Foster Shock: documentary about Florida’s foster care system

Transcript recovered from the original video captions. Automatic captions may contain recognition errors.

Original source recording

0:02 when children are removed from their homes because of abuse and neglect it's because of extreme abuse and neglect and these children have been traumatized when we take them into our system of care that's when we start and re-traumatizing them and that's the beginning of their life in care the trauma they experience going through a system where they're taken from abusive

0:24 situations and then sexually abused physically abused by their caretakers the people that are supposed to care for them for three years the foster care system put my family and our children through a living hell so you don't think anyone deserves to be treated like that because really what me and my sisters went through is torture we were tortured you don't feel like a kid you just felt

0:48 like an outcast if you really go through it kind of feels like that kidnapping you in the middle of night they're putting you in a home that you don't know anybody and they isolate you from your family members and you're alone and then they expect you to become normal when there is nothing normal about it you can't go out and talk to people you can't go out and have fun with friends

1:08 you're literally on an island by yourself then they expect you to form and function like a normal person all of us felt like we were criminals we're being disciplined for something that our parents did [Music] [Applause] in 1996 Florida lawmakers decided to experiment with privatizing the foster care system and began giving large amounts of money to five test programs throughout the state in Duval and Clay

2:01 County the Family Service coalition was given 9.5 million dollars in Escambia County Children's Home Society was given 2.3 million dollars in Lake and sunder County Lake County's Boys Ranch was given 5.6 million dollars Sarasota County is Sarasota County Coalition for families and children was given 9.5 million dollars in in Palm Beach County an unspecified private for-profit company was given an

2:32 undisclosed amount of money despite spending 27 point five million dollars a disclosed money after two years four of the five private test programs were abysmal failures but despite these failures Florida decided to press on and privatize all of the foster care system privatization was just an experiment I need to be very very clear about that then it was one that's never been proven

3:01 to be successful to this date in 1999 after Governor Bush was elected became his mission to entirely privatize the state of Florida and to create this system of care that was managed by these private entities Florida was the first state a fully privatized child welfare when that happened private companies sprung up across the state those companies are called CBC's and the

3:29 Department of Children and Families function then is to monitor that they provide those services the new plan was for the Department of Children and Families to divide up the state between seventeen different CBC's or lead agencies what happened in Florida as the governor pressed on the privatized they allowed agencies that had never delivered child welfare services to just

3:52 be formed and come into existence that have any assets they didn't have any experience base our kids was formed I've never had any experience in child welfare child met formed in Broward no experience in child welfare CFC formed no experience in child welfare and we hired two employees and started operating as new agencies when you have a lead agency that's going to provide

4:14 those services we were under the assumption that lead agency would be providing those services instead what we find out is the lead agencies in almost every county in the state contract out every single service of child welfare you need people that are going to you need people that are going to recruit to foster parents they contract that out you have to license do the

4:42 background screening of foster parents that's contracted out taste managing adoptions that's contracted out if there's mental health services that are provided that's contracted out most of them don't even do their in-house case management and no those kids Dade County had roughly a hundred million dollar budget for child welfare services our kids was formed our kids hired very

5:08 expensive officers to run it some of these officers were making almost twenty and fifty thousand dollars a year and they would have controllers and they would have attorneys and they were very very expensive well they contracted out to case management agencies another set of agencies were born and these folks had very expensive CEOs and chief financial officers and chief information officers

5:32 and lawyers who became general councils and what happened is a huge amount of expense was created an overhead that never existed in the system before the push in Tallahassee has been to take those public dollars tax dollars and give them to for-profit entities you come across a lot of problems when you do that because not only is there a built-in incentive to reduce services

6:00 because you've got to make a profit somewhere and the state never gives anyone enough money to do what they're asked to do but there's also a transfer of accountability seeing that happen in the foster care system with the creation of the CBC's the community-based care councils its legislators trying to kick the bucket down the road by blaming an organization that they've transferred

6:28 money to and absolving themselves of any responsibility when problems occur when abuses occur what happens when a child is harmed and we say something's got to be done who are we gonna hold accountable and then you've got the finger-pointing to everyone else well we only provide this service well we only provided that service well we're not responsible for this and we're not

6:50 responsible for that these companies are getting their funding from the government but they're being completely funded by taxpayer money there's a lot of money flowing through this system and what's crazy is that for the amount of money you're not getting good care there is a serious lack of oversight and serious lack of consequences by the people who run these facilities there's

