Parents of Florida Beware!!!

DCF expects 30,000 more child abuse calls a year under new law


This week, as chilling testimony in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse case gets underway, here in Florida the Department of Children and Families is busily preparing for a new law to go into effect.

Note: Do you want to know what's funny about this?

First of all, Florida has historically had a difficult time handling such calls.  In fact, as little as 5 years back, Florida was experiencing an excessively high number of calls, with an 80% screened in rate, meaning that 80% of calls to the states Child Abuse Hotline resulted in an investigation. 

So what we had were cases of overwhelmed CPS Agents investigating too many frivolous claims of child abuse, with a budget that did not allow for enough growth of staff to keep up.  This does not help to keep children any safer, because workers ignore or don't have the time to spend on the real or more serious cases while just trying to keep up with an inflated number of hotline calls.  

What you end up with is a high number of calls where people are reporting every little thing just in order to cover their asses.  This makes it much more likely that real or significant cases of child abuse will be overlooked.  It also makes it much more likely that inexperienced CPS Agents will be hired on to keep up, falsely substantiating or wasting precious time and resources on the little parental imperfections or nothing at all.

Not to mention Florida has a poorly designed system.  In the case of Nubia Barahona, for example, they were unable to connect the dots of four separate calls to the child abuse hotline on the twins.

So as you can see, Governor Rick Scott is simply over-reacting to a high profile child abuse case, in a way that will only put more kids into harms way and more families at risk of unncessary child abuse interventions, ultimately leading to more kids being stolen by DCF and thrown into foster care.

But look on the bright side.  The state will be able to increase the amount of federal funding that comes in, ultimately resulting in more jobs and contracts for the System Sucks.  Good job Gov!!!