MacKay says mediation moves foster care cases along faster, with less acrimony and saves millions of dollars in the process. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp]

Buddy MacKay retired from politics in 1999 after serving as lieutenant governor under Gov. Lawton Chiles and then governor for 23 days after Chiles died in office. Since then, the former congressman and state senator has lived in a home that his grandfather built on Lake Weir in his native Marion County.

About five years ago, MacKay’s pastor, a longtime foster and adoptive parent, began telling him horror stories about the system meant to protect children in dysfunctional families. MacKay, who’s now 75, decided that he should get involved and try to make a difference.

Children are usually removed from their homes and placed in state custody because they have been abused, neglected or abandoned. Often, a parent has been arrested. Cases frequently involve domestic violence or allegations of drug use by the parents.

From his pastor, MacKay learned how the state’s child-protection process often shifts the children from one bad situation to another. Handled in the traditional manner, judicial dependency cases, as they’re called, require numerous hearings, which can take considerable time because court dockets are full.

Patricia Sokol, executive director of a children’s advocacy center in Marion County called Kimberly’s Cottage, says its not uncommon for children to be removed from their homes for four to six months while court proceedings play out. Some cases take up to a year to resolve. “It’s a long time for a child to be away from their home. If you think from a child’s perspective, one day is a long time,” says Sokol.

Meanwhile, risks await the children in foster care — sometimes from another foster child or an inattentive foster parent. The emotional toll on children grows the more they’re shifted around and the longer they have to live away from their homes, families, friends and schools. “We often do more damage leaving a child in foster care than by leaving them in the home,” MacKay says.

Ultimately, MacKay saw, the state’s system was defeating its own goal of enabling the parents to regain control of their lives and their children.

Looking for a better way, MacKay contacted a local judge who encouraged him to become a certified mediator. MacKay took that step, and with some assistance from Judge Sue Robbins, an administrative family law judge in Marion County, launched a pilot project in Florida’s 5th Judicial Circuit that uses mediation to resolve child-protection cases.

MacKay says mediation moves the process along much faster. Mediators like MacKay begin working with the parents almost immediately to come up with a plan to address their problems. Under the old system, MacKay says, several months might pass before a parent might start attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or begin working on anger-management issues. In dependency mediation, parents are encouraged to develop a case plan and begin working to resolve their personal issues almost immediately.

The mediation process also works better, MacKay says, because it is less adversarial. Attorneys are banned from the “shelter mediation,” the first meeting that occurs within 24 hours of the child’s removal. Because the focus is on cooperation and reuniting the family, family visitation is encouraged from the beginning. Throughout the process, parents are treated with respect, not like criminals.

MacKay says when he first became active, protective investigators tended to use details from police reports to make the case for removing a child from a home. “You end up making the parent look like trash. They’d get a lawyer and they’d fight like hell,” MacKay says.

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.”