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Abuse rate atrocious

More children are being returned to abusive situations now than when the state privatized the system. Someone must be held responsible.

Privatizing Florida's child welfare system has cost more money and produced no better results, but the painful alarm in a new state audit is for bruises and broken bones. Six years after the state started handing off the job to private agencies, abused children are being abused again at a higher rate.

This is unacceptable.

"Some lead agency and department staff attribute the high percentage of children who are reabused and must return to foster care to reuniting children with their families too quickly," says a report by the Legislature's government accountability office. "... If children return to those homes too quickly, relapse is likely."

The numbers are regrettable. In 2004-05, one in every nine children suffered abuse again, which is up from one in every 17 just six years earlier. Whether premature family reunification or overworked case supervisors are the cause, the Department of Children and Families cannot afford to let this trend continue. The first job of child welfare is to make sure children are safe from harm, and the state is slipping.

The child-welfare system is now in the hands of 22 private community agencies that oversee some 500 subcontracts for case management, direct care, foster home placement, mental health services and adoption. Auditors found an encouraging increase in the number of children who were adopted or reunited with their families. But they also talked to foster families who were frustrated and paid the same reimbursement rate five years in a row. They found caseworkers earning $2,000 less a year than those who had worked directly for the state. They discovered rates of abuse and adoption and foster placement that varied widely around the state.

Over this six-year period, though, the state's cost per child increased 83 percent.

The move to community-based child welfare began before Jeb Bush became governor, but his administration must take responsibility for some of its failings. Whether in the arena of education, corrections or personnel management, Bush has seemed more devoted to privatization itself than to holding private companies accountable for doing their jobs.

Lawmakers who called for the report will be sobered by its findings. The point of the private transformation was to find a better way to protect abused and neglected children. Their repeated suffering is shameful.

[Last modified June 24, 2006, 06:06:20]