by Bailey White
Staff Writer
For 18 years I lived in the same house on Morvenwood Road, in the same bedroom with the periwinkle blue walls, with the same mother, father and sister.
My life has been flavored by that consistency. I’ve always known what to expect at home; what I would find behind the front door.
That’s not true for many children.
In the 4th Judicial Circuit, which includes Duval, Nassau and Clay counties, there were 4,200 children in dependent care last year; a complicated system of the Department of Children and Families, community agencies, foster care and adoption units.
Many of these children are taken from their families in the middle of the night, separated from their parents and siblings, unsure of when they will be reunited. They’ve come from abusive or neglectful homes and are placed in homes that may not be any better.
It is not atypical for children in the dependent care system to move several times in a year. That means packing and unpacking a suitcase, brown paper sack or garbage bag, often without warning or in the dead of night. That means losing favorite teddy bears or blankets. It means a new bed, new sheets, new smells, maybe not even one’s own room in a house full of strangers. It means going to a new school.
Overloaded case workers are assigned 60 to 70 cases, when the projected goal is only 35. In the constant shuffle of file folders, some children, such as Rilya Wilson, the missing five-year-old in Miami, slip through the system. There are reports that about 50 children are missing from dependent care in Florida.
The Guardian ad Litem program was created in Seattle in 1979 with a mission to speak for the best interests of abused and neglected children who are involved in juvenile court. The first program in Florida began here in 1981 and the 4th Judicial Circuit now employs 29 people, including director Jeanne Pittman and assistant director Lisa Moore. There are also case coordinators, a volunteer coordinator and program attorneys.
The average stay in foster care for a child in Florida was 33 months last year. During that time, the child endures many changes, including case workers and foster parents. One person who is most often consistent for a child in dependent care is the guardian, who remains a constant through the duration of a case and monitors the case even after it’s complete.
I applied to become a volunteer guardian because I realize how blessed I am to have grown up in the home I did and I want to do what I can to make a child’s life in the dependent care system easier, even if it is only by being a familiar face.
My training classes began in January and for seven nights I met at the GAL office at the City Hall Annex for four hours at a time with a group that included students, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, a retiree and a group of new GAL staff members.
On the first night, we were asked to express our major concerns about being guardians. Having enough time to fulfill our necessary duties was the major concern. Most of the volunteers had full- time jobs and families and children of their own, but were compelled to participate in the program. Guardians are required to see their assigned children at least once a month and more than that during their initial visits. And guardians stay with a case until completion.
A guardian has many roles, as we learned during training: working as an investigator, meeting with the child, the biological parents, the foster parents, the child’s doctor and teacher and grandparents — anyone who might contribute to the report that the guardian will write and present to the court. The report details the child’s wishes, even if those wishes include eating ice cream for dinner every night. The report also contains what the guardian believes is in the child’s best interest.
Guardians monitor agencies, people who provide service to the children, make sure the court’s orders are fulfilled and that the child gets any help they need.
We learned about identifying signs of child abuse and the best ways to question children who have the signs. We were warned not to be overly sensitive to the fact that many of these children would not be very open to us as a result of the myriad of people who had streamed in and out of their lives, demanding the same information repeatedly.
Some of the most compelling stories came from staff members, most of whom have been with the program for at least five years. There was the case of two children, aged three-and-a-half and five, who were found in soiled clothes wandering at night alone to a Burger King restaurant to suck packets of ketchup for their dinner. Five years later, the children are still in dependent care.
And we also learned about having an open mind in regard to the families we’d be visiting. Over and over we were told to remember that being poor was not a crime, that different families have different ways of living and that it was important that we didn’t apply our own values to another family.
Another two hours are spent in courtroom observation. Because a shelter hearing must be held within 24 hours of a child’s removal from their home, each morning begins with a series of these hearings. The night before I went to court, people throughout the city were scrambling to cover plants and bring their animals inside because temperatures would reach record breaking lows. That morning a half dozen of these shelter hearings took place, meaning that at least that many children had been bundled up and removed from their homes on a night so cold most people left their faucets dripping.
The morning was chaotic. Many hearings took place without the presence of the parents or a case worker. I later learned that case workers are awake until 4 or 5 a.m., finding an emergency placement for a child and then completing the necessary paper work.
Guardians may be appointed at shelter hearings by the judge, but often they are appointed at a later hearing. The GAL office sends one staff member to court each day to get a head’s up on these cases and to field the cases in which a guardian is most needed. By law, guardians must be appointed to any case involving the termination of parental rights.
Gov. Jeb Bush has mandated that each child be represented by a guardian, but there are only 261 guardians in the 4th Judicial Circuit and 16 times as many children in the system.
On the night of our last class the group walked to the Duval County Courthouse, where we were sworn in by Circuit Court Judge Linda McCallum.
“I, Bailey White, do solemnly swear. . .”
Now, I’m anxiously awaiting an assignment. I know it will be a challenge, but I look forward to taking on a case, to serving the GAL program and to serving the court, but mostly to serving a child.