News and commentary round-up, week ending August 20, 2019

Once again, there’s been a lot of news:

● Can anyone think of a field other than child welfare in which so-called professionals go around urging their colleagues to think LESS before taking action that could hurt people?  That’s not some kind of inference. As this op-ed in The Hill explains, they’re literally telling their colleagues to think less!

● The Herald, in Everett, Washington decided to take an approach to the Snohomish County CASA scandal that is unusual for Washington State media: They covered it – and the story is excellent. Up to now, only KING-TV has reported on it.  I’ve updated the latest NCCPR Blog Post about the scandal.

● The New York Times Upshot column has a story with profound implications as Congress prepares to reauthorize the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.  As I’ve written before, the CAPTA approach is all about coercing parents – turning them in to child protective services, supposedly for “help,” but the CPS agency gets to decide that, and we all know what that means.  But the Times reports on a new study, confirming earlier research, that this only drives pregnant women away from prenatal care.  The researchers even quantify the harm to children’s health:

They found that policies that defined alcohol use during pregnancy as child abuse or neglect were associated with an increase of more than 12,000 preterm births. The cost of these were more than $580 million in the first year of life. Policies mandating warning signs where alcohol was sold were associated with an increase of more than 7,000 babies born at low birth weight, at a cost of more than $150 million.

● You’re killing kids! No, YOU’RE killing kids!  That’s how low the debate about child welfare has sunk in Los Angeles County.  I have a blog post about it.

● The New York Daily News has a good editorial about why Gov. Andrew Cuomo should sign the Preserving Family Bonds Act.

● Newsday has a good story about how Nassau and Suffolk Counties, on New York’s Long Island, have significantly reduced the number of children in foster care. Nassau’s approach includes reducing racial bias through Blind Removal Meetings.

● Indianz.com has a good analysis of a good court decision – the one upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act.  The story includes a guide, from the Native American Journalists Association, for reporting on ICWA.

● Suppose, hypothetically, the straight teenage daughter of gay parents embraced conservative Catholicism, causing a lot of stress within a family.  The daughter’s school compounds the stress, and then calls the Child Protective Services agency – which takes the youth away and places her in foster care with one of her gym coaches.  Anyone who is appalled by that should be equally appalled by the reverse – as in this actual case from Connecticut.

● It shouldn’t be necessary for the federal government to have to issue an entire information memorandum to explain to child welfare systems why “family and youth voice are critical to a well-functioning child welfare system…”  But remember, this is the field in which professionals are urging less thinking (see first item above.)  And the memo isn’t just a general exhortation. It offers specific examples of ways to do this, including investing in high-quality legal counsel for youth and families.

Jerry Milner, head of the Children’s Bureau at the federal Administration for Children and Families, writes about the importance of listening to youth and families – and acting on what one hears – in this column for the Rethinking Foster Care blog.

● And in Washington State, the King County Department of Public Defense has created a short video to help guide parents through the first crucial days after a child has been removed.  State laws vary, so many of the specifics may apply only to Washington State, but some parts may be useful elsewhere as well.

In Los Angeles, the child welfare debate has sunk to this: You’re killing kids! No, YOU’RE killing kids!

It’s the kind of rhetoric that fuels foster-care panic. Weak leadership and dissembling from the head of the child welfare agency isn’t helping.

 

A game of political one-downmanship by County Supervisor
Kathryn Barger and one of her opponents in the next election,
Darrell Park, is doing what once seemed impossible: lowering the
quality of the child welfare debate in Los Angeles County.

             Here’s how low politicians can sink in an effort to score points off of child abuse tragedy.  After a high-profile child abuse fatality an elected official declares: “The bureaucracy’s gonna kill us, and it’s killing kids.”

            Just days later, someone running against this same elected official blames the same death on “the direct failure of a county government that rewards the [governing body of which the elected official is a part] for how many parties they go to rather than for actually doing their jobs.”

            There is nothing new about politicians exploiting child abuse tragedies for political gain.  And, indeed, this exercise in crass political one-downmanship occurred in exactly the place where it was most likely to occur: Los Angeles County, California.

            It’s been a decade since I first wrote that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, or, as it should properly be called, “The B.S.” might well be the worst political governing body in America when it comes to child welfare.  At that time I wrote this about the m.o. of the B.S.:

In 1954, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont denounced his notorious colleague Joe McCarthy in words that need be changed only slightly to explain the modus operandi of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in child welfare cases. To paraphrase Flanders:

"They don their war paint; they go into their war dance; they emit their war whoops; they go forth to battle -- and proudly return with the scalp of a social worker."

