As a CASA guardian ad-litem with many years in child protection I’ve met many terribly abused children that have fallen through the cracks of overwhelmed child protection workers (and they never make the papers).

In my world, 99% of the abused and neglected children go unnoticed except to the overworked & under-resourced social workers and under- appreciated adoptive/foster parents.

Part of the problem is that since newspapers have been in decline, the old beat reporters just don’t exist anymore (at least in my community) & the topic is painful.

It hurts to confront the cruel reality that our communities deliberately visit on these children.

To appreciate the meanness of some states I point to (Mitch Daniels) Indiana’s stealing (redirecting) the funding promised to parents that adopted abandoned special needs children (after these children had been adopted) & Minnesota’s fiscally irresponsible de-funding of subsidized daycare which forced the county to place children in foster homes because their father’s job did not pay enough to afford daycare.

It costs way more to place children in foster care than it would have to subsidize his daycare payments.

It cost Hennepin County millions of dollars to pay for the care of the four year old boy the court thought would be better off with his father even though dad had a court order to stay away from young boys because of what he did to them.  My client is now is now 23, has AIDS, and has been in over 30 foster homes and he will be a ward of the state until he dies.  He was been tied to a bed, starved, beaten, sexually abused and left alone for days at a time from 4 to 7 years of age.  That never made the paper.  Nor did the four year old girl who I visited in the suicide ward of Fairview hospital (her sister’s story was much worse).

If you read Jordan’s reporting, it will be easy to hate the social workers involved.  Please remember that under-training & under-funding combined with giant case loads, makes their task impossible.

Like blaming teachers for failed schools or cops for full prisons, it’s the wrong place to focus.

We did this; our state legislators, governors, and the mean spirited political hate fest that rallies around fear and war at the direct cost to American children.

When a baby is found in a dumpster, the mother has horrible mental health issues & needs help, but our communities have accepted that we just don’t support young mom’s or their troubled children.

It’s all wrong and we know it.  It is up to us to talk about these issues and bother our media and legislators until positive change happens.

Policy violations in Colorado social-services system found amid deaths of 43 children

 

(Denver Post file photos)

Read more:Policy violations in Colorado social-services system found amid deaths of 43 children – The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/frontpage/ci_19844865#ixzz1l2oc8FUn

Share this:

Before he was 18, Luis had seen 25 of his friends killed by violence.   From 1990 to 1998 6000 LA youth died in gang related violence.

Rodriguez writes that “Gangs flourish where there’s a lack of recreation, education, or employment”.

Our nation’s continued focus on punishment over accommodation/compassion for children has created the largest prison population in the world (over 2 million-add to that juvenile justice/child protection/probation/parole, and the numbers are staggering).

Criminalizing youth that society spurns & declaring them the enemy brings huge costs and great pain to the community and the families involved.

Minneapolis MN arrested 44% of its adult black men in 2001 (no duplicate arrests – 58% of those men went on to be rearrested for a second crime within two years).

Each large American community has its own truths and statistics relating to youth well-being (or non-well-being).

America leads the industrial world in teen aged STD’s, violent crime, preteen moms, child mortality, child poverty, child abuse deaths, and youth tried as adults (25%).

The police and the courts are not equipped to solve these problems.

It is up to communities to understand the nature and scope of these issues and treat children with sufficient care and resources to end the madness as stated by MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz; “The difference between that poor child and a felon is about eight years”.

Let’s all get behind child friendly programs and politics and end the pipeline to prison & preteen pregnancies that America now promotes.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Share this:

Somalia, because it has no functioning government, and the U.S. because we will not stop training child soldiers*.

Americans are proud of and outspoken about spirituality, values, and freedom – making proclamations about human rights, women’s rights, and so on.

My twelve years in County child protection as a volunteer guardian ad-Litem (Court Appointed Special Advocate/CASA) has taught me hard lessons.

Beaten children, sexually abused children, starved and neglected children enter the child protection system every day.  Three million children a year are reported to child protection services in America.

Their numbers and stories are staggering.  It is so painful and so common.

We do not offer adequate help or protection to children that need it the most.

Worse, we don’t like to talk about it.  There is nothing that brings cold hard silence to a conversation than talking about my experiences with child sexual abuse or otherwise traumatized children.

When there is no discussion by those in the know,  few people outside the system can understand the issues which means the media and politicians that could draw attention don’t (or they are mixed up in their understanding and speaking which is actually worse).

So nothing changes.  In fact, during these lean times, programs for abused and neglected children are disappearing all over our nation and things are getting worse.   Our Voices Matter was powerful program that allowed foster and adoptive kids a voice has recently disappeared due to lack of support.  Many truly useful organizations are disappearing today because we don’t support children that need help the most.

From the courts, social workers, CASA programs, & health and other resources, to the foster and adoptive parents that work so hard to make life bearable for traumatized youth, child protection systems throughout this country are overwhelmed and unable to provide the services these children need.

Until I became part of the system, I had no idea that that 90% of the youth in juvenile Justice came through child protection, or that over 50% of youth in juvenile justice suffered from mental health issues with fully half that number diagnosed with multiple and severe mental health problems (the  same is most likely true of children in child protection).

Without professional help, how do you un-teach drug use or sex habits to a 9 year old that has been forced to practice these things at home?

My first visit to a four year old was at the suicide ward at Fairview hospital.  I’ve written about a seven year old foster child that hung himself and left a note (he hated the Prozac).   There is nothing like facing a very young self-hating, suicidal child to bring home the cold hard reality that the mental health services, consistent help from the county (her new parent) will not be there.  Knowing that her chances of recovering to lead a normal life are very, very, slim.  This has made me feel like I’m part of a crime.

As long as we don’t talk about it, no one can know about it.  Social workers are trained to not talk about it.  These children have NO Voice in the substance and direction of their own lives.  They suffer every day all day and we don’t want to hear about it.

Whether you are an abused child, foster/adoptive parent/social or health worker; empower yourself to start this conversation (and tell your friends/family to vote for child friendly initiatives**).

LET’S START TALKING

Support KARA’s efforts;  sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

*It has been suggested that this is why Minnesotan’s were willing to pay 24 Billion dollars as their share of the Iraq/Afghan war over this two year budget, but unwilling to pay 6 billion dollars for healthcare, childcare, education, & infrastructure over the same period.

**My last official act as an active CASA guardian ad-Litem was to remove four children from a father whose only fault was that he could not afford daycare.  The state had defunded subsidized daycare & put the money back into the general fund (just like Indiana did with the money promised to parents that had adopted special needs children this year).

It was the state’s position that it would be cheaper, and the right thing to do, to tear these children from their hard working, honorable father, and put them in foster homes, than to fund subsidized daycare.  In what universe could this be true?

If you are a reader of this blog, you know that the Federal Reserve Board studies, www. AVAHealth.org, and overwhelming  data over thirty years clearly proves the extraordinary costs of letting children slip through the cracks into crime, prison, and more dysfunctional families. It’s way more efficient to save a child than to help a felon or preteen mom recover from a life of abuse and neglect and the behavior problems that follow.

What good are rights if there is no discussion or enforcement?

Support KARA, listen to or buy the book INVISIBLE CHILDREN, schedule a discussion or keynote speech.

