Fostering Media Connections

Foster care in Michigan: Did the state’s child welfare chief mislead the public on purpose …

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

…or was she just appallingly ignorant herself?

That’s the question raised by the latest outstanding investigative report from WXYZ-TV in Detroit. In a series of reports dating back to last August, the station exposed the fact that probation officers were – literally – rubber stamping court orders to tear children from their families; orders that are supposed to be approved only by a real live judge. The issue first came to light as a result of Maryanne Godboldo’s fight to rescue her daughter from needless institutionalization by the Michigan Department of Human Services.

Not surprisingly, that happens to be illegal. But the practice was stopped only after WXYZ exposed it.

But the Wayne County Juvenile Court refuses to release any information about how many children were removed illegally or what has happened to them. Neither will the Michigan Department of Human Services – unless the television station pays more than $32,000. In effect, DHS is holding what should be public information for ransom.

If anyone should be scrupulous about adhering to the law it is the Director of Michigan DHS, Maura Corrigan. After all, she is a former justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.

But, as WXYZ reported:

Following one of our first stories a year ago about child removals, DHS Director Maura Corrigan refused to speak to us on camera. The day after our investigation aired, Corrigan wrote an opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press. The headline: “Removing children from families always follows legal procedures.”

Now that that’s been proven to be false – we asked a DHS spokesman if they have been trying to determine how many children may have been wrongly taken from homes with invalid court orders. [Emphasis added.]

This raises an obvious question: Did Corrigan know full well that the process of removing children from their homes in Detroit was rife with illegality when she claimed otherwise – or was she appallingly ignorant herself?

If it’s the latter, it appears Corrigan has been doing nothing to educate herself. Because in answer to WXYZ’s question, the agency said it is not lifting a finger to find out how many other children were affected by illegal rubber-stamp removals.

And if you’re wondering what the group that so arrogantly calls itself “Children’s Rights” – the group that has a consent decree with Michigan DHS – is doing about all this, the answer is: absolutely nothing. More than nine months after the illegal rubber-stamp removals were revaled, CR hasn’t said a word about them.

But at least one member of Congress isn’t settling for silence and stonewalling. In a follow up story, WXYZ reports that Representative Hansen Clarke (D – Detroit) is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Corrigan’s agency.

Foster care in Maine: Will one dumb politician undo a decade of progress?

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

UPDATE, MAY 16: Longtime Portland Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz has a great column today about a classic case of Maine's child welfare agency confusing poverty with neglect - a perfect illustration of why the state needs to do more, not less, to curb needless foster care.

I’ve written often about the transformation of child welfare in Maine, and how child safety improved after the state abandoned a take-the-child-and-run approach in favor of one which emphasizes safe, proven programs to keep families together. I’ve written about how the death of Logan Marr, a little girl taken needlessly from her mother only to die at the hands of her foster mother, a former child welfare caseworker, shocked the conscience of the state.

Maine’s reforms have been recognized by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which made those reforms a finalist for its Innovations in American Government awards. The executive director of Maine’s leading child advocacy organization, the Maine Children’s Alliance, who also serves as the state’s independent child welfare ombudsman, even wrote a guest column for this Blog praising the reforms.

Unfortunately, because child welfare systems are more secret than the CIA, sometimes all it takes is one dumb politician to bring down a decade of reform. Looks like Maine has found its dumb politician, the current governor, Paul LePage. For starters, as Governing magazine reported, LePage got rid of Jim Beougher, the head of the child welfare division at the state Department of Health and Human Services, who led the reform effort.

Now LePage has found a horror story to exploit. In the wake of that case, LePage now says he “feels” that the state has gone too far in reducing entries into care. The state’s largest newspaper, the Portland Press Herald, compounded the error by confusing two sets of numbers, wrongly claiming that entries into care in Maine have been cut in half. They have not.

Here are the facts, and how they stack up against LePage’s “feeling.”

● No state can prevent every child abuse death. Though each is the worst form of tragedy let us be grateful that the number is low enough, especially in a small state like Maine, that the number can rise or fall due to random chance. That’s why the federal government uses a different measure: the percentage of children reabused in any way within six months after their cases become “known to the system.”

