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Whether fostercare seems like something you’re called to or your are simply curious to learn more, you’re in the right place. On any given day, nearly 407,000 children are in fostercare in America. The primary goal of fostercare is reunification. The Statistics: Children in FosterCare.
Year after year, states and the federal government continue to release annual data showing a decline in the number of children in fostercare, congratulating themselves on keeping families together. percent over the previous year 15.6 percent since 2018. “We
KABB-TV in San Antonio reported this week on the tragic death of 16-year-old Mia Morales who died in a car crash after running away from a makeshift fostercare placement. It’s remarkable how many tragic failings of Texas fostercare – and the failed attempt to fix it with a McLawsuit – are illustrated by this one case.
Ariel Sellers, as she was known before her adoption, was reported missing by her foster/adoptive parents. Ultimately, they adopted her and changed her name. The foster/adoptive parents, who initially reported the child as missing, have been charged with murdering the child. Honolulu police dept.
When I was put into fostercare, the government removed me from my Native grandmother and placed me with my white father who was a rapist and pedophile with prior convictions. After some predatory events occurred, I was put into fostercare with my three half-siblings.
“New Federal Report Demonstrates Reduction in Child Maltreatment Victims and Underscores Need for Continued Action,” the Administration on Children and Families (ACF) of the US Department of Health and Human Services proclaimed in releasing the latest annual report on the government response to child abuse and neglect.
Similarly, “permanency” sounds like permanence – but often it is not; not when it is defined as adoption and only adoption. As I discussed in a previous post, the worst part of Font’s “report” is what it says about her attitude toward older foster youth – she seems to think they need money more than love.
If you are considering adoption, congratulations! However, the adoption journey can prove difficult to navigate if you don’t have the understanding and resources necessary to guide you through the child adoption process. What are your feelings on international adoption vs. domestic adoption?
They’re dumped into institutions by family police agencies (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agencies) when they run out of foster homes because they take so many children needlessly. As she testified: “For children who do end up in fostercare, we cannot allow them to grow up in cold facilities that act like kid prisons.”
In recent years, some Kansas children in fostercare have ended up sleeping in child welfare offices overnight because there were no relatives, foster homes or care centers available. What’s behind this national fostercare placement crisis? But this isn’t what fostercare is for. Let’s rewind.
In that op-ed, she writes: Research finds that following high-profile child fatalities, child welfare agencies respond by removing more children from their homes in a “fostercare panic.” And his only solutions are more study and ramping up constant surveillance of all adoptive families. But not Richard Barth.
.” It does not define RTF’s, but the term clearly refers to facilities that provide behavioral health services in a residential context to children with funding from programs under SFC jurisdiction, mainly Medicaid and fostercare funds under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act.
The government must set up a task force to tackle longstanding racial disparities in the adoption system, including by making the workforce more diverse. This was because of an increasing focus on the role of race in identity formation and the challenges of transracial adoptions.
There was also recognition for the former head of a university social work centre and a regional adoption agency lead. She was previously head of service at Aspire Adoption, the regional adoption agency for Dorset. Heather Freeman, who received an OBE for services to vulnerable children and families.
And it’s important to draw a distinction between that one element of government – the family police – and government as a whole. I think government can play a huge, constructive role in promoting the well-being of children. I am a lifelong tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. But the family police cannot.
It will if some lawmakers attacking kinship fostercare get their way A few months ago on this blog, I posed a hypothetical question to some folks in Oregon. Suppose they took really good care of your child. After all, the kidnappers are the only family your child has ever known! Are you sure? Oh but this is different, you say.
That false narrative, pushed hardest by those who hate birth parents (and yes, that’s the right word) claims that only adoption guarantees a truly permanent home for a child removed from her or his parents. Partly that’s because adoptions sometimes fail. They also take less time to achieve than adoptions.
Over the next five years, the consortium will launch pilot sites that “give youth an active role when decisions are made about their care, including reuniting them with their birth families or placing them in other legally recognized and permanent arrangements,” according to a press release from the University of Washington School of Social Work.
She is the state’s “Child Advocate,” and before that ran a prestigious private agency specializing in adoption and fostercare. million – and the state would save more than that in reducing needless investigations and fostercare. There is, in fact, a place for government in assisting with children’s wellbeing.
The department calculated that 31,490 children left care during 2023-24, up 3% on the year before, with the average duration of time spent in the care system among leavers declining from a peak of 907 days in 2020-21 to 864 in 2023-24.
This is the model that’s proven so successful in New York City – where a comprehensive evaluation found that it reduced time in fostercare with no compromise of safety. Of all the cases of children forced into Massachusetts fostercare in 2021, 63% did not even involve an allegation of substance use.
The harms of removal and sometimes also fostercare can produce “worse long-term outcomes than if the child had remained at home” in many cases … But Michigan’s removal statutes do not require courts to balance these harms against the harm that might result from staying home. In contrast, McCormack wrote, when Washington D.C.
In that article, Alexandra Travis writes about her own experience with family destruction and then asks: Tell me, if you knew our story, would you still advocate so fiercely for adoption and termination? One of those ways is using visits between children in fostercare and their parents as a weapon. Added Prof.