Share this:

Like the settlement that was paid to the birth parents of the child lost forever (literally “disappeared”)  in the Nevada foster care system, or the dozens of brutal deaths children have suffered over the years in this nation where inadequate child protection services exist & social workers are regularly blamed when children are brutalized when in fact they are working in conditions that almost ensure that at risk children will pay the price for a counties / states malfeasance.

It would be far less expensive (see the studies & long term costs) and the right thing to do to see that foster & adoptive parents were well funded, well regulated, and early childhood programs set up to insure that every child had a chance to have a meaningful life in America.

Until then, let’s sue the pants off of states and counties that refuse to care for children.

New York Times Dec 29th article on 68 Million Dollar Settlement Proposal

Please send me related stories.

Support KARA’s effort to improve support for children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Full New York Times Article below;

Share this:

This Indychannel.com news article points to Federal statistics showing that Indiana has one of the highest rates of child abuse and neglect in the nation.

“Some child advocates said they’ve seen some progress recently, but others said they are gravely concerned about recent abuse and neglect deaths and what they consider backsliding services”.

It was clear after talking with adoptive and foster families at their annual conference that Indiana’s failure to protect it’s children is due to the politicizing of children’s issues and not the hard work being done by foster & adoptive parents, educators, & social workers that are trying to provide homes, education, and services.

We all know that healthy children become healthy adults & contributing members of our community & that unhealthy children become preteen mothers & juvenile felons that cost our cities and states a fortune over a lifetime.

Wake up Indiana politicians.  Your citizens depend on you to understand basic humanity and economics.

Citizens, wake up your politicians (the children can’t do it without your help).

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

More Indiana Children Die From Abuse, Neglect, Report Says

Child Advocates Chide Backslide In Children’s Services

INDIANAPOLIS — Federal statistics show that Indiana has one of the highest rates of child abuse and neglect in the nation, though Department of Child Services officials claim their statistics show progress. 

Recent cases of child abuse deaths are indicative of how some Indiana children fall through the cracks, and federal reports obtained by Call 6 Investigator Joanna Massee are counter to DCS claims that the child welfare system is improving.

Some child advocates said they’ve seen some progress recently, but others said they are gravely concerned about recent abuse and neglect deaths and what they consider backsliding services.

 

Deaths Of Children Spur Concern

The cases of Devin Parsons and Christian Choate highlight what many consider to be the failings of DCS.

Greensburg police found Parsons, 12, fatally beaten in June. His mother, Tasha Parsons, and her boyfriend, Waldo Jones, were subsequently charged with murder.

Randy Parsons, Devin’s great-uncle, said he wasn’t aware of the extent of abuse that police said went on in the boy’s home.

“You just never expect anything like that,” Parsons said, adding that he didn’t realize a DCS employee visited the boy’s home days before his death. “I think the job wasn’t finished.”

Christian Choate, 13, also had a long history with DCS before his death earlier this year. According to the agency’s records, Christian lived in a cage and received regular beatings during the last months of his life.

In May, investigators pulled Christian’s body from a shallow grave in Gary. His father, Riley Choate, and his stepmother, Kimberly Kubina, were charged with murder.

Records obtained by the Call 6 Investigators showed that the families of both children had a long history with DCS.

DCS Director James Payne said he thinks his agency is better at protecting children than ever before, and he cautioned against using child fatalities as a measuring stick.

“First of all, nobody in the system looks at fatalities as a measure of whether or not the system itself is doing a good job in helping protect children,” Payne said. “Often the fatalities occur without any contact before. Often they happen in circumstances that were unpredictable.”

Child Welfare Tracking Systems Inconsistent

Nationwide, child safety workers criticized an inconsistent tracking system for child deaths.

Because federal and state reports cover different time periods, the numbers don’t match, and that means the number of deaths can look like it’s going up in one report and down in another.

For example, the most recent Child Maltreatment Report released by the Department of Health and Human Services showed an increase in the number of child deaths from 2008 to 2009. The federal government counted 34 deaths in 2008 and 50 deaths in 2009. The federal year runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.

The state’s most recent Child Abuse and Neglect Report of Child Fatalities showed a decrease in the number of child deaths from 2008 to 2009. The state government counted 46 deaths in 2008 and 38 deaths in 2009. The state year runs from July 1 through June 30.

Payne said a better way to evaluate the system is to look at statistics, such as fewer children being placed in residential treatment.

“The system is much better now,” Payne said.

DCS is focused on helping children thrive in the home because taking them out is very traumatic, Payne said.

But the cases that involved Devin and Christian indicate that leaving abused and neglected children in a home can also be devastating.

Child Advocates’ Opinion Mixed

Privately, leading child advocates and service providers told Massee they disagree with Payne’s claims that the system is improving. Publicly, they choose their words carefully if they say anything at all, fearing retaliation.

Massee asked Payne if the culture at DCS discourages criticism within the agency.

“I suspect there is at some level,” but not at the executive level, Payne responded.

David Sklar, who leads the Children’s Coalition of Indiana, an organization that works to support and lobby for children and families, said child advocates and service providers fear retaliation for voicing concerns about DCS.

“They’re afraid to advocate for those clients because they’re afraid that the state might look somewhere else to provide those contracts,” Sklar said.

Sklar added that advocates are also concerned that the state is spending fewer dollars on therapeutic services that help address and prevent child abuse and neglect.

“We are starting to see a backslide,” he said.

Last year, DCS gave back nearly $104 million to the state general fund, money that could have been used for children. Payne said the agency did not need the cash.

When Massee asked Payne about these spending decisions, he granted RTV6 unusual access to the agency, adamant that his system is working.

During a roundtable discussion with DCS employees, Massee asked case workers about the difficulties they face on the job.

Supervisor Melissa Clark said she has seen positive changes during her 17 years with DCS, but she also said the work comes with challenges.

“It can be a life and death decision that we’re making,” Clark said. “We do see some turnover. It is a stressful job. It’s emotional. We deal with the crying child that’s being removed from their parent.”

Denise Brightman said she has spent 21 years working with families and worries about making a mistake “every day.”

While workers such as Brightman and Clark can only control the cases assigned to them, State Rep. Bill Crawford, D-Indianapolis, said he is concerned with decisions being made at the top.

Crawford criticized the state’s decision to spend less on services for abused and neglected children in need.

“There are too many child advocates from around the state of Indiana who are crying foul,” Crawford said.

Child advocates said the unspent funds could be used for services such as counseling for young abuse victims, clothing and food for foster kids and toward other services for families, such as those in which Christian and Devin once belonged.

Speaking privately, one leading child advocate told Massee, “This needs to be a call to action. The system will succeed when the private sector and public sector work together.”

Share this:

Children have no lobby, no voice, & can’t fight back when a MN Governor* states that “children that are victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the State Of Minnesota”.

There’s nothing a five year old can say to the governor of Indiana about the elimination of the state’s newborn screening fund (paid for by birth fees collected from parents), or the retroactive termination of adoption subsidies to the five hundred families that adopted special need children based on the promise that they would have assistance for their special needs children.

I doubt that a nine year old could clearly explain the problem facing California foster children because 1,000 state-licensed facilities match sex offenders’ addresses;

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/us/california-sex-offenders/

Will Nebraska’s five or ten year old old foster children be allowed to speak to the governor or at the state house about the total collapse of the states’s Privatized Child & Family Services, or what it is like to be abandoned by your birth family and the county in the same year?

http://www.northplattebulletin.com/index.asp?show=news&action=readStory&storyID=21588&pageID=3

More & more states are finding it useful to abdicate their responsibility to children & blame cost savings, immigrants, alcohol, or any number of flimsy excuses for why the government should not intervene.

