Robert Latham, associate director and practitioner-in-residence at the Children & Youth Law Clinic, built an interactive website last year mapping the placements of every single child who passed through Florida’s Department of Children and Families since 2002. He continues to analyze data and report on his findings, especially important during the COVID-19 crisis in Florida.
Below is an excerpt taken from his blog:
Florida DCF’s numbers are out for June and, in terms of investigations and removals, they were spectacularly normal. The predicted wave of removals isn’t here yet, if it’s ever coming at all. To the contrary, the system is struggling to discharge kids, as reunification and adoptions have both significantly decreased. We also have our first look at medical care, dental care, placement stability, sibling separation, and other measures that DCF only reports quarterly. Go ahead and form your own theory about what happened on those before you read on. You might be surprised.
Here are the details.
There were 10,054 initial in-home abuse calls accepted in June 2020. That is only 230 calls below June 2019, making it a fairly normal summer. June calls have been dropping since at least 2016. The rate of decrease actually slowed this month, coming in at 11% above the seasonal trendline. That bump could be due to delayed calls from April and May or the drumbeat of media stories about how people need to report. The short version: people can’t say that calls are down this month, but I’m not quite ready to say they’re rebounding either.
Looking at the pipeline effects, with fewer calls in April and May, there were fewer investigations to close in June — though some investigations may have also been closed faster due to reduced workload. The number of verifications also went down while the number of removals rose slightly. None of this is particularly unusual, except it happened to occur during a pandemic.
And that’s the takeaway thus far: we haven’t seen the drastic increase in removals that people whose jobs depend on caseloads keep predicting. The chart below shows that there has been a gradual but steady decrease in removals since around 2016. June was about 2% up, which is right with the trend.
Now that we have more data for context, it appears that April 2020 was our lowest month for removals, as everyone was getting adjusted to the lockdown. That dip of 15% in April was still less than Hurricane Irma in November 2017, which shut down four of the five regions and reduced removals by 19%. There was a slight rebound in 2017, but it came two months later and quickly leveled out.
Meanwhile, we are seeing lower numbers of kids exiting care across the board. Total exits were about 18% below the trendline. Reunifications were 14% below, and guardianships were pretty even. Adoptions in June, typically one of the biggest adoption months right before the end of the fiscal year, were down a whopping 42% from the expected value. I’ve got a few theories on why. First, trials have been postponed, which could reduce the number of kids free for adoption. Countering that, though, appeals usually take 4-8 months, so we should still be clearing out adoptions from December 2019 to maybe March 2020. Second, the summer adoption campaigns that normally result in lots of adoptions happening all at once probably got paused this year. All those adoptions may wind up spread over the summer months more evenly. The lower rate of adoptions for June isn’t a headline — yet.
New this month, we have data from DCF reports that are run quarterly. The pandemic seems to have solved placement instability. We don’t yet know why that is, but I suspect foster parents were less likely to ask for a kid to be removed, and agencies were less likely to act on requests that were made. Whatever the reason, the decrease in placement changes happened statewide. The Southern Region hit the 4.12 moves per 1,000 bed days standard for the first time in five years. It will be interesting to see if we can hold these numbers down.
The lockdown appears to have significantly disrupted dental care. Note that the measure covers the entire quarter and looks back seven months, so some of these kids may have gone to the dentist prior to the lockdown.
The lockdown only slightly reduced medical care. Maybe more kids wound up going to the doctor with suspicious symptoms, or maybe the expansion of telehealth made it possible to see a doctor without going in. The window here is 12 months, so maybe we’ll see a dip next quarter if the lockdown continues.
As far as the other reports, there was no noticeable change in the percent of kids placed in their removal circuit, seen by case managers every 30 days, sibling groups placed together, or just about any of the other quarterly reported measures. You can review DCF’s dashboards here.
You can play with the dashboards I created for these posts here and view the data by region, CBC, circuit, or even county. Until next month, be safe.
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