Florida child welfare agency wages legal battle, seeks felony charge for ex-watchdog

As the state’s long-time child welfare ombudsman, it was Heather Cox Rosenberg’s job to fight for Florida’s foster children and their parents – an assignment her former employer accused her of sometimes doing too well.

Leaders from the Department of Children and Families said she “disparaged the department” on social media, encouraged foster parents to seek costly care for children from a cash-strapped bureaucracy – and to go to court when they’re denied. She gave advice to families on “how to challenge and undermine department rules, policy and legal counsel,” a lawyer said. She even sued her bosses in an effort to get help for her own adoptive children.

A DCF attorney once referred to Rosenberg as “a tenacious advocate” – and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. “He understood that Ms. Rosenberg has the right to free speech,” the Inspector General wrote of the lawyer, “however, he believed that in many of her posts she ‘crossed the line’.”

On Friday, the agency where Rosenberg used to work went to court to strip her of custody of one of her three children, telling a Tallahassee judge she had effectively abandoned him by refusing to take the boy home following a protracted psychiatric hospitalization.

A judge heard testimony from Heather Rosenberg briefly Monday morning before continuing the hearing until May 24.

DCF also referred its former ombudsman to the Leon County Sheriff’s Office to face possible felony child abandonment charges – a rare occurrence. On Wednesday night, Rosenberg was greeted at her Tallahassee home by a Sheriff’s deputy who, she said, told her he didn’t have an arrest warrant – but didn’t need one to charge her with a felony.

Jeri B. Cohen, who presided over child welfare and foster care cases for 20 of her 27 years as a Miami-Dade Circuit judge, said she did not once see DCF pursue criminal charges against a parent who would not reclaim custody of a child following a stay in juvenile detention or psychiatric treatment. “Never,” she said.

Such decisions are so common among parents in child welfare court that judges and administrators have a word for them: “lockouts.”

“I haven’t committed a felony,” said Rosenberg, who has not been charged. “I have begged everyone. I need help.”

The 12-year-old at the center of the dispute has been living for about 18 months at a psychiatric treatment center for emotionally troubled children in Brevard County. The center says he is ready to be released, but Rosenberg and her husband say their other two children are unsafe around the boy, who is, at times, aggressive, without services the state can’t provide.

“He needs some place to go,” Nick Dolce, an attorney for DCF, said, “and his parents are refusing to take him home.”

Said Alan Mishael, the family’s attorney: “My clients love this child. They want to keep him safe.” But, Mishael added, the Rosenbergs do not feel the boy, or his two siblings, can be protected without in-home supports the state cannot provide.

Heather – who had been abused and neglected herself as a child – and Evan Rosenberg were licensed foster parents for about 10 years. They helped raise 17 children in the state’s care, and eventually adopted three of them. The 12-year-old boy who was the subject of Friday’s hearing is the middle child, and the birth sibling of the Rosenbergs’ 11-year-old adoptive daughter.

In August of 2016, DCF administrators named Heather Rosenberg the state’s first Children’s Ombudsman. The job had been created by Florida lawmakers in the wake of a 2014 series in the Miami Herald, called Innocents Lost, which documented the deaths of about 500 children whose parents had previously been reported to the state as potentially dangerous.

Rosenberg had been president of the Tallahassee Area Foster and Adoptive Parent Association and a long-time volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America.

Her job at DCF was to advocate for children and parents who were embroiled in the state’s child protection system. But, sometimes, her efforts chafed against the wishes of her bosses, whom, she said, appeared at times to be more concerned with protecting the state’s image than caring for abused and neglected kids.

She resigned as ombudsman in March of last year.

Heather Rosenberg’s conflicts with the state didn’t end at the office door, however.

The child at the center of Friday’s dispute – he is not being named by the Herald to protect his privacy – was placed in the Rosenbergs’ home as a foster child when he was four days old, and adopted by them in November of 2013, before he was age two.

He has been diagnosed with a handful of neurological, developmental and psychiatric disorders, mostly as the result of his birth mother’s alcoholism during pregnancy. They include: fetal alcohol syndrome, ADHD, autism, disruptive mood disorder and other intellectual disabilities.

DCF’s petition seeking to take the boy into custody said the 12-year-old functioned more like a small child. He cannot be left alone for more than 15 minutes without oversight, and “needs supervision in the same way a toddler might.”

“He can care for his basic needs and can read and write at a minimal level but is emotionally and developmentally similar to a toddler,” the petition said.

While the Rosenbergs were battling with DCF over services for their children, the state’s Medicaid program was revamped from a fee-for-service model to managed care where they were forced to seek providers inside the plan’s limited network, making it even more difficult for the family to access services, they said.

“They could not obtain speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral therapy, or any of the other specialties like nephrology, gastroenterology [or] cardiology,” the Rosenbergs’ lawyer at the time, Dwight Slater, wrote in a court pleading, “because there were not enough providers in the new managed care system.”

