Good on you, Alan

I used to work for Alan Abramowitz. I like Alan; he's a good guy.

Here's a quote from him in the South Florida Times:

“I think whenever you can keep a family together, it’s a victory,” said Alan Abramowitz, Miami’s regional administrator for the Department of Children and Families, and a proud family preservationist.

File this under "credit where it's due" posts. More:

“[DCF] Secretary Butterworth believes in family preservation, and believes that the state cannot make a good parent,” Abramowitz said, acknowledging that DCF’s top brass has not always been so pro-family. “There are so many families that could have been kept together that we have failed.’’

He recognizes that some families are incapable of providing a safe place for their children without state intervention.

“We will still have to remove some children from families, unfortunately. But it’s not as many as we do,” he said.
[snip]
Abramowitz, 46, balks at the system’s tendency to paint the parents it encounters as monsters who do not care for their children.

“The majority of the time, they love their children,” he said.

He is also mindful that many children enter the system due to poverty-related issues that the system classifies as “neglect,” noting that, “We should see it as a poverty issue and not an abuse or neglect issue.”

And finally, I am very glad that Alan is aware of the study mentioned in the article

For Abramowitz, walking the walk has meant impressing upon his investigators the trauma that removal inflicts upon children.

“The studies have come out over the past few years to show we have actually been doing a disservice to families,” Abramowitz said.

One such study, the March 2007 Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care, looked at outcomes of more than 15,000 children and concluded that,
“Those placed in foster care are far more likely than other children to commit crimes, drop out of school, join welfare, experience substance abuse problems, or enter the homeless population.”