The Florida Senate’s Committee on Children and Families has unanimously approved a sweeping measure aimed at plugging holes in the child welfare system. The bill has a strong supporter in Senate President Ben Albritton.
Among its many components, the bill would establish a four-year foster care pilot program for children with complex mental health needs, placing them with specifically trained foster families. Vero Beach Republican Senator Erin Grall, the committee chair, presented the bill to the committee on the opening day of session.
“There has been a decrease in the overall number of children removed from their homes and placed in out-of-home care," she said. "However, this has coincided with an increase in the needs of those children who are removed from their homes.”
The bill would try to avoid placing children with complicated behavioral health needs into households unequipped to care for them properly. All too often, such situations result in a long trail of busted placements and a long record of rejection for the child.
“Unfortunately, there are simply not enough placements that can adequately serve children with high acuity, particularly in family-like settings," Grall said. "This bill requires DCF to create a treatment foster care pilot program that will increase family-like placements for children with high acuity needs.”
High acuity is another way of saying a critical condition. The bill works to address that by including a professional foster care family designation to be created and overseen by the Florida Department of Children and Families. Those families would receive higher pay. Some would be asked to work with the Department of Juvenile Justice.
Roy Miller, president of the American Children’s Campaign, is a longtime advocate who has criticized DJJ. He says the so-called crossover kids -- so termed because they’ve been involved with both state agencies -- need a special level of care.
“Because the child welfare system really hasn’t been designed to take care of children that are returning from the euphemistic ‘residential commitments.’ Advocates like me use the word ‘youth prisons,’" he said. "These are complicated children with complicated pasts and complicated traumas.”
Miller says he doesn’t know how many DJJ-involved youth are returned to the community each year.
“But I would assume that these crossover kids -- they’re going to need those specialized treatment foster homes," he said. "These are kids who -- sometimes the treatment centers call the parents, and the parents don’t even come to retrieve the child.”
The wide-ranging bill would also require DCF to collect more data about where children in state care are placed. It’s part of an effort to keep them away from commercial sexual exploitation.
And it would require DCF to develop a recruitment program for case managers and child protective investigators.
