DCF: The Nero That Fiddles While Rome Burns

Allow me to share with you an e-mail Communications Director Joe Follick fired out to Department of Children and Families' employees Thursday:

DCF Colleagues,

Starting tomorrow, video news clips featuring Department activity will be
available on DCFs main Intranet site. These clips will be located under
the Department News and Events.

The clips will be updated regularly by the Office of Communications and
will include news stories featuring our employees and our public service.
We hope you will join us in sharing information with your colleagues
statewide.

Uhhh, I beg your pardon ...

Now, I'm not out to fault Follick the messenger here.

But, what sort of "clips" are we talking about? PR for employees in the provinces? PR maybe even for the media to YouTube on their websites?

To what conceivable end in DCF's overall mission of keeping the young and vulnerable safe are these videos?

Please take a minute to remember the story that dominated newspapers a month ago -- the story of 10-year-old Nubia Barahona, who was beaten to death as her twin brother Victor listened to her tortured cries. DCF, the agency charged with keeping children safe, refused to remove these children from their home, even when begged to do so by an informant who knew what danger they were in. Two days later the Barahona youngsters were found doused with toxic chemicals in their adoptive father's truck on I-95, Nubia's body decomposing in the back as Victor convulsed in the driver's seat.

Money for videos?

Instead of paying for "clips" of each other frollicking through some fantasyland of peer support and department pride, would it be asking too much if DCF addressed its priorities first, spent money on more staff training, took some of the boots out of the offices in Tallahassee and put them on the ground in the field?

I would consider it a major triumph if the money for videos and the money to employ the flacks who produce them could be spent on this: plugging the gap that left the Barahona children -- and countless others we don't even know about yet in Florida -- alone and abused and waiting to die.

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