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Foster Care
Fixing Families
Former Gov. Buddy MacKay finds success with a foster care pilot project he started that relies on mediation.
Achieving results
When MacKay first launched his effort five years ago, he was one of two certified mediators in Florida’s 5th Judicial Circuit, which encompasses Citrus, Hernando, Lake, Marion and Sumter counties. Today, there are 50 trained mediators working there, and families are getting reunited sooner.
A study by DCF showed that children who received mediation stayed in state care, on average, nearly 200 fewer days than children who did not receive mediation. Children in mediation achieved permanency — meaning they found a safe, stable custodial environment in which to grow up and receive lifelong support — an average of 182.4 days sooner than children who did not receive mediation.
The program also has saved the state a lot of money — upward of $3 million in foster care costs alone, DCF estimates. And those figures don’t include the additional savings achieved by reducing the workload on the court system. “Every hour of court time we’re eliminating, we’re saving a couple of thousand bucks,” says MacKay.
To build on their success, MacKay, Sokol, Robbins and others who worked on the 5th Circuit pilot project have been promoting dependency mediation programs throughout the state. Today, 19 of the 20 circuits in Florida use dependency mediation.
MacKay says he is confident that the mediation program can have far-reaching consequences. “Every time something goes wrong in the foster care system it’s headlines. People get fired. People get prosecuted. A child dies. A child disappears. What I’m beginning to see is if we could deal with this unduly adversarial, dysfunctional court system on one end and could do that in a way that’s saving money and saving time, it could have this almost unintended consequence of straightening out the foster care system, which has been a nightmare ever since I’ve been in government.”