7:09 really a wall of silence around all types of minor cases and the only time they share information is when something bad happens when there's some type of crisis scenario when there's a resident who dies that's when all of a sudden everybody gets involved one of the biggest stories involving the Department of Children and Families was the Miami Herald expose on the death of

7:31 477 foster care children a story so big the department's wall of silence could not contain it one of the things that's concerned us for many years with regard to DCF is the lack of transparency we had to fight for a good three years to get all of the records that we needed to publish innocence lost one of the things we found was that over a 10-year period about 477 children whose families were

8:01 known to DCF subsequently died one of the things they did 80 times resulting in the death of a child was they came upon a family that was in crisis and instead of intervening with that family meaningfully they asked the parents to sign what was called a safety plan and these were essentially written pledges to be better parents pledges by usually the father to stop being violent toward

8:30 a child pledges by one or both parents to stop being drug addicts and those things we found and DCF really already knew were no more valuable than the paper they were written on you want to be able to kind of pin somebody with the blame for this and so you you keep going to these agencies with these tough questions and they basically you know push you off on somebody else because

8:52 that's way that's the way that the system has been privatized it's very diffuse in terms of who's responsible for what without accountability and with massive amounts of money allotted for child care eaten up by paychecks for corporate ceos these lead agencies had to find an inexpensive efficient way to house large numbers of children this led to the group home one of the other

9:16 failures of privatization in Florida has been the complete and total absence of appropriate placements to meet the needs of children we see horrible examples of overuse of shelters and group home placements I am standing in front of the group home that I aged out of when I was 17 life here was hectic it was crazy there were fights all the time staff useless paying kids to get each other's staff she used

9:45 to try to fight the kids it was exactly the type of situation you would not want your child to be in I was removed from my home when I was 2 years old I was losing my great-grandma my uncle he was displaying himself to my two older sisters and when we take a shower he'd watch us pay so we removed his child from this traumatic bad situation the child's been horrifically abused or

10:09 neglected bad enough to be removed we put them in a place called the group home where you got shift workers to come in every 8 hours you've got a car that's not a car it's a big van that's got the name of the company on it you'd have no privacy and all of that is not creating a safe stable nurturing environment there are a lot of fights all the kids are angry people stole things I barely

10:37 had any type of possessions because they're all gone I mean if it was something nice you didn't have it for very long we're at Great Oaks Village it's a group home ages 5 to 18 I live to it's a group home ages 5 to 18 I live to approximately aa 10 years life here approximately aa 10 years life here during the time you lose hell the police were here almost every day they'll be

11:01 literally waiting if you're late from school if you refuse to come home from sup or if you just refuse to get out of bed they'll call the police as if the police were your mom and dad when theirs will be your caretakers the police were here every day it got to the point where they knew our names by heart when you saw the cops it was like run or you know go hide or we were just really afraid

11:23 because we knew that meant and you weren't gonna be there for very long and they were taking you somewhere private eyes group homes rely heavily on police intervention and calling 911 situation that most parents could easily handle often a single group home will have more than 300 9-1-1 calls a year s-stay vias group home was actually on the same grounds as a juvenile detention

11:46 for facility when we were bad for any reason police were called and they would take us from here and they will bring us to jail and instead of us sending us through to our room they would just bring us here every day kids in my shelter were thrown in jail just for doing things that typical kids do on a daily basis not only did the group homes fail to provide a safe secure place for

12:11 foster kids to grow up they also cost more in 2014 eighty 1.7 million dollars was spent to house twenty-two hundred children in group homes money the children say they never saw one of the things we've seen with privatization is much less money reaches the child now than it did before caring for children it's a business business has a bottom line these places are paid per day per child have an

12:38 average of you know hundred dollars a hundred and twenty dollars a day per child when you have empty beds you have staff to pay you've got to pay your staff the staff doesn't go down you've got to pay those kids are the dollars that you've got to get in I learned the numbers and the percentages and the statistics in foster care I felt like we were just like black market items like

13:00 we're just kids they throw out on the market and I felt like I felt degraded as like a young man because here I am thinking they have our best entries but really it's we're just numbers and percentages to them far too often these kids are placed in placements not because that place has the specific services that that child needs that that's the best placement for them it's

13:25 because they got the empty bed to place that child in it's like we're money to them like you see like mr. Geary would come to work in his Corvette while all of us don't even have food in our fridges I remember one group home there's literally a boat lock on the fridge that lock was always there unless we had a visitor which meant that we went some nights without eating as group home

