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The governor's committee says the state agency needs to overhaul how it tracks children in its care.
©Associated Press
May 27, 2002
MIAMI -- The disappearance of a 5-year-old girl went unnoticed for 15 months because two low-level state workers and her caretakers deceived the state's child-welfare system, a review panel concluded Sunday.
A committee named by Gov. Jeb Bush accused the workers and the sisters caring for Rilya Wilson of malfeasance for submitting paperwork falsely indicating she was in their care and being visited regularly.
"There was fraud perpetrated here," Sara Herald, the child-welfare expert on the four-member panel, said as the group reviewed a 26-page draft of a report to be presented Tuesday to Bush.
DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney and the agency's top Miami administrator should not be removed, but agency shortcomings need to be addressed both quickly and long term, the panel said.
DCF flaws "are manifest, especially in the Rilya Wilson case."
The Miami girl was an infant when she was taken by the state from her homeless, crack-addicted mother. Rilya was placed in Geralyn Graham's home in April 2000, and she reported Rilya was taken from her home by a DCF worker in January 2001.
Rilya's caseworker, Deborah Muskelly, filed a court report in August indicating she visited Rilya. Muskelly and her supervisor, Willie Harris, quit under pressure in March. Graham filed for food stamps on behalf of Rilya as recently as March.
Kearney, who has called the girl's disappearance an "isolated incident," said the agency made mistakes and conceded some changes will be hard to implement.
"This was a very unique situation that involved deficiencies on the part of the department," she said. "We acknowledge failures individually, we acknowledge failures collectively, and now we have to work together to find solutions."
The draft report listed 21 short-term priorities and nine long-term objectives, and panel members added to them during a five-hour meeting focusing on an agency the panel said was "engulfed in scandal."
Some recommendations are intended to more quickly realize when children in state care are missing, including photographing children every three months and having them come to court every six months.
On mandatory monthly visits, the panel wrote, "The requirement was and is there. The enforcement was lamentably -- and for Rilya perhaps tragically -- absent."
Priorities were placed on naming independent guardians for all children in state care, reporting missing children to police immediately, raising the "woeful pay" for caseworkers and their supervisors, creating foster care case review panels and doing background checks on existing caregivers.
A national criminal records check would have excluded Graham, who claims to be Rilya's grandmother, as a caretaker because of a Tennessee food-stamp fraud conviction, the panel noted. The national checks started last July on new caregivers, but 62,000 existing ones have not been checked.
The department promised to get rudimentary information -- names, addresses and last DCF visit dates -- for all 44,000 children in state care into its $230-million tracking system by Sept. 1.
Rilya's DCF file released by courts last week contained reports about Graham being diagnosed with dementia and memory loss before Rilya was placed in the custody of her sister, Pamela Graham.