Child authorities lose important records (after losing track of children)

How stupid do you have to be to lose records in an important international custody battle surrounding a 4-year-old girl? In Florida, authorities have managed to do just that - not just once but over and over.

As the custody trial for the little girl approaches this week, Florida's incompetence-plagued Department of Children & Families now admits it can't find an important document that's central to the case. This happened only months after the official court file for the case was also lost.

Apparently the missing documents would have shown whether the girl's mother, who now lives in the Miami area, agreed to give up custody of the child to the father, who still lives in Cuba (where the child was born and originally lived). The girl had been removed from her mother and placed in a foster home because of problems the mother was having. However, DCF insists the child should stay in foster care in Florida, even though there's no evidence that the father in Cuba is unfit. The foster father who DCF placed the child with is a sports agent whose sports agency certification was suspended because he allegedly seized a Cuban ballplayer's immigration paperwork.

It reminds us of the Elian Gonzalez case of 8 years ago, in that the politics of the Cuban exile community in Florida threaten to trump a child's interests.

It's not clear whether DCF is more to blame for the disappearance of the documents than the juvenile court clerk's office is. An attorney for the foster family blames the latter for losing the court records.

Regardless of DCF's level of irresponsibility this time, DCF has been beleaguered by scandal throughout the decade. In 2002 - when even the Miami Herald referred to DCF as "Florida's notoriously inept child welfare agency" - then-Gov. Jeb Bush appointed a right-wing whack-a-doo named Jerry Regier to head DCF. Regier was a religious zealot who advocated beating children until they developed bruises and welts, an action he claimed was supported by the Bible. He co-wrote an essay saying his fellow religious conservatives should help "realign" local, state, and national legislation "in order to make it conform to the Bible's view of reality and morality." Regier also supported outlawing masturbation and premarital sex. When he ran Oklahoma's health department, Regier wasted $10,000,000 in taxpayer funds on an anti-divorce initiative that didn't even work. This money was supposed to be used on programs for the poor, but Regier instead squandered it on one of his ineffective pet projects.

Regier initially denied co-writing the article that encouraged beating kids. But when another article that said basically the same thing was found with Regier's name on it, he had to fess up.

Jeb Bush claimed he didn't know about Regier's extremist views until after he appointed him. This, however, turned out to be another lie. Regier later resigned in disgrace after an audit found he took favors from contractors.

In the early part of the decade, Florida's DCF was involved in a scandal in which (as far as we know) it didn't lose important court records. Rather, it actually lost children. This came to light during a high-profile case that followed DCF taking a little girl away from her mother because the mother had a drug problem. DCF placed the child in a foster home where she was severely beaten. The woman who gained custody of the girl had a long criminal record, but this didn't matter to DCF. The child then vanished without a trace, and DCF didn't even notice the child was missing until more than a year after she disappeared.

Later it was discovered that DCF couldn't locate over 500 children who were supposed to be in its care. (Around the same time, a DCF employee allegedly drove drunk while returning a foster child from a visit with her mother.) A newspaper investigation quickly found some of the missing kids living within only a mile of DCF offices, which shows DCF didn't even make any attempt to find them. A boy who DCF had lost for 8 years was found by the newspaper almost immediately by calling his relatives. But nearly 90 of the 500 missing couldn't be found even by police. Nearly 40 kids who DCF had lost were found dead.

It sounds like Florida's child welfare system is even more incompetent than that of Ohio, whose own inept system infamously led to the death of a little boy when his foster parents locked him in a closet. Tragedies like this happen because government officials are so bent on filling important jobs in the child welfare system with political cronies who don't have a clue what they're doing themselves. The problems in the system can be traced to people who wouldn't have gotten the jobs they got if not for their political connections. It's a surefire recipe for disaster.

And when something goes wrong or when state officials make a bad decision, it becomes a partisan spectacle. For instance, when Jeb Bush appointed Jerry Regier to run DCF, the governor's office didn't merely defend the appointment. It also made babyish personal attacks against the appointment's critics and fell over itself trying to justify making DCF an ideologically driven agency.

Yet another story in which the system puts party ahead of people.

(Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/214785.html;
http://www.nospank.net/n-j39.htm;
http://www.nospank.net/n-j44.htm;
http://jmhm.livejournal.com/979736.html)