● First up, two items on the Snohomish County CASA
scandal. Just one day after the law firm
that exposed the scandal asked a key funder of CASA to investigate, that
funder, the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, said
it is looking into the issues raised by the scandal. I
have a blog post on it, and a summary of the issues in
this op-ed for The (Everett, Wash.) Herald.
● Just in time for back-to-school, school districts are
ramping up their use of child protective services to harass families. WUSA-TV exposed a particularly egregious
example in Washington, D.C. I
have a blog post about it, including a link to WUSA’s story.
● One year ago, a British online news site, The Tortoise held what it calls a
“ThinkIn” in the Bronx. But let the
reporter explain:
It was about
masculinity and the issues facing the city’s young men. A civil rights lawyer
made an intervention in the kind of tone that cuts through the noise. People
weren’t so scared of the police knocking on the door, she said. What families
in the Bronx most feared was a different wing of the state; it was child
protection workers, because that’s when you might face the worst and lose your
children.
Not only did this lawyer’s comment lead to a
very good story about child welfare in New York, it led to several good
stories about the depressingly-similar problems in the British system. All of the stories
are here.
● A federal appeals court ruled against a mother wrongly
placed in Hawaii’s central registry of alleged child abusers. The statute of limitations for appeals had
expired – but only because the mother never knew she was in the registry in the
first place, and the state never bothered to tell her. Though the court felt it was forced to rule
against the mother, one judge issued a scathing opinion blasting the state for
the ultimate Catch-22. Honolulu Civil Beat has the story.
● More than a year ago, the
Associated Press exposed the use of coerced “voluntary” foster-care
placements arranged by a county child protective services agency in North
Carolina. These are off-the-books
placements in which child protective services says if you don’t place your
child “voluntarily,” usually with a relative, they’ll take you to court and
place the children with strangers. It’s
actually a
common practice all over the country – but in Cherokee County, NC, it was
so egregious that the
state actually took over the county agency for a while.
Now, Carolina Public Press has
dug even deeper and found that things were actually even worse; including a
possibly illegal rush to terminate parental rights, and the state knew what was
going on for months before acting. The
story is a bit confusing; it’s easier to follow if you read the AP stories
first.
● Even as that was being exposed, the North Carolina
Legislature actually was considering legislation to further run roughshod over
the rights of children to live with their own families. I
discuss that bill in this blog post
● And a lawsuit in Vermont highlights the issue of wrongful
removal in that state, which takes away children at one of the highest rates in
the country. VTDigger
reports.
