Dance of the Reptiles (13 page)

The main cheerleader for the FCAT movement has been Gov. Jeb Bush, one politician who could actually pass the test. Just a few days ago, Bush was praising statewide improvements in FCAT scores, especially among children in school districts plagued by poverty and unemployment. No mother or father who saw those results wasn’t cheered by the news and thrilled for her or his children. But it’s only part of the story.

Another side is the roughly 12,000 high school seniors in Florida who failed the FCATs and, by law, weren’t allowed to collect their diplomas. Some people said tough luck—a test is a test. You either pass or flunk.

And certainly it was unsettling to see students and parents taking to the streets to protest the results. Attacking the test isn’t attacking the problem, which is much larger and more systemic. Only a handful of states spend less money per pupil than Florida, an abominable statistic. While Bush has consistently pushed to increase education funding, the money hasn’t kept pace with the state’s rampaging population growth.

Students are packed like sardines into classrooms, teachers remain overworked and underpaid, and parents are perpetually ticked off—even parents whose children sailed through the FCATs. The schools are in crisis, and everybody knows it. That’s why the amendment to cap class sizes passed so thunderously last fall.

Bush and Republican legislative leaders assert that the state can’t afford to build all the new schools needed to meet the prescribed caps on class size. Yet they’re the ones who have been cutting taxes for businesses and stock investors, reducing state revenues at a time of dire budget shortfalls.

Lawmakers dealt with the FCAT uproar in a predictable, slapdash way. Facing the wrath of disappointed parents and a threatened economic boycott by blacks, the Legislature last week tossed a life preserver to high school seniors who failed the test.

About 400 who met all scholastic requirements and attained a marginal score on a college entrance exam will be cleared for graduation. The remaining 11,000–plus students must complete all coursework and eventually pass the FCAT, or score high enough on SAT or ACT college tests. Some
seniors who didn’t pass the FCATs and are recent immigrants to the United States will get a rush course in English this summer before they retake the test. Good luck.

The bill affects only this year’s seniors, but it’s still a political retreat for the governor. Obviously, he didn’t foresee the emotional and very public reaction of those whose kids came up short on the FCATs.

I’ve got no doubt that Bush is both serious and sincere in his quest to improve education, but far too much weight has been put on this single test. Because the FCAT is also used to rate and reward individual schools, teachers and administrators are also under pressure to produce high scores. It doesn’t automatically mean they’re producing the smartest, most well-rounded graduates.

In any case, the protests of this spring promise to become an annual event. Students will keep flunking the FCAT by the thousands as long as the Legislature continues to shortchange our schools in the budget.

All those lawmakers who tout the FCAT as the best academic yardstick should demonstrate their faith in the test by taking it themselves. Their scores would be most instructive to the rest of us when we grade them at election time.

May 1, 2005

DCF Policy: Forcing Babies to Have Babies

Forcing babies to have babies is now the official policy of Florida’s child-welfare agency.

The sadists running the Department of Children and Families are trying to stop a 13-year-old girl under foster care from getting an abortion. They say that she’s too immature to decide whether or not she should have the baby.

The logic is diabolically cockeyed. If the girl isn’t mature enough to make a sensible choice about her pregnancy, how can she possibly be mature enough to care for a newborn infant? An even better question for the extremists at DCF is this: How can any 13-year-old child, from any background, be ready for motherhood?

The girl is publicly known only as L.G., and her life so far hasn’t been a picnic. According to records, her parents lost custody of her years ago, and she has been raised under state care.

The girl was residing in a group home in St. Petersburg when she became pregnant 14 weeks ago. She got the news during a medical examination.

Her attorneys say L.G. immediately told her DCF caseworker “that she wished to terminate the pregnancy.” The procedure had been scheduled for last Tuesday, but then the morality police from Tallahassee arrived. That very morning, DCF lawyers filed an emergency motion with Palm Beach Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez. He signed a temporary order blocking the abortion and ordered a competency examination for L.G.