Since Maine began its reforms in 2003, that percentage has declined by 20 percent. In other words, with caseworkers spending less time on false allegations and trivial cases, they have found more children in real danger, and made Maine’s children safer – not safe enough, but safer than they were during the era of take-the-child-and-run; the era to which LePage apparently wants to return.

● The claim that the number of children removed from their homes in Maine has declined by 50 percent is flat-out false; and all it takes is two clicks of a mouse to prove it.

Every state must report these data to the federal government. In Maine, the number of children removed over the course of a year peaked at 1,052 in 2000 and 1,047 in 2001. Click here to see for yourself. The number of removals fell after Logan Marr died, and after the PBS series Frontline exposed the failure of Maine’s former take-the-child- and-run approach to the entire nation. In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, 760 children were taken from their families in Maine. Again, click to see for yourself.

So yes, over the course of a decade, entries declined, as they should – but by about 27 percent, not 50 percent.

● As can be seen by clicking on those same links, the number that fell by about 50 percent is the number of children trapped in foster care on Sept. 30 of each year. But that number can rise or fall for reasons totally unrelated to whether children are taken away in the first place.

Children taken more than a decade ago, during the heyday of Maine’s take-the-child-and-run fanaticism, may simply “age out” of the system with no place to go. Other children, like the suspect in the current tragedy, himself a former foster child allegedly abused in foster care, are adopted. This “snapshot number” is important, but it tells you nothing about whether a state is doing more to keep children out of the system in the first place.

● NCCPR compares the propensity of states to take children from their homes by comparing entries into care to the number of impoverished children living in each state. By that standard, Maine still takes away children at a rate slightly above the national average. In other words, if anything, the reforms in Maine haven’t gone far enough.

Maine also has made great progress in where it places children when they really do need to be taken from their homes.

● Study after study has found that, when a child really must be taken from her or his home, placing that child with relatives is more stable, better for children’s well-being, and most important, safer than what should properly be called “stranger care.” Back when Logan Marr died, Maine had one of the worst records in the nation for kinship care. Now, Maine uses kinship care at a rate slightly above the national average, though still behind the national leaders. (Details are in NCCPR’s interactive database.)

●Maine’s greatest success has been in dramatically reducing the worst form of care, the use of group homes and institutions. The proportion of children trapped in so-called congregate care has been cut by at least 73 percent. (Again, details are in NCCPR’s interactive database.)

But, of course, that means the reform effort made powerful enemies – the people who ran all those group homes and institutions that had to cut back or close entirely. That foster care-industrial complex apparently has the governor’s ear in a way that vulnerable children do not.

Finally, one more number: 15,000. As I’ve noted often on this Blog, that’s the number of cases examined in two massive studies of how children fared in typical cases seen by workers for child protective services agencies. In those typical cases the children left in their own homes typically fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

That doesn’t mean no child ever should be taken from her or his home. Rather, it means that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. A little girl named Logan Marr had to lose her life before Maine learned that lesson. To forget that lesson now would be like spitting on her grave.

Child welfare in New York: A poll worker’s rash mistake, and a foster care tragedy

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

This is not meant to minimize in any way what Andrew and Jessica Schiefer and their children have had to endure at the hands of the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. But they got off easy.

Their five-year-old daughter was not taken away from the white, middle-class family in Queens. The allegation against the parents almost certainly will be declared unfounded. But they’ll never forget the trauma of the interrogation, or the fact that the process will drag on for 60 days, or the fact that the ACS worker will march all over their child’s school poking into the family’s life, or the fact that there will be a file on the family in New York’s Central Register of alleged “child abusers” forever.

Almost none of it was necessary. But of course, ACS is encouraging more of the same.

Meanwhile, things didn’t go nearly so well for a nonwhite family on Staten Island. Their child was taken away in a case that raises questions about whether ACS is complying with a class-action consent decree. The child died in foster care.