13:44 children went without eating executives at child death the CBC in Broward County found other ways to spend state money in the spring of 2015 the Inspector General of DCF released ACE scathing report on child net it found that there was a high-level employee the chief financial officer named Deepak Park who had engaged in a number of activities inspector general criticized

14:13 the whistleblower in that case had alerted child net to these activities child net looked into the allegations determined that nothing was wrong and did nothing the whistleblower later made allegations to the governor's office they found a host of inappropriate activities paraic had asked several of his underlings to perform tasks for him that had nothing to do with the

14:41 protection of children he had workers paint his house change his locks get his oil changed he was accused of sexually harassing female workers that he supervised park that actually had some of his underlings take his car apart to look for a global positioning device that he feared his wife had placed there in order to spy on him the Inspector General report said that not just Park

15:11 but several executives at Child met had behaved as if state taxpayer money was their own piggy bank we have since learned that the whistleblower was fired paraic left child nap before these allegations became public but his suspect spending reveals one of the system's biggest flaws lots of money for those on the top and very little for the kids on the bottom the allowance

15:37 that I received in the group home was about $13 a week and to my knowledge they get $100 per day per kid and with over 50 kids in the group home that I was in I mean do the math I had to buy my own soap at one point like I had to use like my allowance like they gave us like maximum twelve dollars like every week if you did one thing wrong that week you wouldn't get in an allowance

16:06 Hibiscus especially we would look for any and any reason to hold your allowance so there would be like maybe like three months in a row you wouldn't get paid anything so I mean I could see why some people would fall into human trafficking after the Romancing would begin the girls were manipulated into working for a nasty and quote-unquote his boys these are the mug shots of four men who

16:31 prosecutors say use teenage girls in foster care as prostitutes Eric Earl also known as a nasty was the ringleader these pimps and traffickers are gonna go for the easiest ones they're no longer picking them up in a van they are now going to the hot spots where foster kids hang out and so group homes are a huge target we've got piers recruiting piers sex trafficking of minors is a major

16:54 problem in group homes but despite the fact that this is commonly known by both staff and caseworkers underage girls and boys are able to easily leave the home at all hours of the day and night once gone sexual predators are not far behind where the hotel across the street from the group home the guys would bring the girls here they buy them alcohol by them marijuana they bring them in a room they

17:22 get drunk they get high whatever they wanted to do our case workers weren't providing for us the girls felt that the only way they were gonna get anything is if they got it themselves the prostitutes range from 12 to 17 some girls prostitute for money others prostitutes for fool others prostitutes for drugs some prostitutes because they think that the person I was loves them and being a foster kid mostly

17:47 this girl don't get a lot of love no one's knowing the double lives they're living that they could run out and sneak out and they could go across the street and make some money for sex to get what they need and to take care of the stuff that is not provided by the system and it's become normalized prosecutors say the girls would get $40 for the sex acts the big question though

18:07 is how did they gain access these suspects to homes that are supervised by the Department of Children and Families I think that's a much more complex question than can be answered in couple of words sex traffickers look for these children they look for children that are vulnerable they look for children who aren't attached to others they look for children who are hungry

18:27 for someone to give them love and affection and so they know to target some of these group homes these kids in these group homes are targeted because they're a perfect mark for a sex trafficker the girls have coming in likes you can smell it on them like you know that's what they've been doing the staff they'll look at him dad just give another staff a look and then they'll

18:49 just like leave it a long life if your staffing you trying to help these kids and while you won't say no we aren't doing any sort of justice to these children putting them in homes where there is no understanding or education on what sexual abuse is and how they are prime suspects and targets for human trafficking an investigation into this prostitution ring revealed the girls

19:09 were recruited in the group home while under staffed supervision the kids that are put in there are put in there because of abusive situations so the majority of them that gateway has already been opened they've already had the sexual violation they already are bound Realist with what is theirs and what's not and typically the girls that we have worked with have been reused in

19:29 some sort of setting through foster care the road that we're on is called the runaway trail sometimes men or women they'll see us and they'll pretty much start picking us up and then from there like well you know they either exchange for sex money drugs whatever the situation may be what happens is within 48 hours statistically 80 percent of Runaways are approached and coerced by a

19:57 trafficker or pimp into the sex trade and then once they're in the sex trade is typically a life of being sold 15 to 40 times a day for up to seven years people who lurk around because they knew the group home was right here and it was just easy pickup you'll see in the newspaper or on TV these stings where law enforcement has rescued all these children and I sit back and now that I'm

