Meet Family Law Attorney Deborah Eldridge

Deborah Cerminaro Eldridge has figured out how to turn heartbreaking injustice into a happy career choice with great potential for healing and change. As an attorney who practices family law, Deborah handles divorce, custody, support, adoption, and consumer rights, with a special focus on children’s rights and the juvenile dependency system. She and her husband used to be foster parents and learned firsthand what that system is – and “it is not a pretty picture,” she says.

The biggest flaw in the system, says Deborah, leads directly to the tragedies we read about too often. When children are sheltered into the state’s protective custody, case workers are trained to reunify the child with his or her parents as quickly as possible, generally within six months. However, this often is not in the best interest of the child. “It should be about protecting the child at all costs,” Deborah says.

She feels so strongly about this that she has founded a nonprofit called Children’s Best Interests First, Inc. The mission of the group is threefold: to lobby for change in the juvenile dependency system by providing more protection for children and stabilizing the placement process; to educate the public and the judiciary regarding the statutory and case law and the inherent flaws in the system; and to provide assistance to foster parents and relatives seeking to maintain custody of their foster children, grandchild, or niece or nephew. Meanwhile in her practice, she only represents foster parents or grandparents who presently have custody of a dependent child.

Deborah grew up in Pinellas County after her family moved here from upstate New York when she was 7. She graduated from Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., in 1993 and first practiced insurance defense law at a small firm in Brandon. It didn’t take her long to see that medical malpractice and the like was not for her. She opened her own practice in St. Petersburg and channeled her strong personality, determination and focus into family law. As a woman, Deborah is confident that she brings to the table greater insight into the emotional aspect of what is going on in a legal situation such as a dissolution of a marriage.

She also teaches law courses at St. Petersburg College as a part-time adjunct professor. With her own toddler in the house now – “the light of my life” – she and her husband have not engaged in their much loved sport activity, scuba diving, for a couple of years, but are looking forward to exploring the wrecks and reefs of the Gulf this summer and someday traveling again to their favorite diving spots in Central America.