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INTRODUCTION: Florida child welfare in context

This post was updated on February 19, 2012

Less than a decade ago, the state of Florida was the national example of failure in child welfare.  News organizations across the state flocked to Florida after it was revealed that a foster child had been missing for 14 months – and was presumed dead – before the state Department of Children and Families even noticed.

In fact, NCCPR had predicted the collapse of the Florida system in 1999, shortly after Kathleen Kearney, a former Broward County judge, was named to run it.

Kearney’s approach to child welfare could be boiled down to a single sentence: Take the child and run.  During her first year as DCF Secretary, the number of children torn from their homes soared by 50 percent, the worst statewide “foster care panic” we’ve ever seen.  And entries into foster care stayed at this obscenely high level for seven years.

NCCPR issued report after report on Florida’s failure.  And ultimately those reports, and other factors had an impact.

A new governor, Charlie Crist, brought in new leadership.  First Bob Butterworth and then George Sheldon reversed course and embraced safe proven approaches to keeping families together.  Independent outside evaluations found that the reforms improved child safety.  And during 2009 and 2010, the two years when Florida took away the fewest children since 1998, deaths of children previously known to DCF plummeted by nearly half.

If anything, there is a need for more such reform.  Even in 2010, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Florida’s statewide rate of removal still was 10 percent above the national average, and significantly above the rate in states that take, proportionately, far fewer children.  So the notion that some kind of pendulum now has swung too far toward preserving families is a myth.

But ever since Butterworth and Sheldon changed course, opponents – what we have come to call the “Kearney DCF-in-exile” -  have been waiting for a horror story in an attempt to discredit the reforms.  There’s no literal organization by that name, of course.  There are no secret handshakes or clandestine meetings.  They’re just a bunch of people who either worked for Kearney or supported her policies; people who believe the destruction of all those families somehow made children safer – notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that it did nothing of the sort.

They’ve found an eager ally in Carol Marbin Miller, the longtime reporter on the child welfare beat for The Miami Herald.  Miller is a skilled and tenacious journalist.  She’s as good at pouring over documents as she is at ingratiating herself with sources and colleagues.  She’s mastered the art of making everyone feel she is their friend.  Indeed, her ability to make people want to like her also makes it hazardous for anyone to criticize her, since she has so many friends among Florida journalists. 

But somewhere along the line Miller went from reporter to advocate – becoming a de facto spokeswoman for the “Kearney DCF-in-exile.”  She has distorted data, taken information out of context, gotten time frames wrong, and systematically left out facts that contradict her point of view.

That kind of reporting endangers children.  Indeed it risks setting off another foster care panic, a huge sudden spike in needless removals of children from their homes.  Not only does this do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, it also overloads workers so they have less time to find children in real danger and are prone to take shortcuts.

Indeed, the last foster care panic may well have contributed to a key failure in the very case now in the headlines, something made clear by the far superior reporting of The Palm Beach Post.  That case, in February, 2011, is the horror story that the Kearney DCF-in-exile has been waiting for.

The fact that the child who died a hideous death, and her brother, who nearly suffered the same fate, allegedly are victims of a foster father who had adopted them didn’t matter.  In a front-page story on February 27,  Miller soon exploited the tragedy to attack reforms that have successfully reduced foster care and improved child safety in Florida; something she’d already tried to do late in 2009.  


For a short time, it worked.  During the first month after  Miller's shoddy reporting, entries into foster care soared.  But other media didn't buy the snake oil Miller was selling.  Virtually every major news organization in Florida has been to this site.  Their reporting set the record straight.  


Sadly, as of December, 2011, entries into care were up about 13 percent compared with the same period in 2010. That's largely because of poor leadership from the current DCF Secretary.  (See our Updates page for details). But that is a far smaller increase than the one in 1999, and far smaller than in other states and localities where shoddy media coverage followed high-profile child abuse deaths.

On this website we attempt to set the record straight.  This site includes:

●Key facts.

●An overview if the distortions and omissions in the Herald story.

●The fatality data the Herald left out.
●The errors line-by-line: Excerpts from the story with a detailed point-by-point rebuttal.
● The real roots of tragedy.
● The trouble with “Kearney lite”.
● In search of solutions.