TRAUMA IN QUEENS…

According to WNBC-TV, Channel 4, for the Queens family, the story begins on April 26, the day of the Republican primary in New York. Andrew Schiefer brought his five-year-old daughter with him when he went to vote. The little girl has eczema, a chronic skin condition characterized by scaly rashes. From time to time, when they see the family on the street, people ask them about the rash. The Schiefers answer the question and that is the end of it.

But a poll worker didn’t bother to ask. Instead, she simply assumed that the rashes were bruises and called the New York State child abuse hotline. That is exactly what New Yorkers have been encouraged to do year after year by everyone from Mayor Michael Bloomberg on down. It was easy for the poll worker to give the hotline the name and address – she used the voting records at the polling place.

It was unreasonable of the poll worker to jump to conclusions. But once she did so, it was reasonable for a child protective hotline to screen in a claim by an eyewitness that she saw a little girl with bruises on her hands and legs. It was reasonable for ACS to send a caseworker to the door.

But as soon as the parents produced the prescription eczema ointment and the name and contact information for the doctor, that should have been the end of it.

Instead, the “investigation” drags on and the family is dragged through the mud; all so that the caseworker can protect herself from sanction if she doesn’t follow every bureaucratic procedure required in the investigation – and, of course, to protect herself from landing on the front page if she doesn’t do it on any particular case and then something goes wrong.

A previous post to the blog gives a sense of the extent to which a typical family is put through the wringer. And this excellent story from New York Magazinegives a sense of why caseworkers in New York City are on the defensive.

Both the Schiefers and at least some of the reporters who interviewed them couldn’t understand why they would have a permanent record as a result of such an obvious mistake. You can blame that on some legislative grandstanding.

In New York State, the standard for having an allegation “indicated” is absurdly low. It’s essentially a caseworker’s guess. The caseworker is supposed to check the “indicated” box on a form when she thinks she has “some credible evidence” of abuse or neglect – even when there is more evidence of innocence.

Only when a case can’t meet even that preposterously low standard is the case ruled “unfounded.” So it’s no wonder that, until 1996, New York State law wisely called for expunging the records of unfounded reports. But then, after a high-profile case, the death of Elisa Izquierdo, state legislators started falling all over themselves to show who could look tougher on child abuse. So they changed the law, and now, except in very rare cases, families like the Schiefers never can clear their names completely.

… AND TRAGEDY ON STATEN ISLAND

The Staten Island case concerns William Monge, his girlfriend, Nicole Fair, and their two children. They say the only reason their children, a two-year-old and a six-month old, were taken away was what a news story called their “constant fighting.”

Thanks to a settlement in a class-action lawsuit, in New York City it is illegal to take children from a battered mother just because she has been beaten – because of how harmful that is to the children. (NCCPR’s Vice President, Carolyn Kubitschek was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.) It’s not clear whether this case violates the letter of that decree, but it sure seems to violate the spirit.

And even if a child must be taken away, the first option is supposed to be placement with a relative. Monge and Fair say they begged ACS to place the children with relatives. Instead, they were placed in stranger care. Now, the infant is dead. According to WABC-TV, channel 7:

The baby died Monday night after being rushed to the hospital from her foster mother's Steuben Street home on Staten Island. Sources now tell Eyewitness News the baby had a 105-degree fever and marks consistent with past trauma. The medical examiner says results of an autopsy are inconclusive, pending further study.

Meanwhile, back at Channel 4, reporter Melissa Russo was making the classic reporter’s error in these cases, using her closing “stand-up” concerning the Schiefer case to parrot the ACS party line. Said Russo:

As difficult as this situation might be for this family, too often we’re out here reporting on tragic stories where a caseworker does not do the minimum amount of investigation or neighbors don’t say something when they see something. So ACS tells us, when in doubt, when you suspect child abuse, it’s always better to err on the side of caution.

But there was nothing cautious about what that poll worker did. And there certainly was nothing cautious about the behavior of the ACS worker on Staten Island who took two children from a couple and sent them to a foster home where one of those children died. On the contrary, these were profoundly reckless acts.

