Parents passionately label DCF corrupt and inept
Parents passionately label DCF corrupt and inept
By Jeff Brumley, staff writer
http://www.tcpalm.com/tcp/the_news_local_news/article/0,1651,TCP_1028_1150094,00.html
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MIAMI
When she finished her prepared talk before the governor's panel on child
protection Wednesday afternoon, Port Salerno resident Desere Clabo-Vandevender
was looking for reassurance.
Had she made sense? Had she been
clear? Had she gotten her point across? Had they listened?
She asked these questions quietly as
other parents and self-identified victims of the Department of Children and
Families testified before the Blue Ribbon Panel on Child Protection.
"I was so nervous," she said
in the back of a giant auditorium at Miami-DadeCommunity College in downtown Miami.
"There was so much at stake."
At stake for Clabo-Vandevender and
others was a chance, finally, to share nightmare DCF tales with high-powered
officials who have the governor's ear and do it in front of the very child
welfare officials they've come to fear and despise.
For the panel, formed by Gov. Jeb Bush
in the wake of the Rilya Wilson scandal, Wednesday's public hearing was a
chance to hear from a segment that's gotten little attention in its previous
hearings: Parents who say the DCF ignores its own rules and illegally takes
children from their homes.
Rilya is the 5-year-old girl DCF in Miami
had placed in a relative's care, then learned in April she had gone missing 15
months ago. The case has ignited a firestorm from DCF critics who say the
girl's disappearance proves the agency is inept and corrupt.
DCF Secretary Kathleen Kearney has
taken responsibility for the girl's disappearance, but says the case is
isolated.
But she and other DCF officials in the
audience got an earful Wednesday.
After a morning devoted to listening
to Miami-Dade law enforcement, social service officials and DCF management
mostly on the subject of foster care runaways, the panel started calling
parents and others with axes to grind.
One after another in five-minute
presentations they shared stories about how their children were wrongly taken
away from them. Some cried. Some screamed. Others spoke quietly.
But all of their stories had a theme:
Dishonest and vindictive DCF caseworkers and supervisors, and uncaring or
close-minded judges, conspired to rob them of their rights and deprive them of
their children.
During her five-minute talk
Clabo-Vandevender urged the panel to listen to the things the stories had in
common.
"They all want help,"
Clabo-Vandevender, 30, who battled the DCF for two years in an adoption case,
told the panel.
Clabo-Vandevender, executive director
of the newly formed Families Best Interest, said that could be done by
providing families with a parents' guide to the system whenever DCF becomes
involved.
Doing so would help reduce the number
of cases for DCF employees and the courts, and would prevent the kind of
tragedies the agency creates when it wrongly separates children from their
parents, she said.
"The state makes a poor and
disinterested parent," she said.
In her tearful testimony before the
panel, Stuart resident Sunny Douglas, 50, criticized the DCF for what she
described as a "corporate culture" of lying and ignoring procedure
that she said has illegally placed her three children in the care of an
unlicensed foster family in Ohio
without that state's knowledge.
"That's their nature," she
told the four-member panel.
On Wednesday, Bush signed a bill
making it a third-degree felony for state workers to falsify records related to
children, the elderly or disabled in state care.
Rilya's case features just such an
accusation, and statements about DCF caseworkers filling out false reports was
another theme in Wednesday's testimony before the panel on child protection.
"To falsify records, which is
part of the case of Rilya Wilson, won't happen again without penalties,"
Bush said.
Bush added he thinks Rilya's case is
an isolated one.
"There are thousands of really,
really good public servants that work in the Department of Children and
Families," he said.
The Associated Press contributed to
this report.
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