            The worst of the bunch was Michael Antonovich. Indeed, while he was in office, to paraphrase a line originally used for at least two U.S. Senators, the most dangerous place to stand in Los Angeles was between Michael Antonovich and a television camera.

In the years since, four out of the five Supervisors, including Antonovich, left office.  But guess what: Here come the new Supes, just like the old Supes.  A year ago I wrote:

Do we really have to go through another round of preening, posturing, finger-pointing and general sound and fury signifying nothing in the aftermath of a horrible child abuse death?  Do we really need another round of “[name of politician here] demands answers”-type press releases?  Don’t political leaders in Los Angeles finally owe the county’s most vulnerable children more?

Those are the questions we should be asking after the latest high-profile death of a child “known to the system” – the death of Anthony Avalos.  But so far, all we’ve gotten is more of the same.

            The worst of the new batch? Probably Kathryn Barger, who made an inane statement in the wake of the death of Anthony Avalos that I singled out at the time.

            So guess who made that inane statement about the bureaucracy killing kids in the wake of the death of another child, Noah Cuatro. Yep, Kathryn Barger.  What I did not know last year, is that Barger learned from the worst: She was the staffer in charge of child welfare issues for Antonovich.

            And it’s Barger’s former and current opponent, Darrell Park, who sank to the same level in suggesting that behavior by the Supervisors is killing children.

Foster-care panic? Who cares?

            But we learned something even worse about Barger this time.  She knows rhetoric like hers can cause a foster-care panic – a sharp, sudden spike in removals of children from their homes – but she doesn’t seem to give a damn.  Indeed, she seems to think it’s somehow inevitable.  So, she told the Chronicle of Social Change:

[Y]ou can see the rates of kids being pulled out their homes go up because social workers are petrified that they could be the next casualty of what’s going on.

Well, yes. That can happen when politicians accuse the “bureaucracy” of killing kids – and they’re the bureaucracy.

Bottom line: Barger learned well from her mentor. Crank out those press releases!  Accuse whoever’s convenient of complicity in child abuse deaths!  Grab those headlines any way you can!  And if a whole lot of children suffer the trauma of needless removal because of it, and if workers are further overwhelmed, leaving them even less time to find the next child in real danger, well, that’s just too bad.

But while, as Chronicle publisher Daniel Heimpel put it in a follow-up story, Barger seems to think a foster-care panic is “all but a fait accompli” – it doesn’t have to be.  Proof of that can be found in Connecticut.

In 2011, Gov. Dannel Malloy persuaded Joette Katz to step down from the State Supreme Court to take the hardest job in state government, running the Department of Children and Families. She stayed in that job through both of Malloy's terms in office.  The state had gone through at least three cycles of foster-care panic since 1995.  And months after Katz started on the job, it could have happened again.  But it didn’t.

This time, after a child “known to the system” died, there was no mass scapegoating of front-line workers, no hiding behind confidentiality, and no foster-care panic. 

“I think in the past that’s been exactly the mistake, frankly,” Katz said at the time.

A child dies and the next thing you know, workers are getting thrown under the bus, and 500 children get removed [from their homes] the next day because it’s a reaction to a tragedy. I think that’s the exact wrong way to behave.

That’s why, at the time, I called Katz the gutsiest leader in child welfare.  But just as important, her boss backed her up. Gov. Malloy proved to be America’s gutsiest political leader on child welfare issues.  And he continued to back her up through both his terms, even as he suffered politically for it.

In contrast, the B.S. is – well, we’ve seen exactly what it is.

Bobby Cagle isn’t helping

And the Los Angeles system is run by Bobby Cagle, who presided over one of America’s worst foster-care panics when he ran the child welfare system in Georgia.  Nothing he has done or said in Los Angeles inspires confidence.

And indeed, even as he claims not to want a foster-care panic in Los Angeles, he’s misleading the public about the fact that one already is underway – albeit not as bad an increase as one might expect.

Bobby Cagle

A foster-care panic affects every decision point in child welfare.  Faced with horror story headlines and a barrage of messages to report anything and everything, people do just that – almost certainly increasing the proportion of false reports.  Caseworkers, terrified of having the next tragedy on their caseload are more prone to label a flimsy allegation “substantiated.” And even when they don’t remove the child, they are more prone to drag a family into court and force it to jump through the hoops of court supervision – adding enormous needless stress on the family, and overloading the courts.

