Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Childrens home has history of complaints
Abuse, neglect reported at nonprofit center for developmentally disabled
A state-funded group home that is supposed to help South Florida children with disabilities has racked up a history of complaints including child abuse and neglect, police and state records show.
The Tate Center Inc. is a nonprofit that runs group homes north of Palm Beach County as well as a destination for children with developmental disabilities and aggressive behavior. Its history is detailed in hundreds of pages of records the Sun Sentinel obtained from police, court cases and the Department of Children and Families. Among the cases: Police held a teenager on charges he sexually assaulted an 11-year-old Boca Raton boy twice within a year while living at the Tate Center — once while staff watched a football game in another room. The assaults are alleged to have hap-
pened between 2015 and 2016.
A pending lawsuit alleges that a Tate Center employee left a 15-year-old Palm Beach County boy with scrapes and cuts on his head and an ear swollen with blood.
The Florida Attorney General’s Office conducted a Medicaid fraud investigation in 2016 after a tip alleging that the Tate Center forged signatures on certificates for training that staff never received.
In response to a Sun Sentinel investigation, the state agency that oversees the facility on Thursday decided to end its contract with the center, a spokeswoman said. The Tate Center declined to comment on how this will affect the facility.
“We will begin working with families and waiver support coordinators to identify other providers around the state who may meet their needs,” said Melanie Etters, spokeswoman for the Agency for Persons with Disabilities, which oversees the care of children with disabilities.
The Department of Children and Families, which investigated the abuse allegations, declined to comment on specifics about the case, citing confidentiality laws.
Ivan Tate, 54, who started the company bearing his name in 2008, has programs in three counties, including two homes that serve as a last resort for South Florida parents whose children have developmental disabilities: kids who can throw extreme temper tantrums, jump on desks, run away from school, yell at teachers and bite people.
The center’s Emerald House in Port St. Lucie and its Peridots program in Vero Beach are intensive-behavior group homes that house as many as five clients each. Often, they are children with severe autism, among other conditions.
Last year, the Tate Center received about $1.3 million from the Agency for Persons with Disabilities, which refers parents to the center’s services.
Today, two of Tate’s homes are among 19 intensive behavior homes in the surrounding region, which includes Palm Beach, Broward, St. Lucie and Indian River counties, according to the Agency for Persons with Disabilities.
Tate said the children in his homes make “a lot of allegations” because they have severe behaviors and disabilities, but he said that doesn’t make them factual. Nonetheless, Tate said that when child-protective investigators find proof of abuse or neglect, he fires the people involved.
“We are providing services to children whose parents truly cannot maintain them in their homes,” Tate said. “We do due diligence and really, really try to help these kids.”
‘Inappropriately investigated’
The first report of sexual abuse inside the Tate Center group home in Port St. Lucie happened months after a 13-year-old boy moved into the home in August 2015, according to a police report.
On the night of Oct. 10 that year, the 13-year-old teen called an 11-year-old Boca Raton boy into his bedroom, according to a police report.
Both boys have severe forms of autism, state records show.
Once inside, the teen fondled the boy, records allege.
Meanwhile, in the living room, two on-duty staff watched the third quarter of a college football game, according to a police report.
Two weeks later, on Oct. 26, the Department of Children and Families received a complaint about that night.
The teen “raped another kid living with us,” the complaint read. A DCF investigator didn’t find any evidence of abuse, according to the report.
Chris Fulcher, a Port St. Lucie police detective who later investigated and detained the teen, said childwelfare investigators “inappropriately investigated” the October 2015 abuse. “That’s my professional opinion as a former childabuse investigator and a police officer,” Fulcher said of the DCF investigation, court records show.
After the assault allegation, Tate put the teen on supervision that required staff to be within arms’ length at all times, he said.
“Even though DCF didn’t substantiate things, we put him on a safety plan,” Tate said. “We monitor him differently.”
Still, a second allegation of abuse happened almost a year later between the same two children in September 2016, according to the police report.