And the real reason for those horror stories Russo mentions, in which a caseworker doesn’t do enough, almost always is because caseworkers are overwhelmed wasting hour after hour day after day on cases like the one against the Schiefers in order to protect not the children, but themselves. The more people take the advice of Russo (and Bloomberg’s and ACS) and call in anything and everything, the more likely it is that workers will be further overloaded with false allegations and have even less time to find children in real danger.

Child welfare in Minnesota: Investigate more cases, get more $

admin — Thu, 03 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

The previous post to this Blog discusses an impressive report from the auditing arm of the Minnesota Legislature. The report documented the extent to which child welfare in that state is arbitrary, capricious and cruel.

The report’s authors gave ten hypothetical “vignettes” to workers who decide whether or not to accept a report alleging child abuse or neglect for investigation. There was no unanimity on any of them and relative consensus on only three.

But the real bombshell in the report concerns an idiotic decision by the Minnesota Legislature concerning financial incentives.

I’ve written often about how financial incentives at the federal level encourage the misuse and overuse of foster care. But in Minnesota, where child welfare systems are run by individual counties, the legislature has compounded the problem.

That’s because of the formula the legislature came up with for how the state Department of Human Services will distribute both state social services funds and federal social services aid under a program called Title 20.

Here’s how the audit report explains it:

The 2011 Legislature created the Vulnerable Children and Adults Act. Among other things, the act specifies how DHS should distribute state and federal Title XX funds to county agencies. Increasingly, the funds are to be distributed based on the number of vulnerable children and adults in each county.

The number to be used in the formula is the number of children who were the subject of screened-in maltreatment referrals. Thus, agencies that cast wider nets for screening in child protection referrals could receive more funding, even if their caseloads reflect less-serious child protection cases than agencies that more selectively screen their referrals. [Emphasis added.]

So in Minnesota, if you subject children to the considerable trauma of a needless child abuse investigation, and waste the time of workers that could be better spent finding children in real danger, you get more money.

THE BIZARRE PRACTICE OF “CHILD WELFARE CHECKS”

There is another oddity in Minnesota worth noting: a practice known as a “child welfare check.” Again, from the report:

[L]aw enforcement officers may conduct “child welfare checks” on their own initiative or at the request of a child protection agency. As its name suggests, a child welfare check involves going to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child. A child welfare check may result in a referral to a child protection agency if the officer sees conditions or actions that constitute child maltreatment. Finally, law enforcement officers may take a child into custody for emergency placement if the child is found in conditions that endanger or could endanger his or her health or welfare.

So what, exactly, is the difference between a “child welfare check,” which “involves going to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child” and a child abuse investigation, which, of course involves to a family’s home and asking about or observing the welfare of a child?

Now here’s where it gets weird: Workers at county child welfare agencies in Minnesota said they typically requested such checks on cases they screened out as not rising to the level where they needed an investigation. In still other cases, the child welfare agency itself may do a “child welfare check” on a case that was screened out as not worthy of an “investigation.”

So in parts of Minnesota, if a case does not meet even the minimal standards to be screened in, it still may well be investigated.

The report cites some examples:

Staff at one agency stated that their city police make child welfare checks on every screened-out child protection referral. Staff at another agency stated that workers go out on almost every call that is screened out in order to do preventive work. However, other agencies do not perform child welfare checks or ask law enforcement to perform these checks.

While an initial child protection referral may be screened out, follow up from the agency or the police could result in an additional referral, which may be screened in for child protection. As a result, families in similar situations ultimately may be screened in to child protection by agencies that use child welfare checks, whereas families in the jurisdiction of agencies who do not use child welfare checks regularly may remain screened out.

Several respondents to the vignette portion of our screeners survey commented that a screened-out vignette could become a screened-in child protection referral after more information was learned through child welfare checks. … Another agency stated that they would screen out a vignette involving a teenager who had allegedly been punched by her dad, but added: "We would make a ‘strong’ Child Welfare visit. … If physical discipline continues we would very likely do a child protection family assessment in the future."

Making all this even weirder is the fact that Minnesota has pioneered the use of “differential response” for less serious cases that are screened in. Under differential response families are not investigated or “checked.” Rather they are offered an “assessment” and voluntary help.

