Palm Beach camps ignored background screening advice

Palm Beach County ignored state and federal recommendations via a loop hole in Florida legislation, and paid a convicted sex offender, thieves and drug dealers to run summer camps for homeless and foster children for the past three years. Every summer, the Palm Beach County Division of Human Services hands out about $1.2 million to subsidize camp tuition for the county’s poorest children, and while they are required to perform background checks on the company owners and operators, there is no agency responsible for running the checks. The Palm Beach Post screened the agencies, and found: •Roughly one in eight companies was run by at least one person with a criminal conviction or arrest history. One camp operator was convicted of nearly two dozen felonies during a 28-year stretch.
•Since 2007, 617 homeless, foster or disadvantaged children have attended camps run by people with criminal records. During that period, the county paid these camps $473,059.50, or about $767 per child, in tax dollars, grants and contributions.
•Day-to-day responsibility for administering the scholarships falls to a single county employee who spends part of her time on the program. She ensures camps meet basic requirements, such as providing access to bathrooms and drinking water, but stops far short of screening camp operators’ backgrounds.
•No state agency runs background checks on camp operators because laws meant to protect the vulnerable don’t apply to children in summer camps. Although the Department of Children and Families screens owners and operators of day-care centers and other child-care providers, an exemption in Florida statutes effectively allows anyone, even a registered sex offender, to open a summer camp and gain unsupervised access to children. Presented with this information, county officials disagreed with some of the findings. They also revised specific explanations of how they monitor camp locations and operators. Regardless of what’s gone wrong, it needs to amended. It is our responsibility to protect the most vulnerable members of society, and these children are exactly that. Let’s learn from mistakes and ensure we don’t allow things like this to happen again in the future.]]>