Staff learned of the abuse allegation from another child in the home. When confronted, the teen admitted to molesting the boy from Boca Raton, police said.
One staff member arranged for a female friend of his to pretend to be the victim’s mother, put her on speakerphone and forced the teen to apologize to her for sexually abusing the boy, police said.
“If you don’t tell his mother right here and now that you touched [the boy] inappropriately, [staff members] will put you on the mat,” a staff member told the teen, referring to a mat where they are trained to restrain clients, according to a police report.
When Fulcher told Tate of his findings, Tate replied that calling a client’s parents is a violation of the home’s procedures, police records state.
Tate told the Sun Sentinel the teen made inappropriate comments but did not sexually assault anyone at the home, contrary to the police report.
“There was no further incident of [the teen] doing anything,” Tate said.
Other allegations
Other families, too, have complained about the Tate Center.
Tate Center staff improperly restrained a 15-year-old Lake Worth boy with severe autism, scraping his face on the ground, leaving abrasions and bruises, according a lawsuit pending against the center.
The take-down was so hard it caused the boy’s ear to swell with blood, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed by the boy’s mother in Indian River County Circuit Court, alleges that the encounter happened inside a bedroom of the Peridots program house in Vero Beach in 2015.
Staff violated protocol for restraining the boy, the lawsuit says. Ordinarily, staff are trained to take down children on a mat using special procedures emphasizing safety.
The lawsuit argues that staff were inadequately trained and did not properly supervise the children.
In another instance, staff neglected a West Palm Beach boy diagnosed with severe autism, the boy’s mother alleged in emails sent to the Tate Center and DCF.
His mother, Joanne Patsis, once found him sitting in his own excrement, dried and crusted from sitting so long, Patsis told Tate in an email. On another visit, she found her son’s face painted with markers, she said in an email to Tate.
The markers colored his mouth, face, neck and arms, and staff did not seem to have noticed, she said.
Patsis pulled her son out of the home in June 2016 after a staff member allegedly grabbed his arm so hard he left a large bruise in the shape of a hand print, according to a DCF report.
“I received at least four to five different versions of what staff at the home said about the bruise my son sustained, and the accident injury report was mismarked and showed a different area of the body,” Patsis wrote in a letter to Department of Children and Families Secretary Mike Carroll dated March 2017.
Child-welfare investigators found no evidence of abuse, noting that the teen’s lack of communication skills made it difficult to learn how he was hurt, according to the Department of Children and Families report.
Patsis said her son can answer questions if he is working with someone trained in speaking to children with autism. “[My son] had no voice in his injury,” she wrote to investigators.
Earlier complaints
Complaints against the center date to October 2013, when police arrested a staff member on charges of child abuse, according to a police report.
Three children who lived next door to the Emerald House watched the staff member shove a boy with developmental disabilities twice, sending them both to the ground, the report said.
The staff member then punched and choked the child from behind, causing him to bleed from the mouth, according to the police report. The worker, in an interview with police, called the strikes accidental.
The St. Lucie County State Attorney’s Office concluded he was within his rights to use “corporal punishment ‘to moderately chastise for correction a child under his or her control and authority,’ ” according to a memo from prosecutors explaining why they didn’t pursue charges.
The office dropped the case but said the Tate Center could discipline the employee for violating the rules of his employment, according to the memo.
Tate said he fired the employee after the incident. “If I have bad apples and bad employees, I get rid of those employees,” he said.
The employee couldn’t be reached for comment.
DCF inquiries
DCF child-protective officials investigated 23 allegations, including abuse and neglect, at the Emerald House over a five-year span. Of those allegations, DCF determined there were two confirmed instances of the center providing inadequate supervision.
DCF declined to release records of those two cases to the Sun Sentinel.
The department doesn’t keep a total number of investigations for group homes, but it’s not unusual for group homes to have relatively frequent reports to the abuse hotline, said Jessica Sims, a spokeswoman for the Department of Children and Families.
