Hillsborough County once had more children in foster care than anywhere else in the state.
In the last five years, the number of kids in foster care has dropped. But an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times has found some families ending up in what they’re calling a "side door" in the foster care system — a patchwork of family arrangements that can leave parents struggling to reunite with their children.
Reporters Lauren Peace and Teghan Simonton have been digging into the numbers and talking to families in the foster care system about how Hillsborough’s foster agency celebrates keeping families intact, but has separated hundreds off the books.
They recently joined "Florida Matters Live & Local" host Matthew Peddie to discuss the findings of "Lost in Limbo."
The interview below was lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Lauren, you start this report with recounting the story of somebody called Leslie Flora and her kind of family. So, what has actually happened to her family? What happens to the family in the way in the story that you recount?
Lauren Peace: Leslie Flora is a Tampa mother who has been in the area for the past two decades, most of her life, and she, in 2023, started having brushes with the child welfare system here.
There was an initial report from somebody at the school saying that perhaps the parents were drunk when they were dropping the children off or under the influence of some sort. But where her family's story really intersects with the system is in November, or it may have been October of 2023.
Her husband is driving with their daughter in the front seat on a dinner run for the family, going to Burger King. And during this time, he's pulled over for having a suspended license, driving on a suspended license. And during that check, police find drugs in the front seat of his car.
What happens next is he goes to jail. But then a child protective investigator knocks on the Days Inn motel door where the family had been living and comes into contact with Leslie Flora, who hadn't been there at the time. She has her kids in the room. They're asleep at the time.
The investigator knocks, and they basically tell her, "Listen, we can either send your children to live with your mother-in-law, Joe's mother, effective immediately. You can sign this paperwork, and this'll be better, or we'll take them into foster care."
It's kind of a tricky choice to be making in the early hours of the morning. Teghan, how are these temporary custody transfers, or temporary custody orders, how are they supposed to work? What is the point of them?
Teghan Simonton: The agency presents temporary custody transfers as a voluntary option, as an alternative for foster care. It's widely thought that foster care comes with its own harms, and so if you're able to avoid it, that would be better for the kids. And that's the messaging that the agency and its partners have put out about the use of these transfers, and they're used in other parts of the state and the country.
And the challenge is, of course, as you said, it kind of puts parents, when they're presented with this option, as what they told us felt like an ultimatum. And so the way that it's being used is where it starts to get a little challenging for parents and a little dicey.
I guess the key word here is temporary, right, Lauren? But in the case of the folks that you talk to, temporary is a very flexible term, and it can turn into years for these families.
Peace: Right. So temporary custody orders are... they have their use totally outside and separate from the foster care system. And so typically they would be used if, say, a mother is sick and seeking treatment of some sort. It could be for cancer, or for substance-use disorder. And grandma needs to have the ability to enroll the kids in school or get them medical care, but the key is that they're typically family-made arrangements, meaning the family, on its own, is saying, "I want this to be put in place."
What's happening in this "side-door system," as we've called it, is at the point that a child protective investigator is interacting with a family, they are presenting temporary custody as the alternative to foster care. And they aren't really explaining to families — this is what families have told us — that there are ramifications to signing these forms.
It's not something you can just instantly undo. And so families will sign a temporary custody order transferring custody of their children to a loved one at the suggestion of the agency, but then they'll kind of disappear into this murky "no man's land" where they don't have legal representation, which they would be entitled to had their children been taken through the formal foster care system.
They're really on their own in trying to figure out how to get their kids back. And the one other thing I would add there is I think people get confused when we say temporary custody versus foster care.
When we think of foster care, those of us who aren't super familiar with the system, I think we're imagining group homes, right? Like kids in group homes without family members. In Florida, the directive is actually to place children in foster care first with relatives. So, even though we're saying foster care, what would happen in the traditional system is a judge would say, "Well, our first level of instruction is to try and place the child with a relative or a loved one." So, it's not temporary custody or group home. In both cases, kids would end up more than likely with relatives. It's just the protections that are in place or not in place.
The Children's Network is the agency in charge of the foster care system. Have you been able to talk to them, and if so, what have you learned, or what have they told you about these transfers?
Simonton: Lauren and I have been attending Hillsborough County Community Alliance meetings every month, and we've reached out to the agency several times. The agency has declined so far to meet with us for an interview, but what they have done is they've answered questions via email and sent us a statement to our very detailed findings that we sent to them before the story published. And that's basically been our communication with them. We are still hoping to continue the conversation and continue our reporting.
It seems from reading through your reporting that it wasn't always easy to get answers or even the numbers that you were looking for. So, how did you get the data you needed to join the dots together for this?
Simonton: I'm glad you asked, and part of that is for good reason, right? These are foster kids and kids involved with the child welfare system, for good reason, are protected by confidentiality. What we found in our asking of the agency to try to understand how often this process is used is that they told us that they were not tracking that specific avenue for families.
So Lauren and I sought out to try to figure this out on our own, and what we did was we created our own database using court records. We reached out to the clerk of court and asked for temporary custody transfers filed in the last several years. And then through interviews and later through a records request, we learned the names of the attorneys that were frequently filing these temporary custody transfers on behalf of the agency and its partners.
And so we looked through those — the data provided by the clerk and the attorney name listed with the case number. And right away, we knew something interesting was happening because these three attorneys were making up a very large proportion of the total custody transfers being filed in the county.
Like Lauren mentioned, they're filed by families all the time for other reasons: military service or long-term medical treatment. So we knew that these three attorneys and the cases they were filing, we wanted to take a closer look at. And so from there, we had over 300 of these cases that were filed, and we went through each and every one of them. And we read all the documents for each case. We created a database of our own that we used to track certain trends we thought would be important. And we added to it as we continued reporting and talking to families.
We tracked things like mention of a child protective investigation, case plan tasks, which are these lists of responsibilities that a parent must do before they're able to reopen their case or get visitation with their child. They're things like completing substance abuse treatment, parenting classes, sometimes domestic violence intervention classes. So we were tracking those types of trends as we went, and this is also how we found a lot of the families that we ended up talking to because their names are right there in the court documents.
Lauren, how is Leslie Flora's family doing? How are her kids doing?
Leslie Flora is in an interesting situation in that it's been three years since the case was initially opened, and she's still not gone before a judge. She hasn't appeared in court. And so that's what's unique about this process, right? If the state is going to intervene in a family's life, if they're going to take away your children or separate you from your children, there are really strict protocols that have to be followed, and as such, there's a judge appointed to oversee what is happening throughout the case.
In these cases, that doesn't happen. Parents can be separated from their children without ever going to court, and that's the case with Leslie Flora. Her son recently turned 18 and he returned to his parents. He said the state no longer had a say, but she's still separated from her daughter.
This story was compiled from interviews conducted by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live & Local." You can listen to the full episode here.
