An appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that the state’s ban on gay adoption is unconstitutional.

The Florida Supreme Court will ultimately rule on the adoption ban making Florida the only state that bans gays from adopting children. The state does allow gay couples and individuals to foster children but does not allow them to adopt them. That’s at odds with Florida’s policy on “permanence” in which children are supposed to be moved as little as possible from one household to another.

A Miami-Dade County judge ruled the gay adoption ban unconstitutional in 2008 in the case of Martin Gill and his male partner, who adopted two foster children they have cared for since 2004.

Gov. Charlie Crist, whose Department of Children and Families appealed the adoption and the ruling, said recently he was considering dropping the appeal. But gay rights activists and the ACLU, which represents Gill, as well as DCF Secretary George Sheldon want the Supreme Court to make a final decision on the law to settle uncertainty for future adoptions.

So many state workers helping Haitian earthquake survivors that the Department of Children and Families asked for help from federal health authorities.

DCF has asked staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to screen Haitians at the Sanford and Orlando airports to try to keep flu-like infections from spreading, DCF spokeswoman Carrie Hoeppner said today.

Up to 80 DCF employees, who have volunteered to help the agency handle the influx of refugees from earthquake-shattered Haiti, are working around the clock in the Orlando area, Hoeppner said.

Agency officials sent out an e-mail instructing workers to use universal health precautions, such as gloves and masks, to keep from getting sick.

“We don’t know where this is coming from but want to make sure that everybody’s health is being taken care of,” said Hoeppner, who said she had stomach-flu symptoms throughout the weekend.

“You’re comforting people. You’re wiping running noses. And you’re changing diapers. Those are all things that workers are doing every day. There’s a lot of close contact with our own staff and with the passengers coming off of these planes,” she said, adding that there is “hand sanitizer everywhere you look.”

About 25 workers in the Orlando and Sanford area, where Florida’s Haitian aid is centered, have come down with flu-like symptoms.

Hoeppner said that although the situation is stressful for the refugees and the workers, the job is also rewarding.

“Everybody has probably had an emotional moment being here. If you haven’t cried, you don’t care. And if you don’t care you don’t need to be here,” she said.

Department of Children and Families officials insist that the foster kids living with Martin Gill for nearly five years aren’t going anywhere.

But the agency’s own lawyers told a judge that the two boys adopted by Gill should be “made available for adoption” elsewhere, something Gill can’t legally do because he’s gay.

Despite DCF’s insistence that the Gill family won’t be affected by its appeal of the adoption, the agency has made a test case out of the gay man’s adoption and intends to take the case to the Florida Supreme Court to decide once and for all if Florida’s ban on gay adoption is unconstitutional.

DCF has paid Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office nearly $400,000 so far on the case, and it has yet to make its way to the high court.

Read more about the disconnect between DCF and its own high-paid lawyers here.

A medical examiner found that that the cause of death of 7-year-old Gabriel Myers‘, the Broward County foster child in state custody who hanged himself, was “undetermined” and that he did not commit suicide.

Broward County Deputy Medical Examiner Stephen Cina’s report also said that the child had no history of suicidal thoughts.

That’s contradicted by the Department of Children and Families’ own investigation that found that “he was out of control and destroying school property and stating that he wanted to kill himself” shortly before his death.

DCF Secretary George Sheldon created a workgroup to look into the boy’s death after it was learned that he hanged himself and was on numerous psychotropic drugs that his guardians had not signed off on.

Department of Children and Families Secretary George Sheldon made the apparent suicide of a 7-year-old Broward County boy in foster care one of his top priorities in April.

Sheldon created a working group to get to the bottom of Gabriel Myers’ death and examine why the child was on a psychotropic drug cocktail without the consent of his guardians.

Despite Sheldon’s attention to the boy’s case, his office was unable to get its hands on a copy of the autopsy released to the public by the Broward County Medical Examiner early Thursday afternoon.

About an hour after the autopsy was made public around 11 a.m., Sheldon’s press secretary Joe Follick said he did not have a copy of it. He suggested getting a copy from the medical examiner.

Broward County Medical Examiner Joshua Perper quickly replied to a public records request and e-mailed a copy of the 28-page report.

Hours later, Follick still did not have a copy of it.

“By reviewing the facts of this case carefully, we can work to continue to improve the child welfare system in Florida. While much progress has been made, Gabriel’s death starkly reminds us that when it comes to a child’s life, we cannot relax. Every decision we make profoundly affects the life of that child,” Sheldon said in a press release when the Myers work group was created in April.

From The Post‘s Kathleen Chapman:

When former Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth took over the Department of Children and Families in January 2007, he vowed that the state would stop paying attorneys to fight lawsuits filed by families with valid claims against his agency.

Since then, DCF has settled with 104 plaintiffs, paying a total of more than $6.1 million. Butterworth’s successor at DCF, former state legislator George Sheldon, has continued that approach. In some cases, Sheldon said, it is better to help children who truly have been harmed by the agency’s mistakes than to continue racking up legal fees.

But the settlements are increasingly putting DCF’s commitments in conflict with a state legislature that often has been unwilling to pay.

More here.