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View Full Version : NCCPR: Florida Toddler Latest Casualty of State's Foster-Care Panic


October 4th 03, 05:42 PM
NCCPR: Florida Toddler Latest Casualty of State's Foster-Care Panic
Thu Oct 2, 2:13 PM ET

Contact: Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection
Reform, 703-212-2006 Web: http://www.nccpr.org

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 2 /U. S. Newswire/ -- Brianna Lee, the
Jacksonville, Florida toddler left alone for 19 days to survive
largely on ketchup, is the latest casualty of the foster-care panic
that has made Florida's child welfare system one of the nation's
worst, a non-profit child advocacy organization said Tuesday.

Though the state Department of Children and Families had received
previous reports about the mother, who apparently never told anyone
about the child while she was jailed, "the reports raised yellow flags
instead of red ones, and overloaded workers apparently never had time
to investigate properly," said Richard Wexler, executive director of
the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

"In the same county in the same state at about the same time as
warnings about Brianna Lee got too little attention, DCF tore 10
children from their hard-working father and loving mother solely
because their house was crowded and dirty and the electricity had been
cut off when Dad fell behind on the bills," Wexler said.

Both cases came to DCF's attention in 2001, during Florida's
"foster-care panic" when the disgraced former head of DCF demanded
that workers tear huge numbers of additional children from their
homes. As many more children poured into the system, often after
parents' poverty was confused with "neglect," workers had no time to
investigate any case with care, so they made snap judgments.

"In the case of the ten children, caseworkers could see the dirty
home, so their knee-jerk reaction was to take the children and run,"
Wexler said. "But problems with Biranna Lee's mother were more subtle,
so there was no time to see that this child was in danger and,
perhaps, transfer custody to the man who ultimately saved her, her
father."

The foster-care panic also led to lowering standards for foster homes,
Wexler said. That may have contributed to the death of Latiana
Hamilton, another Jacksonville toddler, killed by her foster mother in
2001.

"These cases have the same common denominator," Wexler said. "A
foster-care system so overloaded with children who didn't need to be
taken from parents that workers lacked the time to find children in
real danger and lacked safe places to put them."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/031002/180/5gb27.html