20:22 behind the scenes a lot I will ask where are these children going because I know now that there aren't enough places for these children to go that they're either going back to my – back to foster homes back to places where there isn't the education there's not the therapy there's not the training to stop this cycle of sex trafficking and so even when we're rescuing children

20:44 we are not really rescuing at them unless they have a safe place to go the problem isn't just lack of supervision lack of real activities but it's really the problem is a lack of a connection that child needs that connection that's what they're looking for when they're out there and that's what they get from those sex traffickers this is my DCF file this is basically my

21:27 life how much paperwork I was born into the system because my mom is a drug addict so therefore I was one cocaine in my system I was taken away at birth I was one at 5:00 p.m. I didn't know that when I was about 1 my maternal aunt got me and then um a lot of abuse took place at that home for the first few years of her life angel was passed between her abusive and her abusive mother and her

21:56 sister then at the age of seven she reentered the foster care system after being hit by a car this is my closet this is where I had to hide out psychological evaluation that was done on me when I was 10 angel appears to be experiencing some gender confusion I realized that I was gay actually before I moved here being here it was hard this ain't my house Hartford to come out

22:27 right now it was just that much harder being here because the simple fact that I had to dress like a girl even though everybody knew that I hated it the foster parent remarked on angel stalo dress like oh boy and indicated that she had been encouraging means it so dressed like a girl she related that angel has problems with her gender identity she related to her religious beliefs

22:47 indicated that angel stolid dress and possibly wanting to be a boy all wrong I ran in fist a lot a lot in foster care it was and she wasn't the only foster parent it was a lot of foster parents how would you feel being bought here in the middle of the night I kept asking me to see my sister but nobody couldn't tell me anything because we didn't leave the campus as angel began life in the

23:15 group home shelter memories of her former life and of her sister began to fade it's like somebody just up and gone out of your life for good and when you're so used to them being there and when they're taken away from you and you're taking away from that person it's like that the memory start to fade therefore you start to fade and you don't want that to fade and that's

23:35 basically what the shelter was doing it was making the memories go away because I was looking for a seventh in they're always there at different people just there and they weren't trying to ask me it you want your strength what's wrong what can we do for you out can we help you how can you not be quiet how can you okay how can we make you talk how can we make you interact how

23:58 instead of asking that it was okay since you don't want to do what I asked you to do you're going to your room they've got about a show there when I work yank away that's when they were restrained I hid behind the door at the shelter and they call the cops with me acting out and it couldn't take me to jail so they Baker Act a Baker Act is a section of Florida law that allows police to detain a

24:22 person who poses a threat to themselves or others for a period of 72 hours while their mental health can be assessed but in a foster care system it is used as a temporary babysitter to remove children from a home by a staff that is untrained in unwilling to deal with an emotional child the use of the police should be the last resort when you see police interventions to the numbers that have

24:47 been reported it it instantly says that something's not working when a child acts up in a foster care home almost always the police are called the police with very few options available to them escort them to a baker acting unit the children are observed for a period of 72 hours then sent back to another group home a cycle that continually repeats sending children in and out of psychiatric facilities if

25:13 some kid comes to me and Ben Baker acted for the third or fourth fifth time the question is why what's going on it means the systems not working the diagnosis is wrong the interventions are not there the Prevention's are not there something is really a foul once at the Baker action unit the children who can be as young as five years old are treated like any other suspect brought

25:38 in everything is very bright white don't take your shoe strings to make you strip naked coughs quad at a young age nose felt very uncomfortable strip why am i very uncomfortable strip why am i stripping cough open your vagina and stripping cough open your vagina and then a woman with glove came in and did this what are you doing I'm a little this what are you doing I'm a little

26:11 girl the doctor asked a lot of questions like do I want to kill myself do I hear voices it's like no no I'm home out of my sister's house how come every time I run away you keep Baker acting me and send me to this crazy home when all I'm doing is trying to see my sister when I tell you or I asked you you guys don't want to listen and nor have you guys asked me it's gotten to a point where I

26:35 don't want to speak anymore I don't I feel like my voice is used to see you guys this is a summary of how many homes I've been in and like a two-year span ssin 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 two years in ssin 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 two years in 18 homes when these kids start acting out and they do they left out it's not pleasant then the group home says well that's it we're done with that behavior and we're

