Florida DCF mistake proved fatal for 15 year old girl.

[madfloridian]

Florida again.

I thought about Rilya Wilson when I read this. Remember her? She disappeared years ago in the child care system here and was never found. I found the latest article on her from 2005 in the NYT.

Woman Accused of Killing A Missing Child in Florida

A caretaker for Rilya Wilson, the foster child whose disappearance four years ago exposed serious flaws in Florida's child-welfare system, was indicted Wednesday on charges of murdering the girl, who was 4 years old when she vanished.

The caretaker, Geralyn Graham, was also charged with kidnapping and aggravated child abuse. Rilya's body has never been found.

The case of this 15 year old has been under investigation for 4 years. The girl was found dead in the motel room of a man who was 36 years old.

DCF 'mistake' proved fatal

A state report discovered lapses in the oversight of a 15-year-old North Miami Beach girl found slain in a motel room.

It was the fourth time in as many years that state child welfare workers had visited the home of Stephanie Dorismond.

The oldest of five children, Stephanie, 15, had told North Miami Beach police that her uncle had asked for sex and that a family friend had molested her. An investigator took less than a week to devise a safety plan:

''Mom told ensure the safety and wellbeing of the child at all times,'' he noted in his report. Case closed.

But even as Department of Children & Families investigator Williams R. Ajayi moved on to his next case, Stephanie, a slim girl with a glowing smile, was already in peril. On April 10, a day before DCF closed its case, a counseling group assigned to work with the family told Ajayi that the teen had run away from home.

..."Records show Ajayi did nothing. With no open investigation, no one searched for the troubled teenager.

Stephanie, who won a middle school prize for poetry writing and favored movies with superheroes, finally turned up May 30 in a Miami motel room she had shared with a 36-year-old man once accused of raping his wife.

I did an image search for Stephanie, but not a single one appeared. Four years of investigating, and not a single picture.

I did a google news search on florida, dcf. I sorted by date with duplicates deleted. I got many pages of hits.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=florida,+dcf&scoring=n

Crist has appointed Bob Butterworth, a Democrat, to lead the DCF. I hope he is able to fix something. The privatization of many of the functions has really damaged this department.

[madfloridian]

1. Leader of PBC private foster agency to retire

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/07/16/0716foster.html

"Monday, July 16, 2007

In advance of a report from a state oversight committee, the head of Palm Beach County's private foster care agency said today that he plans to retire.

Child and Family Connections Executive Director John McCarthy, 63, said he wants to cut back from the 60 hours a week he currently works and find a less time-consuming role.

..."Child and Family Connections oversees the care of abused and neglected children in Palm Beach County under contract with the Department of Children and Families.

The agency has run up a mounting deficit after an increase in the number of children coming into foster care. Without enough local foster homes for the children, the agency has had to place some in expensive shelters as far away as central and north Florida."

[Manifestor_of_Light]

2. Jeb didn't give a shit -- who cares about foster children? Not the guvmint.

[madfloridian]

3. Appears that Butterworth, a Democrat, agrees privatizing DCF is best..

with things being handled from a local level so the government can be small enough to fit in a bathtub....well, the bathtub part was from Grover Norquist.

Thing is that Butterworth seems unaware of the new tax laws being pushed that would cut taxes and therefore services at a local level.

Appears that even our Democrats want Florida to privatize its government.

It has really been working so very well. :sarcasm:

The system was transformed a decade ago, but not necessarily fixed.

It was supposed to be a new era.

Florida began handing over its child welfare duties to private agencies a decade ago, vowing children would be safer.

The new system would end child abuse disasters that plagued the government-run system for years, including the disappearance of 5-year-old Rilya Wilson of Miami and the death of 6-year-old Kayla McKean in Central Florida.

But when a missing 2-year-old Florida foster child was found June 14 at a Wisconsin house of horrors -- where a woman was buried in the back yard and a scalded 11-year-old boy hid in a closet -- glaring fault lines were exposed in the state's privatized child welfare system.

Butterworth says the system works, but people failed. He says privatizing is best, but needs oversight.

Private care still works best, he said, but vital lessons must be learned.

"You can't run this type of agency out of Tallahassee," said Butterworth, a former state attorney general facing his toughest case since his appointment six months ago. "I think it should be at the local level, but the state still has an obligation for oversight."

Then have Tallahassee stop the draconian tax-cutting, Bob. If you want it at local level, it needs to be funded, even if it is privatized...oversight costs money.

And maybe Jeb emptied too many of those government buildings in Tally to have enough government left for oversight. From his inaugural address:

"There would be no
greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.”

We don't know yet how much of his goal he achieved.