The other industrialized nations are far more child friendly and a significant number of American states now compare unfavorably with third world nations.

Please share your ideas with KARA, Kids At Risk Action for making a louder, clearer voice for America’s children.  Pass this on to your friends & people you think should be more aware.  Submit your comments about what works and doesn’t work in your community.

*Tim Pawlenty

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Share this:

The evening before my talk I listened to story after story of the “fluid” nature of Department of Child Services policy, families not being allowed to question decisions or policy for fear of being blackballed, and what it’s like to watch long established, workable policies disappear to be replaced by whimsy and bullying.

Many families voiced that they were not allowed to get together and hold foster/adoption discussions without DCS present. This sounds like a constitutional violation of free speech to me (if you know an attorney, i think it is a fair question, or call Bob Olson, 651-690-3494)

On Saturday morning, at the end of my talk, there were more written questions than we could respond to, but it was perfectly clear that almost everyone had strong feelings about Indiana’s public policy about abused and neglected children being based on political ideology.

The State of Indiana today feels it a better investment to pay $75/day per inmate in its prison system than to pay foster families any more than $18/ day support fees for its children.

It is hard to feed a child for $18/ day and anything extra becomes a real burden to most Hoosier families. Is this what we think of children in America? Not my America.

Dear Indiana legislators, please recognize that most adoptive and foster families don’t come from the top one percent (see Wall Street Protesting).

I found it difficult to believe that the state’s newborn screening fund, collected from birth fees paid by parents, has been captured by the governor & directed back into the general fund instead of providing services and supplies for infants with birth disorders?

How cold and cruel are your state legislators?

How could Indiana retroactively terminate adoption subsidies to the five hundred families that adopted special needs children based on the promise that they would have assistance for their special needs children?

Ethically and economically, these are terrible decisions that will cost Indiana children & citizens for many years to come.

Before these cuts Indiana Ranked almost last, 49th out of the 50 states in not supporting child welfare, 37th in child mortality, 47th in juvenile incarceration, 32nd in child death from ages 1 to 14, & 33rd In births to teen moms (As listed by Child Well Being, Geography Matters).

We are the people that once were the middle class, now being pounded on to make this nation work and bring it back to where it can be a friendly, safe place to live.

We know that healthy children become healthy citizens and that every cost benefit analysis shows conclusively that subsidizing healthy children is a far better investment than subsidizing malls or prisons.

It’s not only the ethical & right thing to do, it is the most economically sound, ethical, and right thing to do.

Thank you Indiana foster & adoption families for your commitment to the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

The tide will turn as the community wakes up to these serious & costly injustices to bring back a more child friendly public policy for Hoosier children.

Support the Indiana Foster Care & Adoption Association in its efforts to bring Change to Indiana

Pass this on – written speech below –

Good morning, It is great to be here,

Speaking for abused and neglected children is one of the most important things that I do.
Spreading critical information to raise awareness is a big first step in bring change to a troubled system.

Abused and neglected Children have no voice in the homes they are raised in, the courts that rule their lives, or the justice system that so many of them spend the rest of their days trying to Stay out of.

Children are not able to object when politicians use children’s issues as a political football.

Did you know that social workers are trained not To Speak about child protection issues outside of their work day, and it appears that no one is allowed to criticize Indiana DCS.

No one talked or wrote about the 4 year old girl I visited in the suicide ward at Fairview hospital or her 7 year old sister with a vocabulary of fifty words that was kicked so hard by her 200 pound sex abuser that she went into convulsions.

After 12 years as an active volunteer GAL I’ve come to know hundreds of at risk children, adoptive & foster parents, teachers, social & healthcare workers, judges & juvenile justice workers.

I’ve met allot of great people trying hard to improve the lives of at risk children with little help, few resources, & almost no appreciation. Individually, we can feel overwhelmed by a cold system – I believe that together we can have an impact and bring the badly need change to how at risk children are treated in this state.

Abused and neglected children have no lobby, the media doesn’t understand them, and our own community and politicians don’t seem to care about their needs.

This lack of awareness is why the people, programs, and policies that could make a difference in their lives go unfunded WHILE the jails continue to fill, schools to fail, & communities to suffer.

We here in this room, can explain to our friends, our networks, politicians & media, our stories and the economic and social costs of bad public policy.

Nothing was made public about the 4 year old boy who was removed from his perfectly fine foster home by a judge and sent to live with the man who had a court order to stay away from young boys because of what he did to them.

Andy was tied to a bed, sexually abused, beaten, starved, and left alone for days at a time for four years before child protection services intervened in his life; only after a teacher reported his full body bruises.

He is still my friend 15 years later… he has AIDS and never received the mental health services that could have helped him lead a normal life.

The judge that gave Andy back to his father thought he was saving the county foster care money when in reality, Andy has gone on to cost the county millions of dollars in institutionalization and mental health services,

Not counting the pain and suffering HE has brought to so many of the people that have come into his life

OR THE FACT THAT ANDY WILL CONTINUE TO BE A SIGNIFICAN COST TO THE COUNTY AS LONG AS HE LIVES.

So not only was this a huge ethical and perhaps criminal failure on the part of my counties child protection system, it would have saved the state millions of dollars to treat the boy fairly. If more politicians understood this, children would be safer & counties more prosperous.

We are all mixed up when we think we’re saving money by not providing children with help and better options while they are still young.

America’s institutions are now creating exactly the opposite of what they were designed for and we are all suffering because of it.

Friends, this is a civil rights issue and a communications issue.

These children cannot speak for themselves AND WE MUST SPEAK FOR THEM… that’s why I’m here today.

IT IS Because Social workers are trained to not speak of child protection outside of their work-day That,

No one knows about MY CLIENT, the prostituted 7 year old who was left with her drug addicted prostitute mother even after 48 police calls to her home, or what the juvenile officer on the case said to me when I asked why.

Because there are no beat reporters at the Newspapers due to budget cuts, NO ONE understood why the 18 month old baby girl drowned in the bathtub after 11 police calls to her home… several reporters called me for an explanation, but the media went on to blame the social workers instead of our understaffed and under-resourced child protection system that I had spoken of.

A few months ago when a MN teenager stole the family car and drove to Iowa and pointlessly murdered two clerks… his mother was crucified in the press even though she had spent ten years trying to get her SON mental health care with no luck.

Instead of concentrating on the people, programs, and policies that would make these horrible events less likely to happen we attack the caregivers & the people doing the work while politicians make political hay blaming teachers, SOCIAL WORKERS, and the VERY institutions they are SUPPOSTED TO BE SUPPORTING.

Rather than openly discussing the issues seeking better answers, we are all caught up in blaming the people doing the work & making children’s lives and our communities more dangerous and unhappy.

Today there’s a new mental health center in Red Lake MN; but it was not there the day Jeff Weiss wrote about suicide and homicide and how his mother wished he’d never been born, or how the Prozac made him crazy just a few days before he murdered his grandfather and fourteen others and took his own life.

He too had been asking for help for a long time. The center was built in response to Jeff’s tragedy just months after the violence occurred. The community agreed completely that the NEW MENTAL HEALTH center was necessary and had no trouble finding the money to build it.

Most of us in this room know what needs to change but we don’t know how to make change happen. We are so busy providing care and safety to children that there just doesn’t seem to time for anything else and we don’t feel that individually we can make a big difference in public policy.

We all experience how frustrating it is — to be a part of or work with underfunded programs AND overworked service providers. We are afraid of speaking out for fear of being blacklisted by a harsh and unfair system that changes its policies based on the current administrations political ideology.

This is not fair to children, nor is it fair to the families that raise them.

WE WATCH the steady stream of at risk children slip through the cracks – into preteen pregnancy and the JUSTICE SYSTEM.

The media’s confusion, politicians dis-interest, and public apathy is why there is a lack of funding and support for early childhood programs, reasonable foster care rates, day care, & mental health SERVICES for children.

Perhaps I’m an optimist, but I believe that it is this basic MISUNDERSTANDING that explains why millions of America’s non-birth family caregivers get so little support for the serious problems facing the children they care for.

What should be a central theme of media concentration & public policy discussion INSTEAD is printed IN the back pages of the newspaper until a baby is found beaten to death and then RATHER THAN SUPPORTING programs that would lessen the potential for that act to be repeated, we blame social workers and build one more jail cell.

MN’s PREVIOUS governor TIM PAWLENTY has stated that, “children that are the victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem nor are they the problem of the state of MN”

Wording much like this is part of his political party’s public policy platform. There should be no question as to which party is trying to dissolve the safety net for children in this nation.

Compared to the rest of the industrialized world, those 23 other nations with 200 year old democracies and solid infrastructures, America has fallen behind in almost all the quality of life indices for children these past 20 years.

A number of U.S. states are now comparable to third world nations in teen deaths, child mortality, child poverty and juvenile incarceration. We now lead the whole world in juvenile crime & sexually transmitted diseases among our youth.

Federally, the “Imminent Harm Doctrine” is the only law that protects children in America. This statute allows children whose lives are in imminent danger to be removed from a home. Because of this, children spend far too long in abusive and neglectful homes without services or a chance to escape.

WE NEED TO DO MORE TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM VIOLENCE AND DEPRIVATION.

The World Health Organization defines torture as extended exposure to violence and deprivation.

Too many children in America live for years in abusive homes and suffer from extended exposure to violence and deprivation. We are just now beginning to fully understand the life-long consequences of child abuse. Did you know that;

Children in the child protection system suffer from post-traumatic stress at twice the rate soldiers returning from Iraq do.

MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated that 90% of the youth in juvenile justice have passed through child protection in MN.

Nationally, 50 to 75% of the youth in juvenile justice suffer from diagnosable mental illness & that fully half of that number have multiple, chronic, and serious diagnosis.

Almost all adult felons have passed through juvenile justice .

The reason I talk about this is that Marion Wright Edelman Founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, has been telling us for years that the majority of At Risk Children are in a pipeline to prison.

Few of us know how serious this is;

80% of youth aging out of foster care are leading dysfunctional lives.

The United States has 5% of the world’s population & almost 25% of the world’s prison population

25% of America’s juvenile offenders are tried as adults.

As far as guns & getting shot; it’s safer to be an on duty cop in America than it is a teenager.

I am convinced our citizens and politicians simply don’t understand the depth and scope of the problem, nor the economic and social consequences of not supporting early childhood programs, daycare, and early learning.

We, who work with, live with and love at risk children must become empowered to be a voice for children if change is going to happen.

We must learn to speak with a clear and unified voice to represent the children that have no voice.

Until we understand and bring voice to the problems of abused & neglected children, the media will continue to blame social workers when a baby is found in a dumpster, jail & prison cells will be built instead of classrooms & our communities will remain high crime areas.

In a move much like just happened under past Governor Pawlenty in MN, your Governor has cut over a hundred million dollars from child services and diverted the money to pay bonuses to state workers that slashed programs.

20 million dollars was taken from the Healthy Families Program leaving over 4400 first time parents of at risk children without support services; A PROGRAM PROVEN TO BE 95% EFFECTIVE IN HELPING NEW PARENTS SUCCEED.

Thousands of Hoosier children will not be receiving mental health or addiction services, abused and neglected children will be left in the home without treatment or counseling and reducing education spending by more than 300 million dollars leaves many kindergarten classes at 1/2 day and INDIANA schools will continue to struggle for the most basic necessities.
How could the Indiana’s state newborn screening fund, collected from birth fees paid by parents, be directed back into the general fund instead of providing services and supplies for infants with birth disorders?

How could Indiana retroactively Terminate adoption subsidies to the 500 families that adopted special needs children based on the promise that they would have assistance for their special needs children?

Ethically and Economically these are terrible decisions that will cost Indiana children & citizens for many years to come.

Before these cuts Indiana Ranked almost last, 49th out of the 50 states in not supporting child welfare, 37th in child mortality, 47th in juvenile incarceration, 32nd in child death from ages 1 to 14, & 33rd In births to teen moms (As listed by Child Well Being, Geography Matter).

The U.S. Federal Reserve bank, under Art Rolnick IN MN, studied the economics of early learning and proved that the return on investment for early childhood programs are far better than subsidizing real estate or businesses (or giving bonuses to state workers for cutting needed programs).

There is no question that early childhood programs provide counties, cities, and states real savings and healthier citizens.

So why was one of my last official duties as a GAL was to remove 4 young children from a father who was guilty of nothing other than not being able to afford day care? Because our last governor redirected those dedicated funds back into the general fund.

WHICH MADE SUBSIDIZED DAYCARE ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO OBTAIN IN MN.

Did my state think it was saving money by forcing these children into foster homes rather than helping a poor working man pay for day care?

I’m a businessman; I’ve run the numbers and it costs way more money to take children out of the home and place them in foster homes than it does to help dad with day care payments, and it makes the families lives broken and miserable.

This was just like the false savings the judge thought would come from taking Andy out of a perfectly fine foster home & giving him to his criminally abusive father & WHAT REALLY HAPPENED DESTROYED THE BOY & COST THE COUNTY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.

It’s not only morally reprehensible and the wrong thing to do, it is the most expensive, morally reprehensible and wrong thing to do.

Our institutions are now creating exactly the opposite of what they were designed to create.

Before I leave this slide, I would like to draw your attention to the resource websites listed and say a few words about them;

www.Aha.mn

(Adoptees Have Answers) a national program with terrific model in MN… worth study and consideration; Involves the youth & families in powerful networks and programs & communication. Wonderful people & a powerful program for adoptive and foster families.

www.AVAhealth.org

(Academy on Violence & Abuse) founded by an emergency room doctor who recognized that most of his emergency room patients had been abused children. Dr. Bruce Perry Study; 25% of Americans to be special needs people by the end of this generation…

www.invisiblechildren.org KARA Kids At Risk Action (KARA) public advocacy for abused and neglected children.

Your networking connection to Indiana Foster and Adoption resources.

www.ifcaa.org Is Your organization…, join it.

Please raise your voices and become a member of the Indiana Foster care & Adoption Association

Use these resources to find information and to get our message out. Tell your friends and circles of influence that you need their support & share this information with them. By all means communicate between conferences.

NOTE; You will find source material for what I have said here today both at the invisiblechildren.org blog and also in the INVISIBLECHILDREN book that you can download for free on the website, or borrow one of the copies I have provided for my talk today.

(Transition; 2 slides), Mental health,

like it’s meant to be talked about…
like any other health.
How to get it, how to keep it.
DR READ SULEK SAYS IT WELL;

Transition; children coping,

JUDGE Heidi schellhas,

Early in my GAL career, Judge Shellhas shared with me pages and pages of psychotropic drugs proscribed to 5, 7, & 9 year olds in her courtroom over a one year period…  She was very disturbed by this trend and we know that this policy is dangerous and needs to change.

Dr Read Sulek.The ability to cope as the best definition of mental health;

Dr. Sulek HAS created a 3 part, economically sound model for providing mental health care to schools.

It is A TERRIFIC NATIONAL MODEL… INSTEAD;

Because of lack of funding, MOST CHILDREN ARE PRESCRIBED PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATIONS WITH LITTLE OR NO THERAPY TODAY.

33% of Georgia Foster Youth on psychotropics,

Most states would find this to be a fair estimate if they were too keep track also.

Many states have abandoned mental health services for children, more and more states are now sending all MISBEHAVING HIGH SCHOOL youth to jail INSTEAD OF TO THE COUNSELORS OFFICE for help with behavior problems.

Transitiion; Because of the media’s misunderstanding &the politicians willingness to make children’s issues into cold hard politics, there is confusion, distraction, deprecating, dividing and blaming where there should be cooperation & concern for three year olds living in dangerous circumstances.

We must stand up to those politicians that are making political hay on the backs of children’s issues.

WE NEED TO BE UNITED AND SUPPORTIVE OF THE PEOPLE DOING THE WORK AND NOT REWARD THOSE WHO ARE deliberately misleading and destructive & furthering their political careers at the cost of thousands of young lives.

THERE IS Not a religion in the world that abandons the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Recruit your friends to this cause.

Transition; These Key issues ARE written about extensively on the invisiblechildren.org website;

AS A PEOPLE WE DON’T LIKE TO TALK ABOUT;

1) Torture/Trauma/MENTAL HEALTH, SEX ABUSE,

THE World health org DEFINES TORTURE AS; EXTENDED EXPOSTURE TO VIOLENCE AND DEPRIVATION

MN IS NOW investigating 202 violent child deaths THIS LAST YEAR; over half OF THEM WERE beaten or shaken to death…

SOME OF YOU MAY REMEMBER THE Boy who died locked in a cage HERE IN INDIANA last year;

ALMOST ALL STATES ARE SUFFERING BIG INCREASES IN EARLY CHILD HOMICIDE & ACCIDENTAL DEATH.

DID YOU KNOW THAT 10% OF ALL SEVERE CHILD BURNS ARE DELIBERATELY INFLICTED?

2) Ready to learn vs. ready to FAIL,

Why are per child education costs HIGHER IN U.S. ? BECAUSE more and more OF AMERICA’S CHILDREN ARE NOT READY TO LEARN when they get to school. Until this changes the costs will continue to rise and schools will continue to fail. Don’t blame the teachers.

Weigh the cost of doubling down on the cost of teaching reading to third graders… (my volunteer work began when I saw several states using failed 3RD GRADE READING TEST SCORES to predict the need for prison space ten years out).

75% of inmates illiterate, ALMOST 20 % COMPLETELY ILLITERATE;

We know the economic and social costs of not graduating & that being able to read by the 3rd grade is critical to making it in school and making it in life.

Better and more available daycare and supporting education are critical if this is to be solved.

3) Pschotropics vs. Therapy,

Ritalin is a cocaine derivative that was banned in Sweden in 1968 because of suicides.

In America, psychotropic medications seem to be about all we have to offer troubled youth as there are virtually no mental health services available in most states.

Like in OHIO, all misbehaving youth are sent to jail.

In 2005, when I wrote the book INVISIBLECHILDREN, there were only13 child psychiatrists in my entire state – with one of them practicing in my county.

SHE WAS TERRIBLY OVERWHELMED AND COULD ONLY PROVIDE brief periods of her time to 5, 7, & 9 year olds that had been raped and beaten.

In most systems, the COUNTY PAYS RIDICULOUSLY LOW RATES AND THEN DOESN’T PAY THE BILL on time or in full.

Many service providers have just quit being available where they are most needed.

There is a huge need for consistent and high quality mental health services for youth in America. It would pay for itself in just a few years; our children deserve better.

Missouri model/Children’s Defense Fund reference.

4) Punishment model vs. Restorative Justice & studies that should be explained to every policy maker;

On the invisiblechildren.ORG website, our Century College volunteer intern David mast Wrote about a study of 254 youth that committed 220,000 crimes over 12 months, THINK ABOUT this is stunning…. What is this costing our community?

In the Ramsey County ACE study4 YEARS AGO, over 70% of the violent and serious crime caused by youth IN ST PAUL MN, were committed by juveniles from fewer than 4% of the families within the community.

We know who these children are and what they need, it would be much better investment to help them gain the skills they need to live rather than preparing them for a lifetime of incarceration.

I have written extensively on the fact that 25% of American juveniles are tried as adults in the U.S. EACH YEAR.

THIS MEANS THAT 200,000 youth ARE tried IN THE CRIMINIAL JUSTICE SYSTEM.. each year, ONCE THEY ENTER THE SYSTEM most of them remain forever.

WE ARE building Too many prisons and not enough schools and health services. THE PRISON LOBBY IS STRONG. The children’s lobby is us. WE MUST GET STRONG

Economics of failure;

Nebraska tried to privatize its entire child protection system and failed completely just last month, with devastating results for the children of Nebraska.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, A Pennsylvania JUDGE was sentenced to many years in prison for receiving payments for each juvenile he committed to THE STATE’S privatized detention system (many if not most of the youth he sentenced were innocent). HE RUINED MANY YOUNG LIVES. The judge’s prison sentence will not benefit the incarcerated youth or change their lives.

PRIVATIZING CHILD PROTECTION, JUVENILE JUSTICE & CRIMINAL JUSTICE APPEARS TO BE A DANGEROUS TREND IN OUR NATION.

I have many stories of abusive privatized juvenile system failures in MN and am convinced that unless facilities are well monitored, staffs better trained, and management not directed by political ideology or religious beliefs, that children will continue to suffer as I have experienced in child protection as a CASA guardian ad-Litem.

Two of my stories are absolutely indefensible near death experiences for my child clients while in the custody of private care providers.

ONE, A 35 MILE WALK HOME IN A T SHIRT ON A 10 DEGREE NIGHT BECAUSE HE WAS CAST OUTSIDE FOR SWEARING (HE WAS AND IS MENTALLY CHALLANGED), this organization was staffed by undereducated and undertrained young people grossly unqualified for the work they were doing.

THE SECOND EXAMPLE WAS A SUICIDE WATCH FACILITY THAT LIED TO ME ABOUT ITS EXPERTISE AND ABILITY TO DEAL WITH SUICIDE AND INSTEAD OF HELPING A SUICIDAL YOUTH, MADE HIS LIFE MUCH WORSE. This was a religious organization that put its own ideology in front of the needs of the child.

CHILD PROTECTION is a public health crisis & needs to be treated as such;

Dr. Bruce Perry is right 25% of Americans will be special needs people by the end of this generation (I personally believe that it has already happened).

Each new generation of abused and neglected children are now parenting their own next generation of at risk children…,

We must ask our policy makers, WHAT DOES 30 to 40 years of institutionalization COST?

WHAT IS THE cost of crime IN AMERICA EACH YEAR? 1.6 trillion is the insurance industries estimate in insurable losses.

JUST A FEW IMPORTANT FINAL FACTS BEFORE I MOVE ONTO WHAT WE CAN DO TO change all this.

In my homestate, MINNESOTA, our share of Iraq war is twenty six Billion dollars OVER THE NEXT 2 YEARS, THIS IS money that we have.

BUT WE DID NOT HAVE 6 Billion dollars FOR OUR SCHOOLS, ROADS, CHILDREN, AND HEALTH CARE THIS LAST LEGISLATIVE SESSION.

David strand, a KARA board member, has ACTUALLY made public policy on children’s issues in Finland OVER A TEN YEAR PERIOD WHILE HE LIVED THERE….and he talks about the huge difference

BETWEEN HOW THE REST OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED WORLD TREATS CHILDREN & HOW AMERICA IS TREATING its children

THE DANES HAVE DENTAL CHAIRS IN THIRD GRAD CLASSROOMS, SUBSIDIES FOR CHILDREN TO INSURE SAFETY, AND A GOOD EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE AND MENTAL HEALTH CARE ARE FREE FOR CHILDREN in most ADVANCED nations,

Did you know that; Day care workers are among the lowest paid workers in America?

Earning about the same as food service workers THAT ARE THE LOWEST PAID WORKERS IN THE U.S.

(in the rest of the industrialized world day care workers are well respected, well qualified, and well paid for the work they do enhancing the lives of their nation’s children).

The current assault on teachers & the dismantling of unions is a terrible development.

Think about it; Foster and adoptive families are being denigrated by the same politicians, who are blaming teachers for a failing education system and social workers when a baby is found dead or brutalized.

All because they won’t support the institutions these people must work in. What’s it like to be a teacher with 3 or 4 very troublesome Prozac children in a classroom of 35 or 40 students and not be able to control a classroom?

What’s it like to oversee twenty or thirty very troubled families as a social worker and have bad things happen?

What’s it like to have very disturbed foster children in a foster or adoptive home and worry about violence or terrible behavior problems with no help from the county?

Instead of supporting children and their caregivers in these circumstances, many politicians are destroying systems that work and damning the people that do the work.

Economically & socially it’s the opposite of sound policy making.

THE REST OF THE WORLD SEEMS TO KNOW THE VALUE OF HEALTHY CITIZENS.

One of our next big political fights is going to be raising the standards and availability of daycare in the U.S. Be on the right side of this argument.

MAKE SURE YOUR FRIENDS UNDERSTAND these issues also. Building awareness among our friends & circles of influence is a critical first step.

For as much talk as we have about the importance of children in this nation, we have not been putting our money where our mouth is. Let’s become a unified voice for children & change this.

What can we do?

In closing I’m making a personal request of you today to do 3 things that will make a big difference for our children and communities.

1) Find and understand an issue important to you & talk about it with your friends & neighbors. The more we learn and talk about these issues, the more comfortable we become in our conversations and the more likely we will be to speak out; Remember, The squeaky wheel gets the grease… no squeaky wheel, no grease & nothing changes – information is powerful.

2) Vote – and convince your friends vote.. tell them about your issue… tell them that not voting means less day care, fewer early learning programs, and far less support for children and education.

3) FINALLY, call your state representative, senator, and governor and tell them who you are, what you want, and why you want it. You pay their salaries, and they have to listen to you. Unless they hear from us on a regular basis, there IS simply no awareness of the pain being visited on these children

Be the one in your family to understand how public policy can be impacted.

Become empowered to be a voice for children.

Continue this discussion at our blog at invisiblechildren.org &

PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR RESPONSE TO THIS TALK & MAKE SUGGESTIONS THAT I MIGHT IMPROVE IT.

Thank you for the work you do and your commitment to at risk children

KNOW THAT WE CAN IMPROVE THE LIVES OF AT RISK CHILDREN BY STICKING TOGETHER AND SAYING OUR PIECE.

If we are successful as foster and adoption parents, we change the lives of a few children.

If we can come together and speak as a group, we will change the lives of thousands of children AND THEIR CHILDREN for many years to come.

I WILL NOW TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS. ******

Support the Indiana Foster Care & Adoption Association in our efforts to bring back sensible public policy for at risk children and the families that care for them.

Indiana Foster Care and Adoption Association
509 East National Avenue
Suite A
Indianapolis, IN 46227

info@ifcaa.org

www.ifcaa.org

Office: 317- 308-6555

Please pass this blog onto your circles of influence & those people you feel might respond to the politicizing of special needs and at risk children.

Share this:

Message Dear Mike, I’m writing to you in hope that you would be able to help or answer some questions.

My brother Matt has been in prison for the last 5 years. His wife is now in Anoka County jail.

She has been in and out of jail for the last 5 years. They have 2 children ages 4 and 7 who are currently living with us.

I have cared for the boys on and off for the last 5 years. The longest period of time they lived with us was in 2008 and it was for 6 months.

Mom has been in and out of jail, more times than I can keep track. I’ve tried to get social service involved because she is a drug user and doing real harm to her children.

While she is in jail the boys do not officially have a legal guardian.

The 7 year old lives with us during the school year and he is a very bright little boy.

My husband and I have tried to do the “right” thing and care for the little boys.

We have 4 biological children and at times it is very difficult to manage our household.

Just recently mom went back to jail and I wanted to become a foster care parent to our nephews.

I was seeking financial assistance in order to pay for pre-school/daycare for the boys.

I had hoped for some financial help with daycare for the boys but, there is a 2 + year waiting list.

Which brings me to today.

In order for me receive foster care assistance I have to call the police and to have the boys put into child protective services.

This sounds scary and drastic when I just need a little financial assistance to help our family afford daycare for our nephews.

Is it possible that the only way we can have help with day care is to put the boys into a police car and make them live in a group home or with a strange family?

This does not seem right.

Any advice you could give would greatly be appreciated. Sincerely, H T

Dear H,
You and your nephews are the reason invisiblechildren.org exists.

It is because the only people that know about how this system works seems to be the people caught inside of it.

There are no easy answers I’m afraid. Budgets are tight and our last Governor cut things back so badly that I was charged with taking children away from a father who could not afford day care (when I was an active guardian ad-litem).

It could be that a signed note recommending you as foster parents from your sister in law (and brother?) might be helpful in getting some help from the system, but I can’t be too optimist

Nationally, there are about seven million grandparents and other relatives caring for children in the U.S. with very little assistance from any government body.

In the words of Tim Pawlenty, “children that are victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the state of Minnesota”.

http://www.mkca.org/ MN kinship org might have some ideas for you as they work with grandparents and other family members

another wonderful local organization is MN Adoptive Resources; http://www.facebook.com/pages/Minnesota-Adoption-Resource-Network-Adoptees-Have-Answers/309580442719

Please call your state representative (and the Governors office) and send them the email (or this link) that you sent to me and talk about this to your friends and neighbors.

There are far too few resources available for children’s needs. If you don’t call, things will stay this way.

Thank you for your commitment to children.

My very best wishes,

MikeT

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Share this:

Without early childhood programs like daycare and early learning, at risk children can find it impossible to build the skills needed to succeed in school or in life. Life gets much worse for these children when they are faced with managing their own life as juveniles.

We know that well adjusted children become smarter adults and better citizens, contribute instead of burden our communities, and go on to have families of their own that contribute to, not cost, society.

Unfortunately, our communities are offering less and less in the way of help for abused and neglected children.

MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated that 90% of the youth in our juvenile justice system have passed through child protective services. Almost all inmates in our criminal justice system passed through juvenile justice on this pipeline to prison.

Over half of all youth in the juvenile justice system have diagnosable mental illness, and over half that number have multiple, chronic, and severe diagnosis. It’s a wonder that America has only two million prisoners (five percent of the world population & 25% of the world’s prison population)

America prosecutes over 25% of its juveniles in adult courts.

Many states have bigger budget increases for prisons and jails than for schools and early childhood programs.

Children have no lobby and social workers are trained to not speak of these things outside of their work day. This combination makes the 3 million children reported to child protection each year voiceless. They have no power to escape the cruelty of sex abuse, violence, and dysfunctional upbringing & no way to avoid the mental health consequences that come with it.

America spends 7$ on the aged for every 1$ we spend on children.

Educators are forced to manage the growing population of severely damaged children without the resources (or even the understanding of the underlying issues) to control a classroom.

Instead of supporting educators, we blame them for poor performance, as if they can manage severely damaged children, many of them regularly taking psychotropic medications.

Rather than training daycare workers and supporting early childhood programs, America builds prisons & send juveniles to prison.

“Children who are the victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the State of Minnesota” said by former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to State Rep Andy Dawkins and current state commissioner David Strand and demonstrates one political party’s approach to day care and early childhood services.

These children, through no fault of their own, are living within a court system that is being torn apart by mean spirited politics.

It is up to you & me to make at least a small effort to enlighten legislators and neighbors to the importance of services for abused and neglected children.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Share this:

El Paso County Texas child abuse case numbers are set to surpass 13,000 this year. Mental health issues and military suicides impact children in profound ways. There is more pain than people in the military can deal with & it explodes in rage, abuse, and death.

What do you think about the impact of suicide on the children of the over one thousand MN veterans that have committed suicide? If you know the children of a suicidal parent you know torture.

The daughter of one of these suicides (who had been a dear friend) called me this year a few days after her father killed himself.

There has never been a more difficult call to take. There are no good answers and the questions linger for lifetime.

Safety nets are evaporating and a percentage of our community has decided that we just can’t afford to help people (Minnesotans share of the wars over the next 2 years is 30 billion dollars, but we do not have the 6 billion dollars for our schools, roads, and communities).

The stresses that impact military families are just the tip of the problem in our troubled communities. Poverty breeds stress that impacts children in a similar fashion. Violence and abuse become more common.

Our inner cities and military families need relief to insure that children are safe and suicide rates come back down.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

El Paso County’s child abuse case numbers are up 9 percent this year in military families and are set to surpass 13,000 overall, according to reports by the Associated Press and KRDO -TV.

Crime statistics from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office show 42 cases of child abuse, 302 cases of domestic violence, and 65 attempted or completed suicides from January through May this year alone.

As The Huffington Post reported in February, El Paso surpassed Denver as the largest county in the state this year; the county can now also add the highest number of child abuse cases in the state to its list of titles according the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Board of County Commissioners raised awareness of the issue in April, dubbed “Child Abuse Prevention Month in El Paso County”, with an additional military family outreach program called the Child Welfare Military Project.

Executive Director Sandra Hernandez of Centro de La Familia, an advocacy and counseling group, told KRDO-TV:
In the military population there was always a problem because of the stressors, and that was when we weren’t at war. Now that we are at war, and we’ve got these soldiers going to Iraq and Afghanistan for the fourth or fifth time, there is a high contribution factor to abuse occurring.
In July, El Paso County received $3.7 million from the state to help fund its human services department and ease the burden of abuse referrals.

Share this:

Blaming social workers is the first and most common reaction we have. After 12 years of working alongside the folks that try to provide a safety net for our weakest and most vulnerable citizens, I don’t believe this is fair or a productive response.

Like blaming teachers for failing schools; teachers have not gotten worse over the last twenty years. The population of abused and troubled children has grown exponentially. These children are hard to manage, let alone educate.

Social workers in a growing number of states are barely able to visit the worst of the worst cases anymore due to giant caseloads. Training is minimal and resources are scarce. Minnesota responds to one out of three reports today. A few years ago two out of three calls were responded to.

We only read about the babies found in dumpsters, or other violent child deaths. NO one reports the thousands of children sexually abused, beaten, or starved.

I know too many of these children & it is a dark stain on America that explains overflowing prisons, failing schools, and unsafe cities.

This nations would save money by funding child protection and copying the Missouri Miracle of a few years ago (in its treatment of juvenile offenders). Until then, we will read about more unbearable tragedy & worry about being downtown after dark.

Support KARA’s effort to stop punishing children; sponsor a conversation in your community (invite me to speak at your conference) / Buy our book or donate

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Huffington Post 6.26.11

Christian Choate, Boy Who Died Locked In Cage, Wrote About Abuse And Desire To Die

Records of the Indiana Department of Child Services reveal that Christian Choate, a boy who authorities claim lived locked in a cage and died from savage abuse, wrote letters describing his situation and saying that he wanted to die.

According to the Chicago Tribune, DCS visited with the Choate family in Gary, Indiana more than a dozen times starting in 1999, investigating allegations of abuse and neglect. Authorities never discovered what prosecutors claim was the true depth of the misery in which young Christian lived.

Based on accounts from his sister and stepsister, Christian, who died in 2009 at age 13, spent much of the last year of his life locked in a three-foot-high dog cage, with little food and drink and few opportunities to leave. When he did get out of the cage, he endured savage beatings from his father Riley.

One night in April of 2009, Christian was too weak to keep his food down. His father allegedly beat him to the point of unconsciousness, then locked his limp body in the cage.

The next morning, his sister Christina found him dead.

According to investigators, Riley then buried the boy in a shallow grave, covered his body in concrete, and moved with Christina to Kentucky, where he threatened to harm her if she ever told anyone about his death. It would be two years before his body was found.

One of the reasons his absence wasn’t noticed was that his stepmother, Kimberly Kubina, took him out of school, saying that he was being home-schooled.

The extent of that homeschooling was revealed in some letters found by DCS. When other children were out playing, Kubina would give Christian paper and tell him to write.

“Christian wrote of why nobody liked him and how he just wanted to be liked by his family,” a DCS document wrote, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “Christian stated that he wanted to die because nobody liked the way he ‘acted.’ Christian’s writings detail a very sad, depressed child who often wondered when someone, anyone, was going to come check on him and give him food or liquid. Christian often stated he was hungry or thirsty.”

In a still more disturbing twist, the Northwest Indiana Times reveals some of the assignments his stepmother gave:

Kubina wrote topics on top of some of the pages including, “Why do you want to play with your peter? Why do you still want to see your mom? Why can’t you let the past go? What does it mean to be part of a family?” DCS records state.

Riley Choate and Kimberly Kubina have been charged with murder, battery, neglect of a dependent, confinement, obstruction of justice, moving a body from a death scene and failure to notify authorities of a dead body. They have both pleaded not guilty.

* authors note; Before blaming teachers, social workers, or cops for the awful things that appear in the press, spend a month or two in their shoes. Get to know one, or volunteer to work with them in some capacity (you will get a deeper understanding of the issues that just can’t be found otherwise).

Share this:

The greater truth must include the absence of understanding and concern in our community.