27:03 gonna ship them to another place where do they go another group home if it's saying 2004 2003 then I was only like 12 to 13 my Hashmi I got a phone call from my aunt and I spoke to me and she was apologizing for the horrible thing she did to me and told me that my mom had died earlier that day and it was a you knew when she's gonna passed away cuz she was in Hospice why didn't you call

27:28 me I'm devastated I want to go to my sister's house and when I tried to leave out the door the foster parent tried to stop me then she restrained me in I maneuver out of it around the door getting at that point I got arrested for assault and battery and destruction of property and I think at that point is when he was ready to throw me in a sit program with the death of her mother and not being

27:51 able to see her sister angel began to act out this led her to be placed in one of the system's most notorious mental health facilities Katz is the Center for adolescent treatment services which is a facility for troubled youth it's run by a non-profit company called citrus health services which is a health care provider out of Hialeah got a call from a public defender in the Broward office

28:17 who deals a lot with juvenile offenders and he told me about some troubling behavior that he had heard about at this facility that was out in Pembroke Pines and it turned out there had been a riot at this facility for young girls and boys if the police had come and it was a whole big deal and the girl had told the public defender that during kind of the whole melee at the center of police

28:44 officer punched her in the face what was so unusual involving citrus is that our office was appointed to represent the child for battery on a law enforcement officer so the state of Florida saw that video she tells that child battering that officer but kind of what was more troubling I think to him and then to me as I began kind of investigating it was just the general craziness that was

29:13 going on that day at the facility in which according this girl and other girls was kind of standard practice there like girls being tied to the bed four-point restraints face down I didn't have any rights here I was force-fed post meaning crushed up pills inside of a yogurt and was forced to eat that until they told me it was all gone and if I did not finish that I was getting tranquilized and being

29:37 strapped down to a bed in a seclusion room one of the most troubling was being administered kind of willy-nilly psychotropic medication to knock them out I mean girls were talking about but getting tied down to beds and shot up with syringes full of Medicine they didn't even know what it was and then they'd wake up hours later the girls started calling a booty juice because

29:54 they were being shot and you know in their back end or the rear with it the manner in which they were doing it in the frequency by which they were restraining these young girls was troubling I was pretty shocked to learn that you would treat not only mentally ill individuals this way but that you would treat young girls this way many of which had already sustained or suffered

30:16 a significant abuse the over prescription of psychotropic medication was not just at Katz's but can be found all across the foster care system order authorizing psychotropic medicine seroquel respite all and how do you say that Jeannette though and then right after that they switched it to rest of it all then zoloft it rested all this little red pill and so laughs was the white

30:45 girl I say them both one of the side effects of all the medication was weight gain pushing angel over 250 pounds but with no one advocating for her she was unable to do anything but continue to take the drugs when it came to medication I'm spending some time they were crunched and medicine up inside of yogurt you have standing you have two minutes to sit there eat that whole

31:09 yogurt and then leave if you do not eat that yogurt you're going to be restrained and shut down to the bed you're gonna be fortunate medication and also a needle in your butt and they held me down as a child to give me that needle they suppress me with medication everything in medication is gonna make this feel better it's like everything's cooking but I'm used to everything just

31:32 clicking like that my brain works like this to me but it goes from looking like this to the Government Accountability Office found that 48% of kids in group home facilities were being given psychotropic medication often at higher doses than FDA guidelines I've been on Zoloft I've been on adderall I've been on effects or IVA don't try the domes I was nine years old at the time and they put

32:00 me on I think Ritalin and paxil or something like that one was for you know hyperactivity and other was for a depression but they never told me what the reason why was getting these drugs what was strange to me was every kid in my group home every kid in the whole moms living in just always had something wrong with and I always thought that was weird I was like how is that possible that all of us are

32:23 not normal the disproportionate number of these kids who need medications and some pretty nasty let me put this way some pretty high doses at times I was on 23 something pills a day 8:00 in the morning 4:00 in the afternoon another four or five at 4:00 p.m. and then seven or eight and at night but that can't be that many kids are they're that bad all the time the numbers are wrong so it's

32:52 saying that the system is not working all of those drugs is about 23 plus or something I was taking in Sandy pines left me with a severely damaged central nervous system I guess afterwards I got diagnosed with a motor tic disorder and it cats these drugs would often be administered by an untrained staff why our staff members repeatedly and continually using a sedative to control the behavior of