DCF “takes all allegations of abuse, neglect, and abandonment of children and vulnerable adults very seriously and thoroughly investigates all cases accepted by the Florida Abuse Hotline,” Sims wrote in a statement to the Sun Sentinel.
The Agency for Persons with Disabilities found no indications of abuse during monthly inspections from December 2014 through the end of 2016, records show, even though police charged a teen with two counts of sexual molestation during that period.
The agency said that’s because investigators write only what they observe while inside the homes in monthly inspection reports.
Etters, the agency spokeswoman, said the agency followed up on every complaint with unannounced visits and on-site reviews.
The Agency for Persons with Disabilities has a zerotolerance initiative in place “to combat sexual violence committed against persons with developmental disabilities.”
The agency “holds our providers to the highest standards, and we place the safety and well-being of our clients above all else,” Etters said in a statement.
The Agency for Persons with Disabilities canceled the contract without giving a reason, according to APD records. Etters didn’t explain why other than to say, “At this time, the agency feels it is in the best interest of all parties to terminate our relationship with the Tate Center.”
State inquiry
The Attorney General’s Office began investigating the Tate Center for Medicaid fraud last year when a subcontractor that worked with the Tate Center called in a tip.
The caller alleged that the Tate Center failed to provide mandated training to staff and instead forged signatures on training certificates, attorney general’s records show.
In the course of investigating, an attorney general’s investigator interviewed Elizabeth McDonald, a behavior analyst who worked with the Tate Center training staff, records show.
McDonald told the Sun Sentinel that her signature was used to sign multiple documents certifying staff for training that she never provided.
“I was furious,” she said. “That could possibly cost me my license. Because it was electronically done. It looked exactly like my signature.”
When the attorney general’s investigator showed copies of forged certificates to the Tate Center, a staff administrator replied that she had never seen the documents before.
In March 2016, a state investigator also interviewed Rita Castor, deputy regional operations manager with the Agency for Persons with Disabilities. Castor said she knew about “minor issues” with licensing the center and “significant problems” with how they cared for clients, but the attorney general’s report does not elaborate about what those problems were.
The Sun Sentinel couldn’t reach Castor for comment.
After the Florida Attorney General’s Office conducted its investigation, it referred the complaint to the Agency for Health Care Administration. That agency told the Sun Sentinel it could not provide information about the case “at this time.” It cited a state law that prohibits the agency from discussing pending investigations, even though it won’t say whether the case is open.
Released from the center
The day the boy from Boca Raton left the Tate Center last October, he was taken to the hospital with bruises across his body, records show.
Port St. Lucie Police reported that the boy fought with staff over a DVD. Tate told the Sun Sentinel the boy was injured while trying to unscrew a light bulb. A protective investigator said he was jumping on the couch and fell off “hitting his face on [an employee’s] knee as he fell causing the black eye,” according to a DCF report.
The boy had a 3-inch bruise around his eye; bruises on both arms, a knee and a leg; and a swollen ankle, according to photos taken after the incident.
A child-welfare investigator said it was unclear how the boy was hurt and closed the case.
A child-welfare advocate — Gordon Weekes, the chief assistant of the Broward County Public Defender’s Office, who has defended children charged as adults in Broward courts — said the boy’s bruises, and the discrepancies in how they happened, are enough to merit a second investigation by state officials.
“Once this occurs very late in the game, you have to go back to all the previous stuff and look at it in a different light,” said Weekes, who is not involved in the Boca boy’s case. “Now you have to determine whether these issues are retaliation for coming forward.”
Despite subsequent phone calls from the Sun Sentinel, Tate couldn’t be reached for comment about the lawsuit, the attorney general’s investigation and a state agency’s decision to end the center’s contract.
The mother met her son at the hospital later that day, on Oct. 8. The Tate Center released him with only the clothes on his back — a filthy shirt and ill-fitting shorts, she said.
“My son was entrusted in the care of other people after I swore I would never let anyone even baby-sit my son,” the boy’s mother said. “He was supposed to have gone there to get better, not worse.”
The Tate Center’s contract with the Agency for Persons with Disabilities ends in December, Etters said.