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Last month, the state attempted to see all 46,403 children it supervises and reached all but 1,237 of them.
By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2002
A month after Gov. Jeb Bush ordered state workers to check on more than 46,000 children under state supervision, the Department of Children and Families says it has contacted 97.3 percent of them.
But a top DCF official said Monday that he did not know whether the exhaustive review had turned up any new cases of missing children.
Bush mandated the checks following the controversy that erupted after DCF acknowledged in April that it had lost track of Rilya Wilson, a 5-year-old Miami girl.
Larry Pintacuda, DCF's assistant secretary for operations, said that after the governor's order, the state attempted to see all 46,403 children in foster care or other forms of state supervision. He said DCF workers had seen all but 1,237 children last month.
Pintacuda said those DCF did not personally visit include:
401 children listed as runaways.
421 children who were out of state with other caregivers.
135 who have "absconded" with a parent.
10 children who could not be contacted because they were traveling with their families or guardians.
Four children whom DCF officials could not see because of a court order.
Rilya Wilson, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
265 children that the department simply did not succeed in reaching. Pintacuda said DCF workers intend to reach these children by the end of this week.
Pintacuda said the extensive effort to visit the children showed the overwhelming majority of children are accounted for, and said seeing roughly 98 percent of the kids was a high accomplishment.
"No state in the country has seen 98 percent of the kids in March or April," Pintacuda said.
He did not know the average percentage of children DCF successfully visits during other months of the year.
Pintacuda said that DCF workers would immediately notify law enforcement about any children found missing. That's something that hasn't always happened. DCF workers waited six days before notifying police about Rilya's disappearance, which had occurred more than a year before.
DCF asked state police to help search for 120 children reported missing last month, more than six times as many as in April.
The increase was mainly because some caseworkers had previously not met agency rules requiring that they immediately report children who disappear while under state supervision, said Linda Radigan, assistant director of DCF's Office of Family Safety.
-- Information from the Orlando Sentinel was included in this report.