Sure enough, those court petitions are up.  But, Cagle tells us, there is not a foster-care panic because

“Although the rate of petitions may have gone up somewhat, it did not result in more children coming out of the home proportionally” [emphasis added].

But if you are bringing more families into court needlessly and then taking the same proportion of children away, that means you are taking more children needlessly.

And, in an example of the insensitivity to the harm child welfare can do to children that characterized his tenure in Georgia and L.A., Cagle adds:

I think it’s never a bad thing to have the courts become involved, that’s a safety mechanism to have another set of eyes on it.

But all those additional court cases are stealing time caseworkers could spend finding the relatively few children in real danger who really do need to be taken from their homes.  All those additional court cases are slowing down the entire process, delaying provision of services to families and prolonging time spent in foster care.  And indeed, while entries actually have not gone up dramatically, there has been a disturbing increase in the number of children trapped in foster care on any given day.

Cagle’s dissembling is not unusual.  The head of New York City’s child welfare agency, David Hansell, keeps trying to pull the same sorts of stunts to hide the most recent foster-care panic there.

But at least New York City starts out with a relatively low rate-of-removal.  It’s that much worse in Los Angeles which tears apart families at more than double the rate of New York City.

Paradoxically, that may help explain why, in recent years, there have not been dramatic spikes in removals – in spite of the behavior of the Supervisors.  The baseline is simply so high it’s hard to go higher. (On the other hand, that’s never stopped Philadelphia, which is even worse.) Or it’s possible that, in the largest locally run child welfare system in America, and one that sprawls across a large urban landscape, a small countywide increase may hide a larger spike in the region where the latest high-profile tragedy took place.

Here’s what we do know: The bureaucracy is not killing kids.  The Supervisors are not killing kids.  In fact, Barger, Park and the rest probably have convinced themselves that they're actually helping - rationalization is powerful. But they're not. 

The process of making Los Angeles County children safer will begin when, finally, at least one member of the B.S. has the guts to say: “We’re taking away far too many kids. Those needless removals are doing terrible harm to children, and denying caseworkers the time to find kids in real danger.”

In the meantime, the B.S. brings to mind another famous comment directed at Joe McCarthy: “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”

NCCPR in Youth Today: Want to Prevent Child Abuse? Behold the Transformative Power Of Cash

Half a century ago, as the Vietnam War still raged, President Nixon began bombing neighboring Cambodia — without bothering to mention it to Congress or the American people. After the New York Times found out about it, this became known as the “secret bombing” of Cambodia

But as Garry Trudeau pointed out in “Doonesbury” four years later, it wasn’t a secret to the Cambodians. “Secret bombings?” a Cambodian says. “Boy, there wasn’t any secret about them. Everyone here knew. I did. And my wife, she knew too! She was with me, and I remarked on them.”

I think of this whenever people in child welfare declare themselves shocked by something that everyone who has to deal with child protective services already knows. The latest case in point: a commentary for a medical journal by Dr. Katherine Campbell, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah. The headline reads: “Prevention of Child Maltreatment as an Unexpected Benefit of Social Policies.”

 “Unexpected”? Not for those who are poor or ever have been poor. I suspect they’d say: “It’s not unexpected to us. We remarked on it.”

The commentary concerns a study that found that reports of what child protective services agencies deem “neglect” declined in states that took advantage of the option to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and increased in states that did not take advantage of this option.

Read the full column in Youth Today

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending August 14, 2019

Lots of news this week, starting with two important court decisions.

● An appellate court in Washington State blasted the scandal-plagued Snohomish County CASA program – that’s the one a judge found engaged in “the blatant withholding and destruction of evidence … rampant, continuing lying …” and “pervasive and egregious” misconduct. 

The appellate court also blasted the Snohomish County Superior Court for making a fair termination of parental rights trial impossible – because court employees actually worked with the CASA program instead of remaining neutral.  Through it all, the National CASA Association has remained silent.  Do they actually approve of the Snohomish County CASA program’s actions?  Details on all of this, and a link to the decision, in this NCCPR Blog Post.

● A federal appellate court also brought good news last week: It upheld the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Here’s the National Indian Child Welfare Association statement on the decision.