33:22 youth within the facility and many of those questions were answered by the quality of staff and the training of the staff seemed to suggest that it was substandard across all measures our residents routinely drugged unconscious sir I'll have to you know defer to you speaking with our folks at our main Center well you run the place but I have to get back to my clients now so thank

33:45 you very much there's no accountability in this system DCF can say well you know talk to child that child and I can say we'll talk to citrus citrus can say well we need to talk to talk to akka you know they don't care how they look in the end of the day because looks really difficult to lose that contract it was so disappointing to see that the anaemic response from the state of Florida when

34:05 it came into protecting these children that were in that facility had it not been for the defense of this fourteen-year-old girl taken into the foster care system after the death of both of her parents the condition and treatment inside this facility would have continued to go on completely unnoticed after finding multiple violations of patients rights the state finds citrus $10,000 but settled for

34:29 9,500 today state money continues to flow into cats and citrus health services and children are still being held behind these closed doors like prison inmates it's like incarceration with training wheels basically what they're going through know you desert if you grew up in this place right here aging out of this place even spending any type of teenage or even childhood like years in

34:52 here watch this game just be getting us prepared to be incarcerated you know they've been abused their whole life they've been in terrible situations their whole life honestly like cats is probably just one stop many stops that don't make through the system as children I think they just take it as a status quo of their lives which is really terrible and it really is an indictment on all of us you know

35:13 as a society for for allowing that to go on and lying these children to feel that way fortunately for Angel she found a placement where she wasn't forced to be someone else and her constant acting out stopped when she came here she had nothing if she wants to be a boy nothing else they were bought they bought for her on a make her and look presentable everything she had was being in raggedy

35:36 and something that she had got from somebody else or whatever so the next day after she got here I took her shopping man I went shopping for everything boy boy underwear boy alone boy undershirts everything so she loved her that I think that's what made her really turn around and want to do good and stay here because I treated her like she should have been treated with

35:58 the proper respect and nurturing at the new foster parents home angel stop taking the drugs in the wait soon began to come on showing that she cared and it was one out of a million people that had in my life a simple fact that she showed me how to love and how to care and that's where I learned to be the happy person so you guys see today in the end Angels issues were not solved with shots

36:21 therapists restraints and reports but by a simple home where she was allowed to be herself unfortunately the abuse she endured for the system has stuck with her to this day I don't want to be nor inside I don't I just want to be outside and just enjoy the fresh air and look at the stars cuz I love looking at the Stars I just had to say but that's something that Fox care has done to me

36:56 when the Carlos came into our home he was about three years old he and his siblings two brothers and one sister they were originally taken from their biological parents due to neglect and abuse they were separated into foster homes in an effort to keep them together my wife and I decided to take them into our home and eventually adopt carlos came in with severe issues as far as

37:19 learning disabilities including hoarding food he would bus holes in the wall eventually it got to the point where he was a threat to himself and the family and so we felt that we would try to get him help we did not have the funds to do it ourselves so we called DCF and asked them for their assistance and they came into the house and interviewed and so forth and they deemed that he was indeed

37:45 a threat to himself in the family and they will remove him and get him to needed help he moved from place to place eventually they put him in what was referred to as a therapeutic foster home while Carlos was in the therapeutic foster home he was a sexually abused by the foster parent son I was in the room the foster parent son I was in the room and I was playing with my toys so then I

38:10 can't I came out of room didn't Vince and he came out I was like it was like like well like shut the door I want you to shut the door I was like why and and he was like shut the door into the room he told me he told me to take off my whole clothes and stuff I got mad I didn't want to do that so Dean so then he's a free force mean he pushed me on the floor on the bed and then started

38:40 doing it started raping me and stuff doing that other all different kinds of stuff and then I got I didn't like this we suspected the abuse was happening the police and DCF investigated but they said that he was a lying that it wasn't true that they didn't believe him that he make up stories and so he stayed in that environment because of that and the abuse continued to happen so you could

39:11 imagine a frustration when they allow it to continue to happen and put him back into the home one day his garden at litem I was visiting to home and and he explained to her the situation at the same time that the therapist was at the home who did not believe Carlos originally and because of the garden that lied him believed him followed up with it he was immediately taken from

39:38 the home after Carlos was removed from the home another child was placed there and was sexually assaulted that first weekend this complaint filed on behalf of that child said the DCF had failed to adequately investigate Carlos claim and had for one year known about the inappropriate behavior and continued to place children in the home yet no one was ever held accountable for what

