Florida's children can't wait

Florida's children can't wait

By Bill Sublette My Word Posted August 30, 2003

The other day, a mom made a call to The Howard Phillips Center for
Children & Families with nowhere else to turn. After taking $700 from
her paycheck to make her mortgage payment, she had no money left for
food, and her children were hungry. Unfortunately, The Howard Phillips
Center receives hundreds of these calls yearly, and last week's
Sentinel merely confirmed what those who work and struggle at the
front lines already know: Florida is failing its kids.

The solution involves more than fixing the Department of Children &
Families. Florida has the second-highest child-maltreatment rate in
the nation. The number of calls to the Florida Child Abuse Hotline
just for Orange County children has increased 62 percent in the past
five years. Why? According to a study by The Howard Phillips Center,
the biggest reason is economic hardship. Fifty-four percent of
Orlando's children live in poverty or low-income households. Their
working parents, many of whom make as little as $6 an hour, cannot
afford a roof over their heads, food on the table, health care when
they're sick, or a safe place to leave their children while at work.
Most of DCF's cases involve neglect, children left home alone or
living in squalid and unsafe conditions, their parents unable to
afford decent housing or health care.

Families seeking help regularly get wait-listed or turned away. There
are more than 4,000 families on the waiting list for rental subsidies
in Orange County, and more than 5,000 children waiting for child-care
assistance. An estimated 5,700 Orange County children qualified for
Head Start last year, an early-childhood education program, but there
was funding to serve only 1,400 of them. Lengthy waiting lists also
exist for substance-abuse and mental-illness programs for the poor.
There is no magic bullet for such a complex problem, but national
research shows that addressing economic hardship is a critical place
to start

Until we set our sights higher and make children a true priority -- by
allocating more money and resources to children and families -- our
community will continue struggling to fix broken lives. Truly making
children a priority takes political will. What if we made it our
10-year goal to become a livable city for children and families -- to
make our community a model for child well-being? What would that do
for attracting businesses, improving schools and making our city shine
in the national spotlight? How much money would we save by preventing
subsequent mental illness, drug abuse, school failure and crime, when
these kids grow up healthy? As Frederick Douglass once said: "It is
easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

Our children can't wait. They are only children for a short time
before their chance is lost forever. And all children deserve a
chance.

Bill Sublette is the chair of the Community Leadership Council at The
Howard Phillips Center for Children & Families
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/...003aug30.story