Crowding plagues foster homes A nonprofit agency must reduce the crowding in six months or risk losing oversight in Pasco and Pinellas.

Crowding plagues foster homes A nonprofit agency must reduce the
crowding in six months or risk losing oversight in Pasco and Pinellas.
By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer Published January 9, 2004
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PINELLAS PARK - The private agency that took over caring for foster
children in Pinellas and Pasco counties three years ago has allowed
too many foster homes to become overcrowded, the state says.
The Department of Children and Families has ordered nonprofit Family
Continuity Programs to reduce the number of overcrowded homes within
six months or risk losing its job overseeing $37-million worth of
child welfare programs in the two counties.
"What we're talking about is the perceived danger of overpopulation in
foster homes," DCF regional administrator Lynn Richard said Thursday.
DCF also recently cited Family Continuity for other problems,
including shuttling kids too often from foster home to foster home, "a
fundamental lack of supervisory oversight" and poorly documenting how
caseworkers are working to help individual children. DCF has told the
agency to correct those problems, too.
In general, Richard said, the agency must improve its communication
with everyone, including other social service agencies and parents of
children in foster care.
Lisa Tackus, in her fourth day as interim CEO of Family Continuity,
said Thursday the agency is hard at work trying to fix DCF's concerns
and to improve communication, analyze finances and forge stronger ties
with other community groups.
Richard's and Tackus' comments came in a Pinellas County Juvenile
Welfare Board meeting. It was the first time DCF has stated in a
public forum that Family Continuity has so far failed to live up to
its expectations as a foster care agency since a much-touted
experiment in privatization of social services began three years ago.
"That's not to say that we think Family Continuity Programs is broken
and in pieces," Richard told the board. He said afterward he expected
Family Continuity to fix the foster care crowding problems and keep
its license.
But at the very least it amounts to a chink in the armor for a company
that has played a leading role in Florida's statewide plans to
privatize social services. The statewide strategy is to pare down
government employees who work with abused children and their families,
and to give out contracts instead to nonprofit companies.
These companies were envisioned as community-based local organizations
that would have broader local support and accountability than the
gargantuan DCF bureaucracy.
But speakers on Thursday complained about poor communication with
Family Continuity. Some pointed out that it has no local governing
board and answers to a parent company in Maine.
It also recently replaced its longtime executive director by hiring an
Arizona-based for-profit company called Providence Service Corp. for
$100,000 plus roughly $11,000 per month for three months. The company
installed Tackus as interim CEO of Family Continuity. She does have
local experience; she spent four years running a similar child welfare
agency in Hillsborough County.
Tackus will have plenty of work during the next 90 days. DCF has given
Family Continuity a six-month provisional license because it had
proved unable to: keep foster homes from getting overcrowded; maintain
enough foster homes for children under age 2; and submit required
foster home studies on time, documents show. The records did not
detail how much the homes were over capacity.
At the time Family Continuity took over the system, 68 of its foster
homes, about 21 percent, were over capacity. Now, it says 37 homes, or
8 percent, are over capacity.
DCF also has criticized Family Continuity for moving nearly one in
four of the children it studied to different foster homes three times
or more during a 12-month period.
Some of the agency's problems stemmed from a dramatic increase in
children sent into foster care that occurred after Family Continuity
began taking over in 2000, Roxanne Fixsen, director of operations,
told the Juvenile Welfare Board.
The number of child abuse and neglect investigations rose from 11,397
to 12,710, an increase of 11.5 percent, from fiscal year 1999-2000 to
fiscal year 2002-03. But in those same years, the number of children
removed from their homes and placed in some sort of foster care jumped
from 900 to 1,939, an increase of 115.4 percent.
Tackus said later that she appreciated the meeting, because it gave
representatives of many different social service agencies the chance
to talk about ways to help make the system better.
James Mills, executive director of the Juvenile Welfare Board, also
considered the dialogue positive. As to Family Continuity, he said,
"my understanding is that DCF is serious" about the agency's need to
show improvement.
"They've got a lot of ground to cover in a short time," he said.
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/09/So...ues_fost.shtml