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A child welfare case leads to a stunning dissent from Michigan’s Chief Justice

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

More than just a dissent in an individual case, this opinion is a call to transform “child welfare” in Michigan – and everywhere else. is a brilliant dissection of the failings of both law and practice in “child welfare” in Michigan and pretty much everywhere else in America. Raising a child is difficult, even when there is no crisis.

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Lessons from two child welfare court decisions

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has issued a scathing rebuke to Philadelphia’s family police agency, the Department of Human Services, rejecting the idea that its caseworkers are effectively exempt from the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and a similar clause in Pennsylvania’s constitution. Lawyers would scream.

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The fundamental misconception at the heart of the Family First Act

Child Welfare Monitor

States have been hard-put to devise plans for implementing the new services because the bill was designed to fix a problem that did not exist–the alleged absence of child welfare services designed to help families stay together. ” As the Child Welfare Information Gateway, an information clearinghouse of the U.S.

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In Iowa, one more family finds out what it’s like to be on the wrong end of family policing

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

For the Donlins, their nightmare at the hands of the family police, known in Iowa as the Department of Human Services, consisted of eight months of hypersurveillance and an attempt to take away their young children. It may well have begun because their second child was born just a little too soon – and definitely in the wrong state.

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NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Oct. 1, 2024

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

“I started this work in 1988,” said Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school and the author of books including “Shattered Bonds” and “Torn Apart,” both about institutional racism in the child welfare system. “To Vermont’s human services agency continued to send teens there — even after the incidents.

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New York’s structure for screening child abuse reports guarantees one thing: mutually-assured buck-passing. The Legislature should change that.

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

Department of Health and Human Services, Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2018 The State Assembly holds a hearing Oct. The structural problem In most states, the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) is a state agency. Source: U.S. Nine states are fully local.

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Myth-making in Maine

NCCPR Child Welfare Blog

Maine’s equivalent of the GAO falls for the Big Lie of American child welfare – and the Disney version of how the system works There are many reasons five-year-old Logan Marr died in 2001. But there was another reason: Maine’s embrace of the Big Lie of American child welfare. Source: U.S.