● In Youth Today, I review recent studies that all have one thing in common:  They demonstrate that, when it comes to reducing child abuse, there’s nothing like the transformative power of cash.  And, great news! In the same column, I reveal the apparently up-to-now secret way to target child abuse prevention without resorting to Big-Brother, privacy-invading predictive analytics!

● I have long argued that the so-called Family First act has been vastly overhyped. The funds can be used on only a few types of services and they have to meet criteria for being “evidence-based” that are vastly higher than the criteria for say, foster care or residential treatment (which have no real evidence base).  But now comes word that the federal government will be studying whether to allow funding under Family First for programs that follow the Homebuilders model for Intensive Family Preservation Services.  That alone would make Family First vastly more useful.  Here’s how Homebuilders works.  And here’s a summary of the impressive evidence base for it.

● In the Chronicle of Social Change, Vivek Sankaran writes about the need for judges to behave like – you know, judges, and enforce the law. He writes:

[T]hroughout my career, I’ve heard judges chide lawyers and parents when they emphasize the law. One frustrated judge said to a colleague, “I see you’re going down the statutory road again.” Another said to a parent, “I know there’s a legal right to ask for more visits. But if I gave it to you, then I’d have to give it to every parent.” A third said, “I know the law says that corporal punishment is allowed. But in my courtroom, this is what we do.”

And I would argue that, at its most extreme, this attitude helps explain what happened in Snohomish County (see first item above).

● Another Chronicle story looks at how “In Aftermath of Latest Child Death, L.A. Contends with Potential Foster Care Panic.”  I’ll have some thoughts on this one soon.

● In Talk Poverty Elizabeth Brico writes about how “State Laws Punish Pregnant People Just For Seeking Drug Treatment.” And of course, they also punish the children.  Ms. Brico cites an Amnesty International report documenting how such laws drive women away from treatment and away from prenatal care.

● When a parent who has lost a child to foster care – or is at risk of it – can get help from another parent who’s been through the same ordeal it can help prevent the placement, or shorten it, lessening the trauma for children.  So, Rise, a magazine written by parents who have been in this position, asks: Why aren’t more of them working in NYC? This is, of course, an excellent question for the rest of the country as well.

● Also in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has on his desk a bill that could significantly ease the trauma for children who have lost their parents forever due to termination of parental rights.  The bill would allow judges to continue contact between these children and their parents if the judge is persuaded it’s in the child’s best interests. 

In the New York Daily News, Chris Gottlieb, co-director of the Family Defense Clinic at New York University School of Law, explains why the governor should sign the bill.  And family defense attorney Amy Mulzer has a letter to the editor about the bill in the Albany Times Union.

● Until it was surpassed in 2017 by Montana, Wyoming had the dubious distinction of child removal capital of America. (It’s still #2 in that regard.)  So it’s encouraging that the legislature in that state is considering a bill that would bolster family defense.  The story illustrates the importance of both the new study showing that high-quality family defense safely reduces foster care and the change in federal rules that allows some of the cost of such defense to be reimbursed with federal funds.

● I have a guest commentary in the Times of Northwest Indiana about how the latest McLawsuit filed by the latest group founded by Marcia Lowry, A Better Childhood, may well make that state’s dismal child welfare system even worse.

● And finally, though not related directly to child protective services, Vice News has a disturbing story about how the private adoption industry coerces parents into giving up their children.  The common denominator shared by these cases and those involving CPS is poverty. The Vice story cites a survey which found that “most women … put up their babies for adoption at least in part because of financial concerns.

A deafening silence from National CASA as an appellate court blasts a scandal-plagued CASA program in Washington State

● The court overturned the termination of a family’s parental rights, and ordered that the case start over.

● The court also ordered the CASA program, and the county Superior Court – which it called “a biased tribunal” -- cut off from any involvement in the case.

● But through it all, the National CASA Association has taken no public action against the program. Click on the audio to get a good sense of National CASA’s response:

To read all about the Snohomish County CASA Scandal, see these previous posts to this Blog.

UPDATE, AUGUST 18, 2019: The Everett Herald has an excellent story about the whole Snohomish County CASA scandal, with a clear step-by-step overview of what happened.

Of course court officials, who were instrumental in causing the problems and turned themselves into what an appellate court called a “biased tribunal” now claim they’ve fixed everything. In other words, the foxes have doubled the guard on the henhouse.

But the most striking part of the story is this: The Snohomish County Court system says that it “increased training [for CASAs] to, among other things, stress honesty, truthfulness and the correct way to handle documents.”