So to sum up, in parts of Minnesota the system works like this:

● Reports deemed most serious: child abuse investigation.

● Reports deemed less serious but still “screened in:” voluntary assessment.

● Reports that are even less serious and so are screened out entirely: “child welfare check” – which is another term for a child abuse investigation.

Child welfare in Minnesota: Arbitrary, capricious and cruel

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Every state has thousands of pages of rules, regulations and laws concerning the investigation of alleged child abuse and the removal of children from their homes. But despite all that exists on paper, in real life child welfare is, in the words of Diane Redleaf, executive director of the Family Defense Center “a lawless system.”

Child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious, and cruel. A child’s fate depends on where that child lives, which caseworker shows up at the door and what mood she’s in.

This can be seen in the fact that when one compares states, or even counties within a state, there is wild variation in decision making: The rate at which a call is accepted for investigation (“screened in”) the rate at which investigated cases are “substantiated” – a misleading term which usually means that a caseworker has decided, on her own that she thinks there is slightly more evidence than not of maltreatment – and the rate at which children are torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to foster care all vary enormously.

So, for example, even after factoring in rates of child poverty, a child in Nebraska is more than five times more likely to be taken from his or her parents than a child in Illinois. In California, where child welfare systems are run by counties, a child is nearly three times as likely to be taken away in Butte County than in Tulare County.

But some of the strongest evidence of the fundamental lawlessness of child welfare has come from studies in which the people who decide whether to “screen in” a phone call alleging abuse or neglect are given hypothetical cases. Studies in New York in 1986 and Florida in 1991 found dramatic variation from county to county or even hotline operator to hotline operator.

The most recent, and most comprehensive such study that I know of comes from the Office of the Legislative Auditor in Minnesota – a state which, year after year, takes away children at rates far above the national average. It was released in February. It is a strikingly thorough assessment of how more than 80 different county run child welfare systems make their screening decisions. The study used several methods, including giving the screeners ten hypothetical cases, based on actual, typical calls to child protection “hotlines,” and asking if they would be accepted for investigation or not.

In only three cases did even 80 to 82 percent of the screeners agree (and in at least one of those cases, as is discussed below, they were dreadfully wrong). In three more cases, 64 to 71 percent of screeners agreed. And in the remaining four they split almost 50/50.

A SYSTEM GONE TO POT

The case that produced the most agreement that it should be screened in, actually was one of those where the evidence was strongest that the best thing the county child welfare agency could have done was leave the family alone. This is the hypothetical case:

Dr. Jones calls to report that Emily Blackdeer tested positive for marijuana after giving birth to a baby boy yesterday. He says the child’s meconium was not tested due to a mix up. Jones reports that Emily also tested positive for marijuana during her pregnancy. Jones said Emily told him she smoked marijuana during her pregnancy to help her with her appetite.

So in 80 percent of Minnesota counties, the stress any mother faces right after giving birth could be compounded by a child protective services worker coming to the door, poking and prying into the home asking mom about the most intimate aspects of her life, questioning friends, neighbors and relatives. (For reasons discussed below it might not play out that way in Minnesota, but the risk remains considerable.) All because, like a great many Americans, mom smoked pot. All this could happen to the mother, and the child could be placed at risk of foster care, in spite of the fact that Mom clearly was getting prenatal care - something she probably won’t do next time, since her doctor turned her in.

The enormous potential for harm in just these circumstances was well documented in stories in The New York Times and Philadelphia Citypaper.

In part this may be because Minnesota’s idiotically, broad, vague definition of “neglect” (as one county screener admitted, they could, if they chose, screen in almost any call) is specific on one point: “prenatally exposing a child to controlled substances” automatically is defined as “neglect.” But in this hypothetical, we don’t know if the infant was born with marijuana in his system.

Another possible reason: The mother’s fictional name is Blackdeer, suggesting she might be Native American. The hypotheticals used a wide variety of names, some of which suggested the family’s race. Unfortunately, the study did not go further and try giving identical hypotheticals with different racial descriptions to the screeners to test for the common problem of racial bias in child welfare decision-making.

