Scott Seeks $31 Million Bump In DCF Funding For Child Protection

Gov. Scott to propose increased funds for child protection

By Mary Ellen Klas

Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau

“Editor’s Note: We believe the constant flow of federal funding is the very reason that CPS is so corrupt. They are ALREADY taking/stealing children for baseless reasons and destroying families each and every day. A pay increase and promotion only pushes them to steal more children.”

In an effort to repair his child welfare track record, Gov. Rick Scott will announce Tuesday in Miami that he is steering $31 million in additional money to child protection efforts, a move aimed at reducing caseloads and increasing oversight of vulnerable children in Florida.

Ticky Ricky

The announcement comes in the wake of dozens of child deaths from abuse and neglect in the past year, and amid calls for reform of the Department of Children & Families from the non-profit Casey Family Foundation and Democrats in the Legislature.
“While DCF has made significant changes to protect children, we still have much to do to protect the most vulnerable among us,’’ the governor said in a statement on Monday. “Even one child death is a death too many.”
The governor will also announce that he will steer an additional $8 million to sheriff’s offices to investigate child abuse complaints, a turnabout for the governor who recommended a $17 million reduction in the grants to sheriffs for child protective efforts in his 2013-14 budget proposal.
The governor’s proposal, which is only a recommendation to the Legislature, includes restoring money for Substance Abuse and Mental Health programs, services that play a vital role in reducing child abuse, the agency said in a statement released to the Herald/Times on Monday.
The governor said his “historic increase to DCF funding” will pay for the hiring of 400 additional child protective investigators. The proposal also aims to reduce caseloads for child protective investigators from the current 13.3 cases per investigator to 10, and institute two-person teams in cases involving children under age 4 when the family has a history of domestic violence, substance abuse or mental illness, the statement said.
The program would be modeled after a pilot program DCF is currently running using paired investigators for high-risk cases in Miami-Dade and Polk counties.
DCF interim Secretary Esther Jacobo said she is confident the proposals “will keep Florida children safe.”

DCF interim Secretary Esther Jacobo

“Armed with input from national experts and data to back up our proposals, we are prepared to ensure that these funds will be laser focused on protecting children who are most at-risk,” Jacobo said in the statement.
The governor’s recommendation also includes restoring 26 of the 72 quality assurance positions that were cut under former DCF Secretary David Wilkins. Child advocates blame those cuts for contributing to some of the child deaths.
Another 50 current investigator positions would be eligible for career advancement under a new “Child Protective Master Practitioner” plan that would reward case workers with the most knowledge and experience.
The Casey Family Programs reviewed 40 child deaths last year and concluded that both DCF and community-based care organizations should focus more resources on providing services aimed at stabilizing families to prevent abuse.
The governor’s track record in his previous budget requests to the Legislature has been to reduce funding to the child welfare agency. In his first budget proposal in the 2011-12 budget year, for example, the governor recommended reducing funding for DCF by $238 million below its current levels at the time.
In 2011-12, Scott recommended increasing the agency budget by $1.7 million over the level approved by lawmakers a year before but, in 2013-14, he recommended reducing the budget again — by $75.7 million — below what lawmakers had approved the year before.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/01/13/3869179/gov-scott-to-propose-increased.html#storylink=cpy

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Foster Care Deaths Are A Failure Of Both Parties So FL Governor Scott Can Rest Easy

 Blog postings are by the founder and Executive Director, Kevin Cline, a former foster child. Link below

12/23/2013
Did I say rest easy?
I meant the man should be ashamed of him self but the Democratic Party can join the Republican Party in the dunce corner for those who help keep the status quo in place.
This is all while they put up a front for people in the public, who will be outraged for a day, from the latest tragedy.
Once all the moral outrage and bandwagon threads and comments about murdering the parents, castrating/sterilizing the poor on one end of the extreme and pay the child welfare worker more money as a response to a child murdered in foster care on their watch…once that is all done, officials will go back to business as usual until the next tragedy and then we will do it again.
Sorry Democrats but Republicans don’t have the monopoly on foster care deaths. Don’t point fingers if your own record is just as reprehensible. The foster care system is not one that is run better by either party. Democrats will claim they care about children more but in all honesty, when it comes to serious concrete changes, neither party has been a leader.
When something horrible happens that makes the news, democrats will always respond by advocating a bigger child welfare budget which includes increases for child protection investigations, hiring more state/county employees, more for foster care, and adoption but always includes a smaller piece of the pie for FAMILY PRESERVATION and REUNIFICATION. Most interesting enough is no connection drawn to the idea that if even a portion of this new found government wealth could be spent on helping families they supposedly care about, exponentially more families would be kept intact and far fewer kids would be entering the system. I’m not naive though and I fully realize that money cant solve this deep rooted problem.
Child welfare agencies have a culture and personality disorder and I feel in the end, that the only way things will change in the end is if we switch back to the days when child protection from an investigative standpoint was a police matter. One in which the police officer could investigate and then arrest if the case seemed to warrant it based off the evidence. These cases would be completely handled in criminal court and not dependency court.
This switch would involve caseworkers switching almost completely from a role of aggressive adversary.  we need to go back to where police handled the serious cases and child welfare workers served essentially as SOCIAL WORKERS. Today child welfare workers enjoy almost impenetrable legal immunity, unlimited power and no oversight combined with quotas and performance targets  as well as both reasonable and unreasonable public expectations. This all combines for a messed up system that aggressively recruits kids to take, then aggressively recruits middle and upper middle class families to take those kids but once they gain those families the system leaves them high and dry minus the money of course. this of course results in good parents being burned out and bad ones having their free reign on the kids they are supposed to be “protecting from the big bad parents”
Republicans can sometimes argue for the same things but tend to yell a bit more about getting government out of the way and sometimes a bit of lip service for parents rights which gets the democrats screaming screw the parents, its all about the kids….The poor family unit is what gets left out of the equation at the end of the day by both parties. Neither party talks about poor family integrity and how the system could be systematically changed so that it actually works for and with poor families who make up over 95 percent of child welfare involved families. Its always middle class middle class middle class and oh yeah middle class. In the end, its always how the system can take more children to cover its arse and appease a public which for a generation has been taught to loathe and hate child welfare involved families and so the public supports the taking of these children from poor families and it becomes unwilling to challenge a system full of angels doing god’s work.
Its bad PR to these days, akin to hugging a child molester, to publicly support child welfare involved parents and their kids together as a family because if we support them together, these kids are no longer false orphans in need of saving by those with means on both sides of the isle.
I do, in closing ask, how fair it is for a family to lose its foundation, the children, for being poor and maybe being homeless or not having  enough to eat or leaving the child with a relative who is too young because you have to work or smoking medical marijuana but still providing and raising your kids just fine..how fair is it that this happens and the parents are the monsters that every member of the public wants a piece of, while time and time again no one cares about the system we have all allowed to be created which takes from poor and gives to those with means, treasure for which we cant spare nor do we want to and when we fight back because that child ends up dead, raped, starved or xyz we are just angry. Don’t pay us any mind. we just lost our kids.

http://www.supportthepoorfamily.org/1/post/2013/12/foster-care-deaths-are-a-failure-of-both-parties-so-fl-governor-scott-can-rest-easy.html