The three children, Slater wrote,“did not sleep well at all, and they were generally ‘explosive’ all the time. [The couple] could not afford a babysitter because their children required someone with special skills to be able to handle their children’s extra needs. Their home was ‘on fire’ with no help or respite in sight.”

The Rosenbergs found themselves in need of immense specialized care for all three of their adoptive children, but three separate state agencies that could help each sent the couple elsewhere, the family wrote in court pleadings.

On May 21, 2014, Heather Rosenberg sent an email to several DCF administrators: “Can someone help? Please? I need a life raft!”

It never came.

Within five years, Heather Rosenberg had become desperate. In a July 26, 2019 Facebook post, while she was DCF’s ombudsman, she wrote: “I’m ANGRY that the system actively intimidated us into not seeking help when we asked for it the first time, and then blew us off the second time we asked for it, and is now making us jump through hoops of fire to be considered for help when I’m asking for it again.”

A DCF attorney told the Inspector General that post was “disparaging to the department.”

In August of 2019, the Rosenbergs filed an administrative complaint against DCF, arguing that they had been promised subsidies from the state when they agreed to adopt three high-risk children with significant special needs from foster care. Over time, the couple alleged, they spent “hundreds of thousands” of their own dollars paying for services the state had pledged to provide. An administrative judge ruled against the couple; an appeal is pending.

“If we were to actually sit down and map out exactly how many times this poor child has languished on wait lists for various services … he has lost YEARS to waiting,” Heather Rosenberg wrote in a June 2022 email to an administrator at Sunshine Health, which oversees the Medicaid plan in which the boy was enrolled.

“The fact that I’ve had to, at times, become a pushy pain in the fanny towards the [healthcare] plan, [the Agency for Health Care Administration] and DCF means that something isn’t working efficiently or effectively.”

Two months later, the state agreed to place the middle child in a psychiatric treatment facility run by Devereux Behavioral Health. He has remained there since. Over the summer, DCF wrote in its petition Friday, Devereux told DCF and the Rosenbergs that the boy was ready to be discharged, and the Rosenbergs would need to pick him up in Brevard County.

“However,” DCF wrote in its petition, “the child still remains at Devereux [and] his parents have refused to exercise their parental rights and responsibilities by failing to retrieve the child.”

DCF’s attorney, Nick Dolce, told Leon Circuit Judge Anthony Miller on Friday that the agency had offered 16 hours-per day of in-home care, respite care and applied behavioral analysis, or ABA, a kind of hands-on intervention for children whose disabilities result in sometimes extreme behavioral challenges.

Mishael said the proposed in-home caregiver was a “homemaker,” who “has no authority or ability to break up fights or restrain the child.”

The behavioral therapy became the barrier the family couldn’t overcome: the Rosenbergs say that, even with a prescription, they can’t get it.

“Tallahassee is a provider desert,” Heather Rosenberg said. “We languished on the waitlist for applied behavior analyst services for just over three years” before the boy was sent to Devereux.

DCF offered, instead, to provide the behavioral therapy via telehealth. The Rosenbergs said an iPad tablet can’t physically restrain their son if he attacks a sibling.

On Thursday, the child was taken into custody. The next day, DCF filed what’s called a “shelter” petition, asking a judge to place the child in the legal care of the state.

“I want my son to come home. I want all my kids under my roof,” Rosenberg told the Herald. “I have that dream where I come home and have that chaotic evening juggling three kids who may, or may not, like what I made for dinner. I want to give them baths and put them to bed smelling their clean hair.”

In remarks before the judge Friday, Dolce, DCF’s lawyer, said neither the agency nor Devereux believe the 12-year-old is as aggressive as the parents suggest. To support their claim, they offered the opinions of the Rosenbergs’ other two children: The boy, his brother said, “was not a problem to anyone in the house, and… he did not know why [he] was even taken to a facility.”

“By all accounts,” Dolce said, “this child is safe – and that includes [accounts] from the child’s siblings themselves.”

The judge expressed skepticism that young children with disabilities themselves were credible witnesses in a dispute over whether they’re safe in a home with their brother. “You talked to two special needs kids in the home, and they said ‘thumbs up’. How much weight should we give this coming from children with special needs themselves saying ‘hey, we are safe’,” Miller said.

Ultimately, three separate state agencies have the authority to help the Rosenbergs. The child was adopted from foster care, relieving DCF of the responsibility of his care during childhood. The Agency for Health Care Administration oversees Children’s Medical Services, the state-funded insurance plan for children with complex medical needs which pays for the boy’s healthcare. And the Agency for Persons with Disabilities manages care for children with autism, cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities.

“Nothing would make my clients happier than to get back the child they adopted from the system and raised for years,” Mishael said. “He needs services from one of three agencies, and three are missing in action. They are all pointing fingers and saying the family abandoned [him].”

“This is DCF’s proposed solution,” Mishael said, referring to DCF’s petition seeking custody of the boy.

Rosenberg fears the state is trying to make an example of her, or punish her for years of advocacy on behalf of abused and neglected children. “They’re frustrated with me for holding them accountable to the promises that they’ve made to the children of this state,” she said.