● The first paragraph of this story from Reason says it all:
Two Colorado child care workers will go on trial this June for presiding over a day care center where a 5-year-old pulled down a 3-year-old's pants.
See NCCPR’s comment in the Reason story. And check out the report in the Colorado Sun, which broke the story.
● The American Civil Liberties Union At Liberty podcast devotes an episode to how “Mandatory Reporting Is Destroying Families.” Guest Anjana Samant of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project says that “I definitely see work in the child welfare system as a core, just basic ACLU bread-and-butter of civil liberties fight.”
● Samant also discusses the enormous harm of predictive analytics algorithms in child welfare. Up to now the designers have pretended that the algorithms don’t use factors like race and poverty. But in their latest, they stop pretending: Race is explicitly included as a factor in measuring the supposed risk to children from their own parents. I have a blog post about it.
● Florida families who say they were denied the chance to care for extended family members, with the children sometimes placed with well-connected strangers instead, are not giving up their legal fight, as WFTS-TV reports.
● In Texas, the Texas Tribune reports, kinship foster care families face another kind of discrimination: less financial aid than stranger-care parents, even though kinship caregivers are more likely to need the help.
● From The Guardian, this story from San Diego: “She lost her child in a home birth. Prosecutors charged her with murder.”
● Remember the story of the Washington State foster mother and foster grandmother who kidnapped a foster child and fled to Vietnam? (Here’s a reminder.) They were caught in January and, KING-TV reports, they’ve pled guilty. But, perhaps because the case contradicts a decades-long “master narrative” of showing contempt for birth families and lionizing foster parents, the Seattle Times still hasn’t published a word about the case.
● Delaware may become the next state to take some small steps toward boosting the quality of legal representation for families.
● In his review of the new film A Thousand and One for The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes:
Throughout, [Director A.V.] Rockwell brings to the fore the media hum of politics, the electoral results and the matters of law that give rise to Inez’s daily difficulties, starting with the matter-of-fact separation of families by way of the foster-care system and the enduring, multigenerational miseries that such cavalier interventions inflict on parents and children alike.
And ICYMI, here’s the trailer:
