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Message to Florida Legislators: Protect the Children

January 5th, 2009   No Comments   Funding

This is an editorial from today’s Ft. Myers News Press. As the Florida Legislature begins a special session, the needs of certain residents should be kept far from the chopping block…

Legislators seeking ways to save money should save the children and spare  the most vulnerable residents from cuts.

That’s our mantra as the Florida Legislature begins a challenging two-week special session today to plug a gaping $2.3 billion shortfall in the current  budget.

With the economy blowing holes in the spending plans of every government, business, family and organization in the country, it’s with great reluctance  that we urge any spending program be kept off the cutting table.

But we do so for child protective services, mostly under the Department of Children and Families-and we urge you to contact our leaders in Tallahassee and do the same.

It’s not that education, health, law enforcement, roads, seniors and the environment aren’t essential service areas. They are, but the protection of vulnerable children cannot be diminished or postponed until the economy recovers. It’s a society’s most basic moral responsibility, as we see it.

PAINFUL PROGRESS

We have made such painful progress recently in Florida in what had been one of the state’s most shameful failures. Lawmakers should not retreat in spending to save at-risk children from abusive families, in reinforcing troubled families so they can perform their function as the best institution for nurturing children.

Those children and that progress are close to the hearts of Southwest Florida and The News-Press.

More than 40 children who had some contact with DCF have died in our region in the past decade at the hands of care-givers.

Tragic victims such as Joshua Jenkins (2008), Zahid Jones Jr. (2007) and Michelle Fontanez (2006), all brutally abused and murdered, have given this issue human faces and an unusually high profile.

To see the article in its original form, click here…

http://www.news-press.com/article/20090105/OPINION/901050323/1015

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