State: Tough ex-judge now defends DCF

MIAMI -- Kathleen Kearney, secretary of Florida's Department of Children and Families, is used to tough questions about incompetent casework in Florida's embattled social services agency.

But until three years ago, she was the person asking them.

"This was the judge who was most feared among all the Department of Children and Families," said child advocate Jack Levine, who first met Kearney 20 years ago.

As a Broward County juvenile judge, Kearney was known for her searing interrogations of DCF caseworkers who she sometimes felt had provided her with false information on abused children. She threatened some with contempt of court.

Now, more than three years after setting aside her dark robe to take what some call a thankless job, the roles have reversed. This time Kearney (pronounced CAR-nee) is the DCF employee on the defensive.

Lawmakers, a gubernatorial candidate and the media are asking stinging questions about the case of Rilya Wilson, a 5-year-old girl who disappeared while in foster care. The department didn't realize the girl was missing for 15 months; a caseworker even gave progress reports on her care to a judge.

Some politicians, including gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno, have suggested that Gov. Jeb Bush replace Kearney.

Kearney is standing firm.

"I've conferred with the governor and certainly I have no intention of resigning. I've worked diligently in this field for 20 years," she said. "As long as I continue to be effective in this agency, my intention is to stay."

Kearney, 47, is cheerful but intense. Her top staff still calls her "Judge Kearney." She is divorced and has said the long hours she put in as a juvenile judge took their toll on her marriage.

Kearney told a blue-ribbon commission last week that "God did not bless me with children." But she has thousands to watch over, she often points out. And now she works the kind of schedule that would be impossible for someone with children waiting at home.

"I think the minimum she's ever put in is like a 10-hour day," said Susan Moss, Kearney's executive assistant. "It's not just finding Rilya. She still has the department to run."

Kearney, who grew up in a close-knit family of nine, received undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Notre Dame. After law school, she moved to Broward County to be close to her parents.

As a prosecutor there, she specialized in crimes involving children. As a judge, she presided in dependency court, where she was often required to decide whether abusive parents could reunite with their children or should lose them forever. She had no plans to leave the bench.

That changed when Jeb Bush sat in her courtroom while campaigning in 1998.

"I think the day that candidate Jeb Bush walked into the courtroom and saw the passion and the persuasion that she was exercising . . . I think he saw in her the style that he had in mind for reform," said Levine, president of the Center for Florida's Children.

In 1999, the judge with a staff of one and no significant management experience took over an agency with 27,000 employees. In addition to child protection, her department handles welfare benefits and programs for the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, disabled adults, refugees and others. The job pays $106,000 annually.

Her courtroom style has now become her management style. She is intense, demanding and firmly convinced that she is on the right path. It is a style that might fit the public's image of an Army general, and indeed, she admires the military, having tapped former officers with no social services background for key posts.

For the DCF district that includes Citrus and Hernando counties, she appointed Patrick Howard, a U.S. Marine Corps major general.

Some of the job openings she created herself. Soon after signing on with the Bush Administration in early 1999, she got her employees' attention by firing high-level administrators she found subpar.

"She's a tenacious person on whatever she has laid out in front of her," said Chris Card, executive director of Hillsborough Kids, an agency that is taking over foster care programs from the department in Hillsborough County.

Some employees say privately that they are afraid of her. They say they avoid contradicting her because they don't want to become targets of her criticism.

But she also has assembled a crew of "loyal people working around her that are energized by her compassion for kids and families," Card said.

Kearney appeared before the Governor's Blue-Ribbon Commission on Child Protection last week and spoke as a reformer, discussing how she has worked to redirect the often maligned agency she had so often criticized herself.

She discussed a massive computer system that will give supervisors better control of child protection casework.

She said she revived the project from near-extinction after her predecessors spent $40-million on the system without making it operational.

She spoke of "privatizing" the agency, which is why nonprofit companies and the sheriff's offices do virtually all of the department's child protection work in Pinellas and Pasco counties. She also explained how she has worked to train staff about a "revolutionary" federal law that requires states to make children's safety the focus of their child welfare work.

What she did not do was explain how the Rilya case went so wrong, saying she could not delve into the details because law enforcement officials have asked her not to while their investigation continues.

"Obviously, it's very difficult," Kearney said when asked to describe how she is coping with the current crisis. "Because we do have a tremendous amount of good work that's been done and is being done every day in the field. And people lose sight of all those wonderful workers, and I'm hearing from them, that they are traumatized and that people do not respect their work. And that weighs very heavily on me."

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk