Flooded by foster kids, Florida failed to find safe homes USA Today 10/2020

[barbaraann]

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/10/15/flooded-foster-kids-florida-failed-find-safe-homes/3624505001/

Six years ago, Florida lawmakers embraced a tough new approach to stop parents from abusing their children.
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In a matter of months, the foster care system found itself drowning in hundreds of new cases. By 2017, the state needed space for 6,000 additional foster children – an influx equivalent to the size of the entire foster population of the state of New Jersey.

But lawmakers, child welfare leaders and Scott did not hire more caseworkers or increase the money paid to foster families to make more homes available. And they failed to tackle the root problems driving most of the removals: lack of access to drug treatment, mental health care and domestic violence services for parents.

Instead, they stood by as foster care agencies packed children into overcrowded homes and sent nearly 200 boys and girls to foster parents previously accused of abusing or neglecting the children in their care, a USA TODAY investigation found.
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USA Today did a remarkable job investigating this horribly, horribly tragic situation. I cried through the whole article.

[barbaraann]

1. Here's a follow-up article (editorial) about this situation.

Florida children pay the price of foster-care panic | Opinion
Richard WexlerGuest Columnist
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So all those children needlessly separated; all those taken from homes that were safe or could have been made safe with the right kinds of help only to be abused in foster care, suffered for nothing. They were victims of a “foster-care panic” — a sharp, sudden increase in removals of children from their homes that often follows high-profile child abuse deaths — especially when that coverage goes out of its way to scapegoat family preservation.
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It’s not a hard prediction to make. That’s because the real reason for deaths of children known-to-the-system has nothing to do with a supposed emphasis on keeping families together. Rather it’s almost always because caseworkers are so overloaded with false allegations, trivial cases and cases in which poverty is confused with neglect that they lack the time to investigate any case properly.

Child abuse deaths are as rare as they are tragic. They are needles in a haystack. A foster-care panic makes the haystack bigger, so the needles are even harder to find.
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https://www.floridatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/12/17/florida-children-pay-price-foster-care-panic-opinion/8897012002/