Now. one might be able to make a case that there is something complicated about handling documents.  But what does it say about the inherent nature of CASA that it can so corrupt the ethics of good people that they actually need training to know they’re supposed to be honest and truthful?

The problem with the scandal at the Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) program in Snohomish County, Wash.,*  is that court decisions describe so much misconduct and it’s so awful that it’s hard to know where to begin. 

So perhaps it’s best to begin here: Everything discussed below is documented in the public record – not in assertions by parties, but in decisions by a judge; decisions that run to hundreds of pages.  And now, we can add three more judges and 29 more pages.

On Monday, an appellate court panel ruled unanimously that there was blatant bias, not just on the part of the CASA program but also the Snohomish County Superior Court (which, at one point actually declared itself and the CASA program effectively one-and-the-same).

The appellate court found so much bias that it threw out the termination of parental rights at the center of it all and ordered everyone back to square one.  They also ordered that square one, and everything else about the case, be located someplace other than Snohomish County.

The bias runs so deep, the appellate court found, that even bringing in a judge from another county isn’t good enough. They tried that, and that judge upheld the termination. But the appellate court found that the judge

heard oral argument on the motions in Snohomish County and relied on a record generated in that biased tribunal in making his decisions.  For that reason the orders [he] entered … do not escape the taint of bias and must be vacated.

It started with CASA

It all began with the CASA program.  So we should begin with a reminder, from a previous post, of what CASA is all about.

CASAs are minimally-trained amateurs, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, who are sent out to investigate overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families. Then they recommend to the judge whether the children should be separated from those families, sometimes forever. Judges typically take the advice. 

The most comprehensive study ever done of the program, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that it does nothing to make children safer. The study also found that CASA prolongs foster care and reduces the chances children will be placed with relatives instead of strangers.

One CASA program saw no problem when a performer at a fundraiser dressed in blackface, another CASA program fell apart as soon as it had to confront issues of race. A law review article called CASA “an exercise of white supremacy.” 

And for many years, the Snohomish County program used a volunteer who would go on to write a vile screed about the parents he investigated (and another vile screed about Muslims). They are so awful Donald Trump would probably tweet them if he knew about them.

In the case at the center of the scandal, an African-American child was placed with a white foster family days after birth.  And it appears that, from day one, the CASA assigned to the case would do anything to keep it that way, including leaking confidential documents to the foster family.

Another CASA infiltrated a listserv for family defense attorneys to learn about their strategy. (“Infiltrated” isn’t my word; it’s from a decision by Judge Anita Farris, who presided over the case. Judge Farris was praised by the appellate court for acting with integrity throughout.)

But it didn’t stop there.  Judge Farris found that the CASA program conducted a campaign of threats and intimidation against the parents’ lawyers. 

And Judge Farris used another word – one she had not used in her entire judicial career until this case: Perjury.  Judge Farris ruled that  the program engaged in “the blatant withholding and destruction of evidence … rampant, continuing lying …” and “pervasive and egregious” misconduct.

The appellate court seemed particularly struck by the fact that CASA’s

entire hard copy file for this dependency mysteriously “disappeared” from the [CASA] Program’s possession during the post-trial proceedings regarding the [CASAs’] misconduct.

The appellate court decision only scratches the surface of the misconduct.  There is more detail, and links to Judge Ferris’s decisions in this previous post and this one. 

Thumb on the scales of justice

But it didn’t stop there.  The family wasn’t just up against a CASA program that engaged in what Judge Farris called “pervasive and egregious” misconduct. They were up against a court system that did everything it could to help the CASA program win this case, putting a giant thumb on the scales of justice.  Eventually, the Snohomish County Superior Court claimed that it and the CASA program were essentially one-and-the-same – and that forced Judge Farris to recuse herself. 

Somewhat oddly, she still ruled in favor of termination of parental rights, apparently concluding that even disregarding the CASA program’s behavior there was reason to do so. But the appellate court disagreed, finding that the behavior of the court system and the CASA program made a fair trial impossible.  But that was the only area of disagreement.  The appellate court did not dispute any of Judge Farris’ findings about CASA or the Snohomish County Superior Court.  On the contrary, citing precedent that “unchallenged findings are verities on appeal” the appellate judges wrote this:

Here, Judge Farris displayed no personal bias and attempted to conduct an unbiased proceeding. But the sticky wicket is that the tribunal in which A.H.’s dependency and termination proceedings took place was biased because of the involvement of superior court employees working against the parents in this case. … And Judge Farris entered many unchallenged findings of fact in her recusal order and memorandum decision…

All of this led the judges to rule, in effect, that the Snohomish County Superior Court,  by taking sides at all, let alone siding with a CASA program that Judge Farris found engaged in “pervasive and egregious” misconduct is, itself, so biased that it should not be allowed anywhere near this case.