She is represented by lawyers from Palm Beach Legal Aid and the American Civil Liberties Union. They say that L.G. has never been found to be incompetent or institutionalized for mental problems. They say she should be allowed to make up her own mind about the pregnancy. The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution offers a shield of privacy in such cases.

DCF insists that it’s forbidden by law to let any person under its supervision undergo an abortion or sterilization procedure. Apparently, this is to ensure that the agency will never run out of clients. Forcing children in state custody to
have babies against their will guarantees that there will be a whole new generation of abused, abandoned, and neglected kids for taxpayers to support. It’s quite a clever plan.

Unfortunately, DCF can’t keep up with the thousands of cases that it’s already got—cases such as L.G.’s. In a way, she’s one of the lucky ones; she only got pregnant. Others in state care have been tortured, raped, killed, or, in the case of Rilya Wilson, vaporized into thin air.

With nightmare stories leaking out every few weeks, one would think that DCF had its hands full. Wrong.

The zealots picked by Gov. Jeb Bush to run the agency are never too busy to play politics with somebody’s private agony. The Terri Schiavo case was the most recent debacle, but there have been others. Two years ago, DCF fought to block a severely retarded Orlando woman from having an abortion. In that case, the agency litigated for so many months that the operation could not be safely performed. The woman gave birth, and the infant was put up for adoption.

Such ruthless intrusion into the most private matters is a trademark of the new Republican right, which seldom wastes an opportunity to whip the pro-life crowd into a tizzy. It will likely happen again with L.G.’s case.

With the governor’s political image in mind, DCF carefully tries to mask its meddling as the act of a caring and concerned overseer. In fact, the driving but unspoken philosophy behind most of the new abortion restrictions is punitive: You got knocked up, kid. That’s what you get for fooling around. Now everybody but you gets to decide your future.

That’s basically what the state of Florida is telling L.G.

We know what’s best for you, kid. You’re going to carry this baby for the next six months, and we don’t care whether you want it or not. We don’t care whether you’re old enough, responsible enough, sober enough, stable enough, or financially
secure enough. You can give it up for adoption, or you can keep it. If you turn out to be a lousy mom, we’ll simply take it away and stick it in a foster home, just like we did to you.

A spokeswoman for DCF Secretary Luci Hadi said the agency is doing “what we believe is in the best interest of the child.” Sure. If you happen to believe that unplanned pregnancy is a real character-builder for teenage girls.

Don’t be surprised if DCF uses the same cold-blooded tactics against L.G. as it did against the retarded woman in Orlando—dragging the case out in court until it’s too late for a safe abortion.

If someone put your 13-year-old daughter through that kind of cruelty, you’d know exactly what to call it: Child abuse.

November 13, 2005

When Will We Be Ready for the Next One? Never

With its usual foresight and timeliness, the Florida Legislature is now grappling with the issue of hurricane preparedness.

We all know what that means: absolutely nothing.

The Democrats are blaming the Republicans for the halting response to Hurricane Wilma, and the Republicans are blaming the citizens for not heeding calls to be ready.

There’s a breath of truth in both arguments—and plenty of hot air.

The fact is, urban South Florida will never be prepared for a major hurricane. The idea of evacuating six million people is ludicrous, and the vast majority will be either stuck on the highways or stuck in their homes.

If a slow-moving Category 4 or 5 storm strikes head-on any
place from West Palm Beach to South Miami, plan on mass destruction, long-term shortages of fuel and food, disorder in the streets, and, of course, darkness.

There’s no other possible scenario, unless they bulldoze the whole peninsula, boot everybody out and start over. Catastrophic mistakes have literally been set in concrete, as has our fate.

How many cities and counties in South Florida govern development with future hurricanes in mind? The road systems are designed purely to feed growth. High-rises and subdivisions are mapped to maximize density. The result is sprawl, suffocating congestion, and—when the storm hits—the collapse of an overburdened infrastructure. Big surprise.

For decades, the state’s governors and legislative leaders have avidly encouraged reckless coastal growth, beholden as they’ve been to mega-developers, road builders, banks, and others getting rich from cramming more people into Florida. Now our lawmakers sit around, scrounging for somebody to blame for the havoc caused by Hurricane Wilma. What boneheads.

