The Orlando Sentinel, in a stunning investigation of Dept of Children and Families records, found that more than 70 caseworkers lie and falsified documents pertaining to safety of children.
"During the past two years, more than 70 Florida child-welfare workers have been caught falsifying records -- lying about their on-the-job efforts to protect children, according to state and county records reviewed by the Orlando Sentinel.
As a consequence, the Florida Department of Children and Families temporarily lost track of at least six children, sometimes for months. Fourteen children were left in unsafe homes, the Sentinel found in a review of agency records..."
Lost children? The state of FL lost track of 5 year old Rilya Wilson in 2001, leaving her missing and presumed dead.
A study found 88 children, including Wilson, missing and uaccounted for.
Governor JEB!'s solution? Hire private companies to keep track of foster kids.
"...Florida overhauled its child-welfare system after authorities discovered in 2002 that a Miami foster child, 5-year-old Rilya Wilson, had been missing for 15 months without DCF knowing. Her caseworker had stopped making face-to-face visits.
The child has never been found.
In response to the scandal, the agency began outsourcing much of its child-safety work to private contractors.
What's left today is a much smaller government agency with limited oversight of the companies in charge of child safety..."
[This quote comes after quote below from Sentinel.]
"•The day after a caseworker reported that she had inspected a foster home in Wildwood, police found its four foster children living in tents in the yard. The house had no running water, no food and no clean clothes. [emphasis added]
•After a Hardee County social worker lied about making home visits, one child wound up living with an uncle awaiting trial on child-rape charges.
•Two children in Hernando County lived, for a time, with a grandfather who had been arrested two years earlier and accused of physically abusing his own child.
No child was hurt or killed because of phony paperwork, DCF said. But an investigation into the 2007 death of a neglected Jacksonville newborn revealed that his caseworker had falsified records in four other cases."
Lying caseworkers split 50 50 between state and private workers.
Still, we give lipservice to importance of protecting children but not enough money.
[Longtime child advocate Jack Levine of the 4Generations Institute in Tallahassee, a family-policy advisory group, said DCF clearly is policing itself, firing bad workers and trying to make children safer.
But the state also has a legacy of failing to meet its goals.
"Florida is a state that has always had among the finest child-protection laws and among the most paltry budgets to pay for those good intentions," Levine said.]
In Guv JEB!s delusional second inaugural speech, he imagined capital empty of government workers.
What a freaking tool!!! As Thomas Hobbes observed in Leviathan, government exists to enforce a social compact that works for all, whether weak or strong or poor or rich.
Privatize power grid and we got Enron.
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