DCF Secretary David Wilkins resigned this week as the department reels from multiple children’s deaths on its watch. (Photo by the Second Judicial Circuit Guardian ad Litem Program.)

By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

David Wilkins, the secretary of Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF), resigned this week.

Wilkin’s resignation comes as the agency has been under fire for the deaths of several children under DCF’s watch.

Just a few weeks ago, a child died in North Miami. Only weeks or months earlier had gotten the attention of the state.

The child, 2-year-old Ezra Raphael, died after he was found unconscious by paramedics on his mother’s dining room floor. Ezra was the fourth child on DCF’s watch who died within six weeks.

According to a June article in The Miami Herald:

An autopsy showed that Ezra had sustained trauma to his back and body, and the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the boy’s death was a homicide, police said. At the time when Ezra was mortally injured, North Miami Beach police said, the boy had been left alone with 32-year-old Claude Alexis, his mother’s boyfriend. He has a lengthy arrest record. Alexis remains without bond at the Miami-Dade County Jail on first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse charges.

Ezra’s mother, 22-year-old Cierrah Raphael, was charged with neglect because “over a course of time, evidence showed that Cierrah repeatedly left [the boy] home completely uncared for and unattended,” a press release said.

The last time Florida child welfare investigators were aware of Ezra Raphael, the infant had been abandoned by his mother with a virtual stranger in Gainesville. A DCF investigator was told last February that then-1-year-old Ezra had been left with a woman his mother “does not know” because his mom was working as a prostitute and could not raise him.

Since then, DCF has changed many of their child prevention policies and is retraining staff to prevent child abuse and neglect.

According to the Tampa Bay Times/ Miami Herald:

Wilkins’ resignation comes at a sensitive time for the long-embattled agency: DCF is midway in a disputed effort to overhaul the state’s system for investigating child abuse, assessing the risk to troubled families and providing services to mitigate such risks. Wilkins called the project a child welfare “transformation,” but some of his policies drew harsh criticism from experts and advocates.

Wilkins was appointed to DCF, a mammoth agency with a close to $3 billion budget, in January 2011. He had been a consulting executive with the technology vendor Accenture, which has a large footprint in Florida government contracting, and also had served as the finance chief of the Florida Baptist Children’s home, a social service group with strong Christian fundamentalist roots.

Wilkins also had some problems with the groups he worked with, including the contracted operators of 19 private agencies in the state that have been providing foster care and adoption services. Until recently, Wilkins demanded that these private agencies get his approval for all high-level hires within their agencies.

And it wasn’t just contractors. The Times/Herald also reports that the change in command is welcome among advocates, many of whom have had problems with some of Wilkins’ policies:

In recent weeks, one of the state’s established advocacy groups, Florida’s Children First, called on Scott to make changes at the top of DCF. On Thursday, the group’s director, Christina Spudeas, said she was “looking forward to the new administration.”

“We were very concerned with the direction that DCF was taking on what we thought were some extremely important issues,” Spudeas said. “We were alarmed at the response not just by the secretary but by others in the department. It didn’t seem as if DCF was taking the type of responsibility it should have been.”

Spudeas said she hopes that DCF will reconsider some of its controversial policies and become more responsive again so that “when there’s a horrific incident we carefully scrutinize what everyone has done to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Wilkins’ position is being filled by Esther Jacobo on an interim basis. Jacobo was the statewide deputy director of DCF’s Children’s Legal Services.