Advocates: Florida fails at protecting children

A new study gives Florida an "F" for failing to adequately protect the legal rights of abused and neglected children.

Florida is one of only seven states that received failing marks in the national report from First Star, a nonprofit group that litigates and advocates on behalf of children, and the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law. The two groups are releasing the state-by-state portion of their report today.

The authors based their findings on the laws that govern legal representation in each state for juveniles who wind up in the child welfare system. Among the criteria: whether a state requires that attorneys represent abused and neglected children in court; whether those attorneys continue representing those children until their case is over, and whether those advocates receive specialized training.

The report does not comment on the performance of programs such as Guardian ad Litem, which are charged with carrying out those state policies, said Christina Riehl, an attorney at the Children's Advocacy Institute and one of the report's co-authors.

Florida's marks were particularly low, because while the state requires that a guardian ad litem be assigned to all child dependency cases, that person need not necessarily be an attorney, she said. "It's our position that an attorney is best suited to be an advocate in a court of law."

Florida law does not mandate case loads for advocates either, and does not expressly require specialized training for advocates in all cases, the report found.

Other states that received F's in the report were Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Maine and North Dakota. On the opposite end, Connecticut and Massachusetts received A-pluses.

A spokeswoman for Florida's Guardian ad Litem office said she could not comment prior to the report's full release.