Child careless: Florida caseworkers lose kids.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Citings - Poor state of child welfare system - Brief Article

FLORIDA'S CHILD WELFARE sytem has sported a black eye since it finally admitted last April that 5-year-old Rilya Wilson, allegedly under its supervision, was missing. It turned out the caseworkers hadn't done their monthly check-ins on Rilya for 15 months. Now the Sun-Sentinel a regional paper in South Florida, has added a bloody nose with an investigation proving that reporters can do in a few hours what Florida's Department of Children and Families (DCF) can't do at all.

In August the paper picked 24 children from the state's official list of missing kids ostensibly under the DCF's care, most of them under age 4. The reporters located two of them in less than three hours and within a month had found seven more. They did this without access to any DCF files...