NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 22

 

● Kansas has its own special, ugly little version of hidden foster care. I have a blog post on How the Kansas “child welfare” agency makes hundreds of foster children “disappear.” 

● Indiana has a law limiting the number of cases family police are supposed to carry – at least it has one for now. WRTV Indianapolis reports on efforts by some lawmakers to sneak repeal of those limits into the state budget – including NCCPR’s perspective on how it all traces back to Indiana’s obscene rate of tearing apart families. 

● Gotthamist and Black Enterprise both have stories on a new report about racial bias in the New York City family policing system. 

● It’s not just New York City, of course. The 19^th reports on Black Texas parents whose child was wrongly torn from them at birth. Now reunited, the family is still trying to fight its way out of what amounts to a child abuse registry Twilight Zone.

● Even as a white middle-class foster parent who doubles as a state legislator in the Child Removal Capital of America, West Virginia, tries to weaken laws protecting the rights of siblings to stay together in foster care, The Imprint reports on a national group founded by those with actual lived experience, that works to strengthen those protections. 

● For children and families who are survivors of sibling separation and all the other harms of family policing, Imani Worthy, co-founder and executive director of Black Failies Love and Unite has a column in The Imprint about what reparations should look like. 

● Here’s something you don’t see every day – in fact hardly ever: a child welfare “ombudsman” who recognizes that agencies make terrible errors in all directions. But Virginia’s ombudsman gets it. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on a “blistering” report by the ombudsman which finds that workers often make decisions “in arbitrary ways with little planning or thought.” 

Among other findings, the story notes, the report echoed concerns of other advocates that decisions sometimes 

-- can be more about the convenience of social service department staff than a child’s needs;
-- do not take account of earlier problems that put a child at risk;
-- result from personality conflicts with parents;
-- are based on hasty judgment calls about parents;
-- and can reflect unsubstantiated worries about children’s safety. 

It’s quite a contrast to the willful blindness of ombuds / “child advocates” in, for example, Maine and Massachusetts. 

● Speaking of Massachusetts, the Legislature there did the right thing when it slightly curbed the number of different conditions mandated reporters are mandated to report. But even that was too much for the state family police agency – which is trying to overrule state law with a regulation.  I have a blog post about the Department of Children and Family’s great big “DCF-U!” to the legislature. 

● Florida Politics reports that Florida is the latest state to introduce Reasonable Childhood Independence legislation. 

In this week's edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions:

● From Searchlight New Mexico: 

Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, 16-year-old Jaydun Garcia took his own life at a makeshift home for youth who lack foster placements.  Jaydun’s family included four brothers and a baby sister. He was very close to his siblings, those who knew him said, and a close friend to many kids in foster care. 

“He was always building us up, like helping us all,” said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun’s who lived with him for months in the Albuquerque office building of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, where case workers have often housed kids who don’t have foster homes available to them. … 

And finally … 

● Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating interview with “Alec Karakatsanis on the Media’s Role in Spreading ‘Copaganda’  So what is an interview about covering the police doing in a list of stories about family policing? Well, you don’t have to change the wording much to see the similarity.  Just change a sentence like this: 

[W]hen you report as an objective fact that there’s a shortage of  prison guards foster parents as opposed to too many people in prison too many children in foster care, you’re actually taking a side in a very consequential political debate.