The study notes that “Staff at one agency explained that marijuana use is so common in the area that when a positive marijuana test is the only concern, they screen out the referral and offer child welfare services instead.” But another county “screens in marijuana use because of the risk of mis-socializing a child.”

Right. Because nothing “socializes” a child better than a few foster homes.

In contrast, only 47 percent of counties would screen in a case in which a mother allegedly “is drunk every day to the point of throwing up and has withdrawal tremors from alcohol.” The father, who does not have custody, says the mother’s friends brought their four-year-old son to him because mom “was too drunk to take care of” the boy.

Of course in this case, the controlled substance is legal, and there are no ethnically-identifiable surnames.

ANOTHER APPALLING EXAMPLE

And it gets weirder still. In 54 percent of counties, this case would be “screened-in:”

Police fax the following report: I responded to a report of five-year-old Davie Michaelson wandering in town. I met with Ann Johnson, a passerby who had found this child. While I was speaking with Ann, a man approached who said he knew the child. He directed me to a house at the end of the block. The yard was fenced, but the gate and front door were open. I entered the house and found Tammy Michaelson (Davie’s mother) sleeping on the couch. I awakened her and she explained that she had worked the third shift at the gas station last night and had left the boy to watch cartoons while she napped. The TV was on with a children’s DVD playing. Tammy said she had locked the door, but Davie must have unlocked it and left.
A [records] search shows that Tammy, age 21, received children’s mental health services as a child.

I’ve written before about the double standards that abound in these types of cases. In an example of the kinds of unwritten rules that substitute for the rule of law in child welfare, a screener in one Minnesota county said that “caregivers generally get one free pass on wandering child allegations because such incidents often are accidental.

Other appalling decisions include:

● Twenty-nine percent of counties saying they would screen in a case where the only allegation is that a father who was evicted from his apartment now lives with his ten and 12-year-old sons in a trailer with no plumbing or electricity. In other words, he’s poor.

● More than one-third of counties would investigate a mother whose only crime was to have been punched and choked by the father while the children were upstairs playing video games and may or may not have heard what was going on. At least one county said they recently had screened in a case that involved parents yelling at each other, with no allegation of physical maltreatment.

This in spite of the fact that the danger to the child can be removed by arresting the abuser (an approach pioneered in Minneapolis) and in spite of the enormous body of research on the extra measure of harm done to children if those children are taken from their mothers under these circumstances.

THE ROLE OF DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE

To some extent screening in cases like the pregnant mother who smoked marijuana or the father who simply was poor might be explained by the fact that Minnesota pioneered “differential response,” in which some cases that normally would be screened out, and some which otherwise would get a full-scale investigation instead receive an “assessment” in which the agency offers help without the threat of removal.

But differential response exists statewide in Minnesota, yet there remains enormous variation in deciding whether to screen in cases. And differential response was never intended to be used in cases where the only issue is poverty or a mother who smokes pot while pregnant.

A more likely explanation can be found in this question, asked in a survey of screeners in Minnesota counties. They were asked if they agreed with the statement that “At times, child protection interventions can be more harmful than helpful to families.” Now, keep in mind, virtually everyone in child welfare knows that you are supposed to at least pretend to agree with that statement, given the gigantic body of evidence showing that it is true.

Yet 22 percent of screeners disagreed or strongly disagreed with that statement. In other words, nearly one time in four, a call to a child welfare hotline in Minnesota is likely to be taken by someone who has no clue that the investigation ever can do any harm to anyone.

That should cause a lot of people in Minnesota to be afraid – especially if they live in poor neighborhoods or on Indian reservations.

Making things worse: A bizarre Minnesota practice called a “child welfare check” and an insidious financial incentive to screen in cases. That story in a future post.

We’re back!

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:41:00 +0000

Reports of our death proved to be slightly exaggerated – which is my own fault, since those reports came from me. In any event, we have some funding left – and, of course, hope to raise more. For however long it lasts, we will continue our efforts to leave the child welfare system better than we found it.

J4 Social Change End of Semester Celebration

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:21:24 +0000

Monday April 30th, will mark our last session of Journalism for Social Change this semester. Fittingly, we will hear from former foster youth Sokhom Mao and Lily Dorman Colby, both leaders in a growing national youth-driven foster care reform movement.