40:03 happened not the case manager not the therapeutic foster home not the therapist no one the doctors mentioned because of the previous things that he was suffering with as he grow older it was going to get worse in which they did and they advised he needed to be in a long-term facility where he could get help and that's where he is at present I entered the foster care system when I

40:31 was about three years old and my brothers were aged two and one and that was due to neglect from our birth mother we were in a variety of group homes me and my brothers weren't always together in the case of the garcia being a channel boys they moved around it was like a carousel of foster homes and some of them were very abusive both emotionally physically there was one home where two of the boys

41:02 were disciplined by being put out in a chicken coop at night at the last home that the three boys were together in was home Hector Rosa who was a serial child molester one DCF caseworker testified that one day she took James the youngest boy ow cry scream when they came back and she was escorting him to the front door about half way he just fell on his knees grabbed her around her

41:35 legs and started screaming please don't take me back there she took him back and left him there and when she testified he was crying about it it was it was that bad by the time they got out of that house they didn't trust anybody the house they didn't trust anybody the Garcia being a che is who are a wonderful couple they came to the department said they were interested in

42:00 adopting one child possibly two and the department convinced them that these three boys they would love so the department concealed all of the important records regarding the natural history that the children had had with her mother as well as the revolving abusive foster care that they received in the other homes I would do this thing called shutting down I would just become

42:29 a wall and people could talk people could say stuff to me and people could do whatever and I wouldn't make any any facial expression you wouldn't be able to tell that I heard what you said you I would just sit there like a stone wall we were talking about five six-year-olds four-year-olds I mean this was just not expected behavior we would have nightmares we slept on bunk beds and it

42:54 was a metal bunk bed and the metal beds would creak the creaking of the beds triggered memory – mr. Hector coming in and having sexual stuff with us horrible stuff when the boys were removed from home even though there were signs of abuse obvious signs and we proved it in the civil litigation they put other children into that home there was a young girl who was placed into that home

43:22 after the boys left she was sexually abused horribly her abuse is what ultimately led to the arrest and subsequent investigation of Hector Rosa as a foster father the Garcia Begich a case was such a terrible case factually for the department you know involving the way the children were handled the fraud that was perpetrated on the adoptive parents that they did not want this case to see the

43:55 light of day when we finally got to the courthouse steps they wanted to mediate and they settled the case for ten million dollars most of which the money was going to go to the boys and special needs trust I've had five cases against the department that it either paid multi million dollars as a result of the injuries that it was directly responsible for or it's facing a million

44:27 dollar claim and in none of those cases it was anybody fired and to my knowledge none of those cases was anybody even disciplined but I know nobody was fired there seems to be a consensus among my sources that there is an overall lack of accountability and oversight within these state agencies that care for and are supposed to protect children when some of these agencies get caught doing

44:56 things they're not supposed to do they will retreat into greater lack of transparency what I'm looking at is supposed to be my dependency records while I was in care but when I opened the mail and started going through them it's not what I received my dependency records are life under 18 that's what I requested I was born insecure my mom is considered a crackhead my grandmother had custody of my sister

45:25 and I she started physically abusing us and when things got to where she was gonna be placed under investigation and we were gonna be taken from her and she was gonna face criminal charges she just decided that she would just put us on a greyhound with a relative and sent us to Florida there's nothing in here about Who I am who my sister is there's no Who I am who my sister is there's no

45:47 police record investigation record on when I was sexually abused my sister and I had the best relationship my sister was my best friend she was all I had when I came from New York we were placed into a home immediately together I noticed things wasn't right when my sister told me I don't want to go back to our house our foster father he to our house our foster father he

46:16 touched her in me and I wasn't I let him in touch her you could touch me but you're not going to touch her you told me if I told anybody was gonna kill me I'm telling you we need to get out of there this man raped me do you tell me stop imagining things that are not there for half the knee they send people in the home you know and after the the home you know and after the

46:48 investigation was done they removed me and kept myself for their they put me in a crisis nursery I feel like they're hiding something they're trying to cover up something so when we may confirm please excuse I havea from school due to her receiving her treatment thank you and the treatment that I was receiving was eight hours of cytoxan it's chemo HIV was withdrawn from school

47:20 on nine 16 2009 prior to that she had horrible attendance and used the drum in her life as excuses and play the victim role the day this was written I was in the hospital I just had open-heart surgery and then to be diagnosed with lupus SLE on top of it and all they can say that you're lying only thing that's in here that shame is a liar as cheap as a manipulator there's not even a birth certificate