And, precisely because most cases we think of when we hear the words “child abuse” are nothing like the horror stories and far more like the case of Logan Marr, the data show that, almost always, family preservation is safer than fostercare. You can read about those data here and here. See above for the links.) Source: U.S.
Children are staying longer in the care system due to inequalities in payments to kinship carers, a report has found. However, there was a far smaller rise in the number of children leaving kinship fostercare for an SGO over this time, with this figure rising by 10%, from 2,270 to 2,500 over this time.
If this all weren’t so dangerous the answer would be laugh-out-loud funny: They know it works, they say, not because the algorithm was good at predicting actual child abuse, but because, in many cases, it was good at predicting whether a child would wind up in fostercare!
Saturday marked a tragic milestone – the 25 th anniversary of a law that has harmed millions of children, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. Mical Raz in The Washington Post: “Our adoption policies have harmed families and children. The Clinton-era Adoption and Safe Families Act passed 25 years ago.
The sisters of Arabella McCormack, a little girl allegedly, in effect, adopted-to-death in San Diego are suing. Unfortunately, she told Boston Public Radio “When you’re in government, the notion of what the general fund is entitled to is read very, very, very expansively.” ● And Lackawanna County, Pa. I have a blog post about them. ●
Whenever anyone in state government was asked about the problems in the state’s “child welfare” system they’d give the same stock answer: As soon as the new Department of Social Services was up and running, and took over jobs then done by the Department of Public Welfare, everything would be fine! Katz did something simple. She said no.
The bill also curbs the abuse of "hidden fostercare" - a practice Texas uses at what may be the highest rate in the country. In still another reminder that the horrors go in all directions, KNSD-TV, San Diego exposes the numerous warning signs that were ignored before 11-year-old Arabella McCormack was, in effect, adopted to death.
At long last the federal government has released state and national fostercare statistics for the year ending September 30, 2022. It’s not clear if they’re violating regulations the federal government won’t enforce or if the states actually have found a loophole.) When we curb needless fostercare, children get safer!
These figures correlate with the government’s children looked after statistics for March 2020, which showed that the proportion of children in fostercare not with a relative or friend had decreased to 57% from 60% in 2018. Yvette Stanley, Ofsted’s national director for social care, said the figures painted a “bleak picture”.
It singles out for criticism three odious laws, the Adoption and Safe Families Act , the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act. But still … In 2003, I debated Howard Davidson, the first director of the ABA Center on Children and the Law, before the National Center on Adoption Law and policy.
Here’s an excerpt: When we consider the Adoption and Safe Families Act, we situate our analysis not only in the elements of the law, but also the dominant imagination that allowed it to exist and survive with very little opposition. Their analysis of the law’s origins is striking.
Last month, two online news sites published more than 10,000 words about fostercare in West Virginia. THE CITY reports on a fight in the New York City Council over whether ACS will continue to be able to run roughshod over families. ? Not one of those words came from a birth parent.
As it happens, another part of this group's approach is the blue pinwheel imagery that Pennsylvania's family policing agency was only too glad to adopt for its report cover.) I heard it from the leader of a group that admits to having practiced it. They say they've stopped. It didn’t happen.
During that period, state, local, federal government and neighbors stepped in. Those words came in a decision reversing a lower court which allowed a Black child to be taken from his loving extended family and placed with white strangers who tried to adopt him. They were less rushed; their kids were less rushed.
It’s part of the special issue of Family Integrity and Justice Quarterly devoted to the harm done by the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. ? There is a right way and a wrong way to cover the release of the federal government's annual Child Maltreatment report. It’s called “Stop Blaming the Uncooperative Mother.”
In 43 Essential Policies for Human Services Professionals , Gerald O’Brien provides a resource to overcome these challenges, because policy familiarity contributes to social workers’ fundamental understanding of the individuals, communities, institutions, and governments they serve.
. ● Also in New York, but applicable everywhere: This Daily News op-ed from family defenders on why the worst way to respond to child abuse fatalities is foster-care panic. ● One of her recommendations: Repeal the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act. Here's one way to do it: In Washington, D.C.,
But it turns out the authors took as much care with the substance of their commentary as with their capitalization and spelling. The data for 2023 have not yet been published by the Bureau, but the figures below represent what New Jersey reported for Federal Fiscal Years (FFY) 2016 to 2022, which ended on September 30, 2022.
The legislation mandates early intervention to keep families intact when possible and reduce the need for fostercare. It also strengthens post-adoption services. This is the process of functional governing.” It expands access for tribal communities and provides support systems for the 2.5 Darin LaHood to lead H.R.
Landers’ research: “more than 80% of Native American people who were fostered or adopted eventually reunify.” ● In New York, a bill that would allow children continued contact with their parents even after their legal rights to those parents have been terminated has – again – been passed by the State Legislature.
And in its report on social care last year, the CMA found that councils “can struggle to collaborate successfully due to risk aversion, budgetary constraints, differences in governance, and difficulties aligning priorities and sharing costs”. It concluded this was unlikely to change without action by central government.
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