State: Bush: Account for every child

Hoping to reassure Floridians about the plight of foster children, Gov. Jeb Bush on Thursday ordered a face-to-face verification of all 44,660 children under state supervision.

The extraordinary move was announced during a video conference among Bush, child welfare managers and nonprofit groups that protect children.

Hours later, a commission appointed by Bush heard from the head of the state agency under fire in the disappearance of 5-year-old foster child Rilya Willson.

"We will never, ever be perfect, ever. . . . I certainly take responsibility for what happened here with Rilya," Kathleen Kearney, head of the state Department of Children and Families, said at the hearing in Miami.

Florida Democrats, and some Republicans, took the opportunity to issue a strong criticism of Bush's response to recent events and to call for Kearney's ouster. In St. Petersburg, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno blasted Bush for failing to move quickly and urged him to appoint an experienced child welfare manager to head the DCF.

Bush acknowledged the difficult nature of accounting for more than 44,000 children.

"It's going to require a lot of work, but I think it's essential to give confidence that what happened to this precious child in Miami is not the norm," Bush said.

The governor's video conference was part pep talk, part stern admonition to a beleaguered agency.

Caseworkers are required to see each child at least once a month, but some visits are missed because a child is on vacation or unreachable. Bush said those children, who constitute a tiny percentage of the total, were to be tracked down by Wednesday.

The rest are to be visited in the next few weeks, with supervisors and managers personally locating the children and stretching the agency's already burdened staff even further.

Lee Johnson of the Sarasota YMCA, which the state pays to provide child welfare services in Sarasota, Manatee and De Soto counties, was lining up managers to check about 1,400 children face to face so front-line caseworkers can remain on their jobs.

The worker in charge of Rilya's case, family services counselor Deborah Muskelly, resigned in March amid accusations she falsified DCF records. Muskelly had worked for the agency since 1988 and was paid $48,500 a year.

Bush said that Rilya's case, while "horrific," is isolated and that the vast majority of the DCF's workers are dedicated and doing good work under stressful circumstances.

"I cannot tell you with certainty that tragedies like this won't play out. It is impossible," Bush said, "and to suggest that government somehow can replace loving parents -- it is impossible, and people understand that."

Bush says much progress has been made since he took office, with funding doubled for child investigators and caseloads dropping from as many as 100 to an average of 21 for each caseworker.

A legislative review of the child protection program in March found improvements "in many areas" in the past year but said the agency is still not meeting some goals.

The Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability said the rate of turnover among family service counselors was 29.7 percent in the year ending July 1. That was an improvement over the previous year but still higher than similar jobs in other states, the report said.

The turnover rate was attributed to hard-to-serve clients, a lack of staff, frequent changes in child protection laws and the "low to modest" compensation. A beginning caseworker earns about $30,000 a year, the department says.

In the Capitol, calls are mounting even among Republican lawmakers for a wide-ranging investigation of the DCF.

House Speaker Tom Feeney appointed a select committee to look into the department's contracts with outside companies, but the panel's chairwoman, Rep. Sandra Murman, R-Tampa, said it is more crucial than ever to investigate what she calls "systemic" problems at the DCF.

"Why they have a huge backlog of child abuse, why they're hiring workers who have gotten fired other places, their oversight of contracts, why there are conflicts of interest, all those types of things," Murman said.

At the hearing in Miami, DCF Secretary Kearney and the agency's Miami-area district administrator, Charles Auslander, vigorously defended their agency before the governor's four-member commission.

Kearney said she is trying to professionalize a department that had "lost sight of its mission."

Kearney talked for nearly an hour in a sober, matter-of-fact recounting of how she has reorganized and sought to improve the department. But she appeared on the verge of tears when she described a newspaper editorial cartoon portraying her as uncaring about children under her watch.

Kearney spoke at length about how she had reorganized the department and helped build a $230-million computer system that department officials believe will help point out child abuse cases that are not receiving proper attention from caseworkers.

Auslander surprised some committee members by saying the department in the Miami-Dade area had "significantly reduced average caseloads" and made the required monthly visits for 91 percent of the children under its supervision.

As recently as last year, only 60 percent of the children were being seen and "it was not a healthy situation," he said.

Commission chairman David Lawrence, former publisher of the Miami Herald, and other committee members said they want information on how the department verifies such figures.

The commission also grappled with a paradox: It wants to read the DCF's files on Rilya, but Kearney said law enforcement officials don't want the details discussed publicly so their investigation is not jeopardized.

So the members will individually read the files and sign an agreement to keep the information confidential.

That leaves the commission, a public body subject to the Sunshine Law, to rely on information it cannot share with the public to reach decisions about how to improve the child protection system.

-- Times staff writer Anita Kumar contributed to this report, which used information from the Associated Press.

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