47:48 everything I've ever gone through has never happened I'm a preschool teacher and the reason why I'm doing it is because like I remember when I was in school I just felt that nobody really connected with me so many kids that have spent a lot of time in care have a very common feeling that they want to help change the system just over ten years ago my organization started a youth

48:17 advocacy organization called Florida youth shine these kids are thirteen to twenty four they're in care or have aged out of care they live through the system they know it better than anyone else but yet they've not had a voice these kids already here getting rate they're getting beat up they're doing drugs you have these people who you placed in charge over these kids to protect them

48:40 and they're the ones who are violating them every single year for use trying to identify is the issues that they want to focus on this year it is eliminating the need for large group home because they don't feel safe nurtured or stable in those placements statistics are so high for kids in foster care being in jail because that's all that they're used to another issue is once they get on an

49:07 aged out of care they can end up homeless they can end up out Street the last day of my court day when I aged out I told them that I had no place to go I had no resources and their response to me was I should go to the homeless shelter I cry and I cry and I homeless shelter I cry and I cry and I really honestly I could never understand how could a person tell somebody that

49:30 how do you have the heart to even be in child welfare to be in social services to serve any oppressed population and make careless decisions on another person's behalf because they're they're person's behalf because they're they're living in an institution who was constantly controlling them constantly telling them okay it's lights out at 10:00 that sounds like prison to me oh

49:59 we're gonna go down to do random counts and random searches make sure you don't have any weapons or contraband on you that sounds like prison and that becomes life for them and once you try to put them in a normal environment it's like oh my god what is this this is not normal being told what to do all the time it's normal being locked in a room all the time it's normal being searched

50:24 is normal I have to go out and I have to find that and the only balance that they can find is imprisoning because that's all there you see Florida use shines outreach to Florida legislators is one way the former foster care children are trying to improve the system another is by volunteering at local community centers such as handy this place is kind of like a sanctuary for me this is where

50:48 Ison grew up this is the program that helped me so I want to help them help as many people as possible the reason I do it is because I grew up in the system and there wasn't that many people that did care and the few that did I chose to kind of follow in their footsteps and care about people that are also in the system which would be all the kids here I just don't want anyone to feel like

51:09 they don't have someone there like I did another bright spot in the system is the Community Partnership for children the lead agency in Daytona Beach we operate through a social worker lens here we don't operate through a business lens or an attorney one of the things that makes this lead agency effective is not falling into the shortcomings of other lead agencies like

51:28 avoiding out of county placements we at all costs keep the kids in county here so they're still in the same school they're still hopefully you're on their same friends avoiding multiple placements the right placement is important for us we have the highest rate in Florida of first placement last placement avoiding group homes 88 percent of the time when we place a child the first time you're not moving

51:50 that place until I go home or they're adopted avoiding large CEO salaries our corporate overhead is three point six percent which means urbanized syndrome our dollars go to direct services for children and we're proud of that limiting the contracting out of services when we contract with their providers they have to submit a budget through the hundreds of millions of dollars handed

52:10 to privatized companies for care across the state the few successes all have the same thing in common a safe stable environment for the child and the best way to achieve that is still the traditional foster family in my opinion what the system needs is tons and tons and tons of great foster families these kids they don't know what to do and they act out and trying to deliver their

52:34 emotions and so many of them when they're put in a good foster home it's like somebody turned one switch off and turned on another switch it's unbelievable when you have these foster parents that are advocating for the kids the system just shuts them down when you're working for them in you have to do what while are they rules so that's one of the reasons why I'm not a foster

52:54 parent anymore because they had too many rules and too many things that I didn't agree with you know I don't think my husband and I would ever foster again because it was a constant battle against the system foster parents feel threatened that they're gonna lose the children in their care if they can make too many waves and so either they acquiesce or they give up and when the

53:14 best foster parents give up the entire system is doomed to fail these kids weren't special cases they weren't the worst of the worst they were just kids in bad situations pulled into a broken system a system that abuses state funds crams children into group homes and when they act out drugs and restraints a system that needs change [Music] [Music] got to find out where to go I might end

54:15 got to find out where to go I might end up taking this long dark road through up taking this long dark road through the ditches and I think on me [Music] I got to find out who I am I got to know where I fit in so hard to beat that [Music] like in [Music] it's a story [Music] all these papers [Music] [Music] underneath me like in [Music]