I love the comments from Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla of Miami and Sen. Paula Dockery of Lakeland. They say Floridians need to take more personal responsibility for hurricane preparation. Are you slackers listening? Next time a tropical storm is brewing, rush out and buy your three days’ worth of food, ice, and D batteries. You’ll be just fine after the storm hits.

For 72 measly hours, at least. After that, good luck.

And here come the Democrats, carping about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and demanding to know why some supply trucks didn’t get where they were supposed to go. Sure, there was some bungling and confusion, but it’s
hard to envision a smooth operation in the absence of traffic signals and fuel for the relief vehicles.

Meanwhile, Florida Power & Light has been asked to explain how so many of its substations got knocked out and why so many of its power poles snapped like matchsticks, leaving more than 3.2 million people in the dark. The utility probably isn’t taking the inquiry too seriously, having been awarded last week a whopping rate increase of 20.6 percent for the average residential customers. Interestingly, the company had asked for less.

It was with the same unbridled generosity that the so-called Public Service Commission earlier decided that FPL should be handsomely compensated for revenues lost from the massive outages caused by the 2004 hurricanes. So, even though your electricity was off, the meter was still running.

Many thousands of private businesses took huge hits from Wilma, yet only a select few are being rescued by our concerned leaders in Tallahassee.

Take Citizens Property Insurance, the shambling, state-run outfit that will likely receive a humongous rate hike, including increased assessments on innocent policyholders using other coverage. Citizens was set up because real insurance companies were bailing out of Florida, which wasn’t unexpected. Only gamblers or fools would write windstorm policies in Hurricane Central, so it’s fitting that the state leaped into the void.

You won’t be shocked to learn that Citizens is teetering toward insolvency, with losses projected to exceed $1 billion. To bail out South Florida’s largest home insurer, we’ll all be opening our wallets.

See, it’s not just the next hurricane we should prepare for. It’s the inevitable reaming that follows.

Wilma wasn’t a cataclysmic event on the scale of Katrina smashing the Gulf Coast. It was a Category 1 storm swiftly raking across an insanely overpopulated swampland. Imagine a hurricane exponentially stronger and slower. Imagine sustained winds of 120 mph instead of 85 mph. Imagine four feet of rainfall and streets flooded for weeks.

When the big one arrives—the
really
big one—plan on the pits. Plan on devastation. Plan on mayhem. Plan on bungling by those who’ve been telling you how to plan. And plan on way more than 72 hours of grief and gouging.

Be prepared, they’re warning us. Next time, you’d better be prepared. Know how to prepare? Stock up on Prozac, that’s how.

Because it’s going to be real bad, both miserable and tragic, and there’s nothing to be done except wait.

February 25, 2007

Stadium Giveaway Idea Won’t Go Away

Yikes. It’s baaaaack. Like movie ghoul Freddy Krueger, the Florida Marlins Stadium scam refuses to die.

Republican leaders in the new Legislature have enthusiastically exhumed the oft-snuffed plan to throw away $60 million of public funds on a Major League Baseball park in South Florida.

Forget that the state is already shelling out $60 million in sales tax “rebates” to Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, ostensibly for having renovated his football stadium to accommodate the Marlins. Huizenga wants the Marlins out (though he’ll keep the money, thank you very much), and the Marlins want a new stadium. Every year they come to Tallahassee begging for tax dollars, and up till now they’ve been shut out.

The big obstacle was Jeb Bush, who peevishly opposed
spending public funds on professional sports palaces. In 2005, Senate President Tom Lee actually uttered the term “corporate welfare” when discussing the money grab, and he helped send it to its deserved doom.

But Bush and Lee are gone, and a new breed of freespending, jock-waving Republicans are poised to resubsidize not only the Marlins but every other pro-sports franchise in the state. Apparently, it’s a good time to be a team owner in Florida, sniffing for a handout. Despite forecasts for a tight budget and possible cuts in social services, the needy billionaires of baseball, football, hockey, and basketball are finding friends in Tallahassee.