Jax Daily

Former Attorney General Bob Butterworth has resigned from his current post as head of the state’s Department of Children and Families. He has said he will head back to Miami to practice law.

From the Sun-Sentinel…

Under Butterworth’s leadership, the department settled more than 900 pending lawsuits, increased adoptions and reduced by 22 percent the number of children in foster care. Instead of imposing dictates from Tallahassee, Butterworth moved more decision-making to county and regional levels. And he ushered in a new openness in the state agency responsible for handling some of Florida’s most difficult human and social issues.

Butterworth, 65, conceded that not all the department’s problems have been solved but called the 13,000 DCF employees, whose jobs may involve danger when they confront abusive parents, the “unsung heroes” of state government.

“This agency will never be able to say ‘mission accomplished’,” said Butterworth, the DCF’s first secretary to leave office of his own accord in a decade and a half. “We can only look at the accomplishments of these past 19 months and say, ‘keep it going.’”

The article continues, strangely, goes on to describe some of the recent scandals that have plagued DCF as relatively minor troubles…

Butterworth’s tenure at the agency was marked by mostly minor troubles. A spokesman hired by the former DCF secretary was accused of taking nude photos of two teenage boys, one of them a foster child in DCF care, for overseas distribution, forcing an agency-wide review of personnel records. And the department came under criticism last year for losing track of a 2-year-old foster child later found in Wisconsin.