Kudos to The Miami Herald for its coverage of the Nubia Barahona scandal and calling out as misguided efforts to diminish the role of community-based child-services agencies (CBCs).

Five years ago I started working with the CBCs in Miami-Dade and Broward as part of the team assembled by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago to evaluate child welfare privatization under a contract with DCF. Frankly, going in I was skeptical that privatization would prove to be an effective strategy for improving Florida’s child welfare system.

Five years later, my skepticism has been replaced by respect — and a little awe. OurKids of Miami-Dade/Monroe has succeeded in creating a space within which Miami’s child-welfare community regularly comes together to tackle big issues. Each of the parties to the collaboration recognizes that everyone has to accept and implement changes instead of indulging in business as usual.

In the past five years, I have seen purposeful collaboration fomented by OurKids reduce the length of time babies spend in foster care, increase the rate at which teens in foster care find permanent families, reduce the acceptability of youth aging out of care without permanent family connections and strengthen the family-centeredness of child-welfare practice in Miami.

One of the central findings of the Nubia Report was that “. . . no one accepted the role of ‘system integrator’ with responsibility to ensure that each individual involved shared and had access to all pertinent case-related information, including allegations of abuse. That point person needs to be the case manager.” Through training, OurKids is now demonstrating the efficacy of the real collaboration happening in Miami on the issue of strengthening each case manager’s sense of case ownership. This will require each of the other system actors to cede some measure of control to the case manager.

This is sure to test even the robust collaborative spirit that has emerged in Miami since the advent of privatization. It would compound the tragedy of Nubia’s death if the elusive goal of case ownership, which might have saved her, remained out of reach because of the failure to appreciate something it has taken me five years to fully comprehend — that better child welfare outcomes can only be achieved with real collaboration, and that real collaboration can only be engineered at the community level.

James T. Dimas,

Sykesville, Md.