Politics
Megan Rose: The grand jury sounded the alarm. Now Florida must answer it.
A Marion County grand jury spent seven months investigating Florida’s child welfare system and came back with a warning impossible to ignore: the Department of Children and Families (DCF) in Circuit 5 is “failing catastrophically” in its duty to protect children and vulnerable adults.
I know how difficult this work is. I began my career as a frontline child welfare case manager, and I know many of the dedicated people doing it today.
At the DCF summit this month, I also heard familiar explanations for the challenges facing child welfare: high caseloads, staffing shortages, insufficient funding, complicated policies, and legislative constraints.
Those challenges are real. But they cannot keep us from asking hard questions about accountability, outcomes, and what needs to change.
After a report like this, the response should be straightforward: We hear these concerns. We accept responsibility for addressing them. Here is what will change, who will be responsible, and when Floridians should expect results.
We are already hearing calls for more funding. However, before taxpayers are asked for more, they deserve a clear picture of how nearly $1.4 billion in annual funding for community-based care agencies, which contract with DCF to manage services across Florida, is being used and what outcomes it is producing.
After all, this is not Florida’s first warning. Previous grand jury reports in 2002, 2011, and 2014 also identified serious concerns, while a 2020 investigation documented children who suffered abuse after being removed from their families. Different decades. Different regions. Yet some troubling patterns have persisted.
And if these reports were not concerning enough, a recent Tampa Bay Times investigation found Hillsborough County’s lead child welfare agency used temporary custody transfers to separate more than 370 children from their parents outside the traditional foster care system between 2022 and 2026, raising serious questions about due process for parents, support for relatives, and meaningful oversight for children.
These concerns deserve careful examination and a meaningful response.
Florida law already makes clear that DCF remains responsible for the quality of contracted services. The department has authority to increase monitoring, require corrective action, impose financial penalties, and terminate contracts when lead agencies fail to perform. Where performance falls short, it should use that authority appropriately and consistently.
To assess the full extent of the challenges facing Florida’s child welfare system, the Legislature should commission independent reviews of all 20 judicial circuits, examining both DCF operations and the community-based care lead agency responsible for each region. Those reviews should evaluate child safety outcomes, missed investigations, informal custody transfers, financial management, contract compliance, and the status of previous corrective actions. The findings should be public, comparable across circuits, and accompanied by clear corrective actions when problems are identified.
But accountability inside the system is only part of the solution. Preventing children from ever needing to enter that system is just as important.
DCF and its contracted community-based care agencies play a critical role in protecting children and helping families already in crisis. Prevention organizations can complement that work by helping parents access support before they reach a crisis point.
While large systems necessarily rely on standardized approaches, prevention often works differently. It is personal, local, relational, and grounded in community. It depends on people closest to a family recognizing a problem early and helping address it before it becomes a crisis requiring government intervention.
A struggling parent may need child care, transportation, employment, housing support, or simply someone willing to walk alongside them. Churches, nonprofits, neighbors, and community organizations often identify and meet those needs long before a hotline call is made or a case is opened.
That is the opportunity before Florida: strengthen accountability and outcomes within the child welfare system while building prevention from the bottom up through local community organizations. The fewer families who reach the point of needing formal intervention, the more capacity the state has to serve the children who truly need its protection.
Florida’s next Governor will have an opportunity to build on the work underway at DCF and help shape the next chapter of Florida’s child welfare system. In the meantime, policymakers can continue strengthening the system through independent reviews, greater transparency around temporary custody transfers, and investment in community-based efforts that help families before they reach a crisis point.
Florida has many good people doing extraordinarily difficult work on behalf of children. They deserve our support, strong community partners who can help families before crisis occurs, and a system committed to accountability and continuous improvement. Most importantly, Florida’s children deserve to see meaningful action follow these reports.
The grand jury sounded the alarm. Now Florida must answer it.
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Megan Rose is the CEO of Better Together, a Florida-based nonprofit dedicated to helping families and children.
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