Child protection chaos

To read the report of a distinguished review team is to confirm the worst fears about foster care in Pinellas County: Three years after the Sarasota Family YMCA took over the job from a group that had previously failed, child protection is still in chaos and the YMCA is in denial.

So stubborn is the YMCA's resistance to criticism that the review team questioned whether it could ever change. "If the YMCA continues to believe that negative perceptions ... are only due to a few disgruntled former providers ... and does not take the community's concerns and the recommendations of this report seriously," the team wrote, "it will continue to be plagued by similar issues and conflicts."

In formally presenting the report to YMCA board members Tuesday, Lee Haworth, chief judge of Florida's 12th Judicial Circuit, was similarly direct. "I do want to make this clear," Haworth said. "There needs to be a big change. There needs to be a serious change."

The question that now presents itself squarely to State Department of Children and Families secretary Bob Butterworth is one of scope: Is the YMCA capable of such dramatic change, or does he need to look for yet another new provider? Given the scale of the documented problems, he has little choice but to seek the latter.

This is a remarkable and numbing turn of events in the state's venture into community-based foster care. The Sarasota YMCA, which serves five counties at a cost of $72-million to taxpayers, is the oldest and largest of the state's 20 foster care agencies. Its early success is largely why the approach spread throughout the state. Now, though, the organization is looking more like a bloated bureaucracy.

What the review team found is that the YMCA is failing at the most basic level. In Pinellas, caseworker turnover is 70 percent and caseloads exceed 40 children. Caseworker pay is among the lowest in the state, training is poor, and management is all but nonexistent. The result is that abused and neglected children can be lost in the cracks of a foster program that is constantly changing faces.

These findings are worrisome throughout the YMCA's five counties, but most acute in Pinellas. As if to underscore the lack of community involvement, a Pinellas oversight alliance met Wednesday for the first time in two years.

"The team and stakeholders remain significantly concerned about Pinellas County," the report states. "Many describe the system as in crisis mode. ... Almost all the feedback received regarding Pinellas is consistent with a system in trouble."

When a system of foster care is in trouble, that can only mean the same for the children it is supposed to protect. If the YMCA cannot assure Pinellas or any of its counties that it can protect abused children, then Butterworth will have to make a change.

[Last modified November 4, 2007, 20:36:38]