Students, members of the public and any of our esteemed speakers are welcome to join the session at 5:00 PM in our customary location: The J-School Library in North Gate Hall. Immediately afterward folks are invited to join us for an end of the semester celebration in the J-School courtyard; refreshments and snacks provided.

During the Spring Semester, Journalism for Social Change broke ground with weekly lectures from leaders in child welfare, public policy and journalism to develop solution-based journalism covering the complex foster care system.

The vision of this collaboration between the graduate schools of Journalism, Public Policy and Social Welfare was to: 1) give students deep access into social problems and fluency in contemporary research as to contextualize proposed public policy solutions; 2) use the power of ethical journalism to engender civic action and engagement towards those solutions; 3) teach future actors in public policy the importance of sharing their ideas and recommendations with the public through the news media; and 4) allow those who will be specialized practitioners of public policy (in this case social workers) a forum to influence political and public will based on their front-line experience.

With a population of 408,000 children in foster care nationwide, 55,000 of whom live here in California; the media produced by students enrolled in this course and by those accepted as part of the Journalism for Social Change Summer Fellowship can have a direct and appreciable affect on the foster care system.

We hope this training will help students tackle these and broader societal issues throughout their careers, long after the course is over and they have finished graduate school.

Please join us in celebrating the conclusion of our first semester!

Jennifer Rodriguez is New Executive Director of Youth Law Center

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:41:08 +0000

Attorney Jennifer Rodriguez has been advocating on the rights of foster youth since her days with California Youth Connection, when many of her efforts resulted in legislative accomplishments including the development of a foster youth bill of rights, educational rights and services for foster youth, and increased efforts for permanence for older youth.

Now as the new Executive Director of the Youth Law Center, Rodriguez will not only be able to advocate on behalf of youth across the nation, but use her own experience growing up in the foster care system to make positive change for youth today.

FMC spent a day in the office with Rodriguez and had an intimate conversation about her experience in care, what she considers justice for foster youth, and how she will keep the movement of the child welfare system on the right track.

Take a look and post your thoughts about Rodriquez’s new role and what you want the Youth Law Center to focus on in coming years.

-Ryann Blackshere

Fostering Media Connections harnesses the power of journalism and media to drive public and political will behind policy and practice that improve foster care.

Big Foster Care Stories in 2012

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:37:58 +0000

While the news media’s coverage of California’s foster care system is generally driven by isolated cases of tragedy and systemic failings, another narrative exists.

Over the past twenty years, the numbers of children entering the system has been halved while lengths of stay for those that do enter foster care have also been reduced. California has led the nation in legislation that addresses the educational needs of foster youth and has built an incomplete but promising infrastructure to help foster youth transition to adulthood including the passage of landmark legislation to extend foster care in 2010.

But for all the gains, consistent budget cuts and the specter of “Re-Alignment” has created deep insecurity throughout the ranks of child welfare workers and the children they serve.

It is in these uncertain times that accurate and nuanced news coverage can hold those in power accountable and shed light on how decisions made in Sacramento affect children throughout the state.

Please join us for this penultimate session of Journalism for Social Change to hear from San Francisco Chronicle’s Editorial Page Editor John Diaz and Amy Lemley, policy director for the John Burton Foundation, as we explore the big stories in foster care in 2012.

Journalism for Social Change meets every Monday at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School for Journalism from 6:00 – 7:30 PM and features state and national leaders and researchers in journalism, public policy and child welfare. Monday’s session will be held in the J-School Library in North Gate Hall at the corner of Euclid and Hearst. Class is open to the public and those interested can RSVP at info@fosteringmediaconnections.org.

You can tune into KGO 810 Radio every Monday night at 7:35 PM to listen to a run down of that evening’s session.

Fostering Media Connections harnesses the power of journalism and media to drive public and political will behind policy and practice that improve foster care.

Foster Parents Considering Adoption

admin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Summarizes what foster parents should consider while deciding whether to adopt their foster child or youth, including information on the differences between foster care and adoption.