103 Children in State Care Still Missing in Florida

MIAMI —  Despite nearly four months of searching, Florida authorities have not found 103 missing children who were in the care of the state’s Department of Children & Families, officials announced Tuesday.

Accentuating the positive, Gov. Jeb Bush and members of his administration stressed that most of the missing -- 290 of 393 children -- had been located because of the creation of regional, multi-agency “strike forces.” But child-care advocates said the statistic was no proof the state’s checkered record in child care, which was a major issue in Bush’s successful reelection battle last month, was now better.

“On the one hand, we’re bringing the forces of law enforcement, technology and four major state departments together because of concerns about 400 children,” said Jack Levine, president of the Center for Florida’s Children, a Tallahassee-based statewide advocacy organization. “Yeah, let’s do that, but what about the 40,000 other children who do not have the level of professional counseling and long-term quality care they should?”

After a scandal over the disappearance of a 5-year-old girl in state-supervised care rocked his administration, Bush ordered the Department of Children & Families and law enforcement agencies last August to cooperate in hunting for other missing children.

“The life of every youngster in our state is precious, and Operation SafeKids is indeed making a difference in the lives of Florida’s families,” Bush said Tuesday. “The partnership between DCF and the law enforcement community has been successful in locating missing kids and has helped to establish a system that will better protect the children in our state.”

Of the children not found, officials said 88 are still being sought by police, including Rilya Wilson, the little girl who was discovered to be missing from her foster home in the Miami area last May. It took DCF officials 15 months to realize she was gone.

Unlike Rilya, most of the missing are teenage runaways, or are believed to have been snatched by a noncustodial parent, DCF spokesman Owen Roach said. Fourteen others were minors when put in the agency’s care but have since turned 18. They are now being sought by police as adult missing persons, officials said.

One 17-year-old girl who had been placed in a juvenile intervention program, Melissa Karp, was apparently murdered. Her body was found in a canal in southwest Florida’s Collier County.

“We’re working to fill the cup,” Roach said of the children whose whereabouts are still unknown. “But if finding one missing child is a victory, finding nearly 300 is a great victory.”

The Rilya Wilson case led to months of embarrassing headlines about the gaps in Florida’s child care system, and ultimately to a high-level shake-up in the Department of Children & Families.

But Richard Gelles, interim dean of the school of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, said people in other states should not believe their agencies perform any better when it comes to keeping track of foster children.

“The situation is mirrored in practically every other state,” Gelles said in a telephone interview. “That is because of the truly archaic information management systems that the states rely on.”

According to the Ivy League academic, a shipping company like Federal Express uses technology to track parcels that is far more advanced than what states have to keep tabs on children in their custody. To some extent, Gelles said, the federal government bears a share of the blame, because since 1990, it has allocated block grants to state child care agencies to create what data specialists call “legacy systems.”

Those files, said Gelles, “count what you’ve done, but are incapable of telling you what you’re doing. What you’re doing is kept in paper files.”

Consequently, each night in the United States, “560,000 children go to sleep in foster care, and they are being tracked by paper and pencil,” Gelles said. If social workers were equipped with something as simple as a Palm Pilot, he said, computerized records could be updated much more rapidly to reflect a child’s change of address or disappearance. A truly revolutionary approach, Gelles said, would be to connect foster homes and institutions with the child-care agency via the Internet.

In March, a draft report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found Florida in “substantial compliance” with federal guidelines in five of seven categories on child care, but said the state had a long way to go in tracking abuse cases and providing adequate foster homes, mental health counseling and other services to children in the system.