The court ordered a new trial in another county, and the appointment of a new lawyer for the child.

Most media failed, too

All this, of course, challenges the master narrative of most Washington State media. They cling to the view that all parents who become enmeshed in the system are at best sick and at worst evil, and send the message that foster parents, CASAs etc. can do no wrong.  That explains why with the exception of some excellent reporting from Seattle television station KING, the scandal has been ignored. [UPDATE, AUGUST 18: As noted above, the Everett Herald has now done an excellent story.]

Even worse is the behavior of the National CASA Association. The Snohomish program describes itself as “an associated member of Washington State CASA and National CASA.”

So listen again to the functional equivalent of what we’ve heard from National CASA about this scandal:

So, does National CASA have a problem with one of its associated members behaving this way or not? 

What about the other cases?

What are the odds that a CASA program would engage in “pervasive and egregious” misconduct in only one case?  What are the odds that the court system would side with the CASA program and against a family in only one case?   What are the odds that a longtime volunteer who calls the parents he investigated “felons,” “junkies,” and  “dumb as dirt” may have made some, uh, erroneous recommendations that were accepted by judges?

What is to be done about all those other cases?

*-Although it has always been a CASA program, for many years it called itself a Volunteer Guardian ad Litem (VGAL) program.  It’s the same thing, and the program has long been an associated member of National CASA.  It now calls itself a CASA program, but the appellate court decision still uses VGAL.

NCCPR in Times of Northwest Indiana: The last thing Indiana child welfare needs is another McLawsuit

Three months ago, NWI Times reporter Giles Bruce documented the problem at the heart of Indiana’s child welfare failure: The state routinely confuses poverty with “neglect.” That in turn leads to Indiana tearing apart families needlessly at one of the highest rates in America.

Unfortunately, it appears that Marcia Lowry never read Bruce’s story, because she’s brought a lawsuit against the Indiana Department of Child Services that ignores this issue. As a result, the lawsuit could end up making Indiana child welfare even worse. It’s not that DCS doesn’t deserve to be sued — but this isn’t the way to do it.

Read the full NCCPR Guest Commentary here.

And for more about the failure of these suits, and links to data cited in the commentary, see NCCPR’s publication, The children wronged by “Children’s Rights” (and by “A Better Childhood,” too).

News and commentary round-up, week ending August 7, 2019

● I missed this excellent story from Youth Today about the value of high-quality family representation in New York when it ran in June.

● In this story for Reason attorney Diane Redleaf describes how so-called “child abuse pediatricians” can traumatize families by jumping to the conclusion that even the slightest bruise on a child must be abuse. She also discusses proposed federal legislation that would make everything worse.  “If these bills become law,” she writes, “any parent who has a baby with a bruise—regardless of whether it's from a medical condition, or even from learning to crawl—could get entangled in a months-long battle to maintain custody.” 

As you read the story, try to imagine what would have happened had the family Redleaf profiles been poor.

● At least 40 percent of America’s foster children live in states where court hearings in child welfare cases are open. But reporters rarely show up.  The Arizona Republic rectified that, at least for the moment, in a big way. They sent 12 reporters who try to observe every child welfare court hearing in the state’s largest juvenile court on one day.  Here’s the result.

● The New York Times has a story about an important piece of children’s rights legislation now on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s desk.  It would preserve the right of adopted children to maintain contact with their birth parents after termination of parental rights – if a judge ruled it was in the children’s best interests.  Naturally, the commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, David Hansell, and much of the state’s child welfare establishment is against it.

● Voices for Children in Nebraska has a good data snapshot concerning racial disparities at the very beginning of the child welfare process in that state: who gets called in to the hotline.  There’s a story about it in the Lincoln Journal Star:  And the full report is here  

● In an interview with NPR concerning family separation at the Mexican border, an ACLU lawyer says: "Can you imagine how many Americans would lose their children if [a minor offense] was a basis for taking away your child?"

Actually, yes – something I discuss in this post to this blog.

Of course, if you’re poor you already know this.  The New York Times has a case in point in this story.