide behind the secrecy laws.''

Advocates, and others, would be more forgiving when a child dies a preventable death if they believed the tragedy resulted from an ``individual failure'' rather than a ``systemic, ongoing inadequacy,'' said Michael Dale, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University.

``That's what's so troubling,'' Dale added. ``It appears to be [the latter].''

© 2001 The Miami Herald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com/herald

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http://www.miami.com/herald/content/news/local/florida/digdocs/107374.htm

Published Wednesday, December 5, 2001
1). U.S. judge rejects lawsuit against foster-child agency
CAROL MARBIN MILLER, cmarbin@herald.com

In a stunning blow to child advocates -- and an equally stunning victory for Florida child-welfare officials -- a judge in Miami has tossed out the most significant claims of a lawsuit designed to force sweeping changes in the state's foster-care system.

U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno ruled in an order released Tuesday that federal oversight of Florida's child-welfare system was unnecessary because individual state court judges had the power to protect and order services for children under their jurisdiction.

Moreno dismissed the suit's primary claims ``with prejudice,'' which means the attorneys cannot refile them in federal court.

For a decade, Florida's foster-care system has come under attack by lawyers and advocates who assert that many youths are better off remaining with abusive or neglectful parents than being placed in a state system often characterized as chaotic, insensitive and woefully underfunded.

When she filed her suit in June 2000, Tallahassee attorney Karen Gievers described the foster-care system as the worst ``abuser, neglecter and exploiter of children in Florida.'' For the most part, Moreno declined to rule on the merits of the case; he dismissed the most significant portions of the complaint on purely procedural grounds, a rarity in such cases.

In his 43-page decision, Moreno wrote that for all children under age 18, state court judges are able to exercise authority over children's fate from the time they enter care until the time they are either adopted or returned to their parents.

``The relevant question is not whether the state courts can do all that [advocates] wish they could, but whether the available remedies are sufficient'' to protect children in state care, the judge added. ``This court declines to hold that the allowable remedies are inadequate.''

Moreno wrote that enforcing the lawsuit's requests could create an ``unseemly conflict between state and federal judges.''

Moreno actually dismissed the entire complaint, saying it violated federal rules requiring that lawsuits ``contain a short and plain statement of the claim.'' Much of the suit, he said, ``reads like a closing argument.'' Twenty-eight pages ``contain a sprawling exposition of alleged violations'' of children's rights.

Three of the lawsuit's claims -- none of them cut to the heart of advocates' concerns -- may be refiled, he said, but only if they comply with procedural rules.

For Gievers, who filed the class-action lawsuit last year on behalf of about 20,000 children in state care in Florida, it was the second time she has been disappointed in her efforts to improve foster care. She said she settled a similar lawsuit, filed 11 years ago, only to find the department failed to make agreed-upon changes.

Moreno's decision is the second recent victory for the Department of Children & Families (DCF). In October, Moreno declined to appoint independent monitors to oversee the department's Broward County office. Advocates had argued that foster children were not safe in Broward.

``I think this sounds like an important victory for the state, and the state has tried very hard to provide quality foster care,'' said Paul Hancock, the deputy attorney general who helped defend the lawsuit.

``I think the [Broward] trial demonstrates that success has been achieved in Broward County, and that will have ripple effects throughout the state. Broward County is the starting point for reform.''

A spokeswoman for DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney could not be reached for comment late Tuesday after Moreno's ruling was released.

Children's advocates were as dismayed as state officials were pleased. Though the lawsuit originally was filed by Gievers, almost two dozen lawyers and child advocates were involved in the case.

Carolyn Salisbury, associate director of the University of Miami Law School's Children and Youth Law Clinic -- and a member of the legal team working with Gievers -- said the group had not yet mapped out a new strategy.

One avenue could be filing a similar lawsuit in state court, she said.

Salisbury said Moreno's ruling is flawed because it assumes children can be protected by dependency court judges, even though the overwhelming majority of foster children are not represented by lawyers. DCF has its lawyers, as do parents of children found to have suffered abuse, neglect or abandonment.

``In most cases, the child stands alone before a juvenile court,'' she said. ``The DCF attorney stands in opposition to that child. How can a little child possibly vindicate his or her rights when the state is represented by a lawyer, and he or she has none.''

© 2001 The Miami Herald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com/herald