Of the fifty children I worked with as a Hennepin County guardian ad-Litem, every one of them had been sexually abused, subject to violent beatings or extended exposure to violence and deprivation. All of them suffered for long periods of time.

Most of these children were three and four years old when the abuse began. A number of them were sexually and violently abused for over five years before the child protection system did anything to help them.

Two of my first cases were horrifically abused children that to this day lead lives completely defined by what happened to them when they were four years old. The boy (now 22) leads a very dysfunctional life & has AIDS – the girl had more sex partners by the time she was 11 than anyone I’ve ever known.

There are three big reasons that the issues of abused and neglected children are misunderstood and ignored;

1) Social workers are trained to not speak of their work (even in general terms) outside of their peer group.

2) News organizations no longer have the funding to put journalists on community stories that don’t sell newspapers (while articles are written, there are no longer reporters assigned to these stories & we only read about the most horrific cases today),

3) No one wants to talk about the abuse of children. It is an uncomfortable subject that we would prefer to ignore.

When I wrote the book INVISIBLE CHILDREN in 2005, there were less than a thousand reported cases of child sex abuse in my home state. If that were true, I knew of fifty cases personally, and I was only one of five hundred guardian ad-Litems in MN at the time.

When there is no discussion, people remain unaware of the problems. The lack of awareness insures a less than adequate public response to the needs of the weakest and most vulnerable people in our community. Half the children I worked with were four years old or younger when the abuse began.

Today, otherwise decent people are questioning the necessity of providing services to abused and neglected children. There is not a religion on this planet that abandons the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

This lack of compassion makes me certain that children’s issues need more discussion and more understanding.

We simply can’t be a civilized people and continue to ruin our schools & communities and fill prisons and jails with children that could have been rescued with a little help when they were young enough to save.

I have come to know these children & they all want to be normal. We have the resources and knowledge of what needs

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Star Tribune Article;

Male caregivers linked to two-thirds of child deaths, injuries
JEREMY OLSON , Star Tribune Updated: May 2, 2011 – 9:12 PM

Statewide study of more than 200 deaths or near-deaths of children examined the years between 2005 and 2009.

A troubling new report on child mortality in Minnesota has found that male caregivers were responsible for two-thirds of child deaths and near-fatal injuries from 2005 to 2009.

While advocates suggested this might be an economic indicator — that parents who can’t afford child care are leaving kids with unfit caregivers — a state human services official said the problem is not new.

“Even before the economy went in a downward spiral, we saw deaths of children at the hands of male caregivers who were not equipped to care for infants,” said Erin Sullivan Sutton, an assistant commissioner with the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

Released last week, the report by the Minnesota Child Mortality Review Panel examined 202 deaths or near-deaths from 2005 through 2009. Incidents included drownings and other preventable accidents in the home, suicides, unexplained infant injuries and homicides.

Two-thirds of the 71 inflicted injuries or homicides involved male perpetrators, some with histories of drug abuse or violence.

Most of the cases involved children under age 3 who were shaken or who suffered blows to their heads.

“The strategies [for reducing these deaths] are making sure that moms have information about child-care options,” Sullivan Sutton said, “and also thinking about what questions they should ask themselves before leaving their babies in the care of anybody.” Caring for infants, she said, “is hard work.”

Still, the male-female disparity in child homicides and injuries is a “striking finding,” said Marcie Jefferys of the Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota. Expanding child-care options and referrals is only part of the equation, she said.

“I had been noticing that in the paper for the last few years,” Jefferys said. “There are so many babies being killed by boyfriends or husbands while the mother is off to work.”

While abusive deaths and injuries were commonly committed by men, the review found more female caretakers at fault in cases of neglect.

Sullivan Sutton said both trends mirror data from the child welfare system on abuse and neglect complaints.

Jeremy Olson • 612-673-7744

Share this:

The unrest of the 60’s & the vicious attacks by policemen & dogs and firemen on nonviolent protesters (Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connors/Selma Alabama) was not that long ago—I’m not that old.

Many of my friend’s fathers were outspoken bigots afraid of being forced to share their good paying jobs with other people.

I had few liberal childhood friends in my neighborhood and I had no healthy understanding of racial issues until I was in college. I remember one black student in junior high school and none from my senior high school (and I was an inner city kid).

Today, too many of my friends and business associates talk the same talk (minus certain words) that I heard back then. Blaming people that have very little, never had much, and most likely will never have more than subsistence (no matter what they do), along with teachers and social workers as the root of our nation’s problems.

Blaming and hating people solved nothing in the 50’s and it is not working today (if it were, we could simply elect Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh to run the nation).

We know that public institutions are imperfect and require ongoing attention and improvement to function well.

We can denounce poor performance but if we want results we need to make an effort to find the problem and fix it, not just dump on the people doing the hard work of dealing with our nations severe social problems (3 million children a year are reported to child protection services).

Blaming police workers for increased crime (since 1981 MN prison population has tripled) makes no sense, nor does blaming social workers when a baby is found in a dumpster.

When I wrote the book INVISIBLE CHILDREN in 2005 I interviewed educators and included stories about teachers of the children I had come to know through my volunteer work in child protection.

**My 12 year old state ward kicked his teacher so hard she needed medical care. He stabbed a student with a pencil. An eleven year old girl could not be restrained from sneaking out and having sex with adults during the school day (and the high school staff made huge efforts to track her by the minute while she was in school). I have many stories and I was only one of about 500 guardian ad-Litems that year watching thousands of state ward children impact our schools and communities.

It’s impossible to teach children or even manage a classroom with uncontrollable (and often dangerous) children in the room. There is no ignoring the quantities of psychotropic medications being used on grade school children in our communities today. Severe mental health issues are evident even in America’s day care systems today.

The sheer quantity of psychotropic medications being used on very young children today is sad and stunning. Judge Heidi Schellhas provided me with the statistics from her courtroom over a one year period & I have watched seven and nine year olds impacted by these drugs without the necessary mental health therapy that might have facilitated their adjustment into normal society.

Educating uncontrollable and often dangerous children is not so much teaching as it is public safety control. Keeping the other children safe is becoming a full time job in many schools. 86% of American Indian students, 76% of Hispanic students, & 63% of black students don’t graduate. Children in child protection in MN are mostly of color.

Crime among youth without a high school education is extremely high. 90% of the youth locked up in Hennepin County detention are children of color. The data is compelling. The stories are heart rending. Hating, blaming, and abandoning children is wrong and no religion in the world would promote it.

A growing number of us are blaming teachers and giving up on American institutions along with those who are born into poverty and dysfunctional families. Instead, we focus on more & bigger prisons, dumping our support for public education, and letting a growing number of Americans live in high crime & under-resourced inner cities.

It is asocial reptilian behavior that allows a community to abandon poor children born into violent dysfunctional homes to a life of almost guaranteed failure.

It is not economically viable, nor is it socially prudent to foster prison growth and personal failure instead of early childhood programs that can insure a fair start and at least a chance of leading a normal life.

Judges Blatz, Schellhas, and Wieland have a particular insight into how our community fails the poorest and weakest among us and I am grateful that they have stepped forward to make these statements.

The other industrialized nations have discovered that healthy children are the key to a healthy community. These nations have supported early childhood programs and poor families to insure that hundreds of thousands of dysfunctional children do not enter their school systems and force educators to manage mental health issues instead of educating children.

These nations have also recognized the residual benefit of not building thousands of prisons to house millions of criminals that have committed trillions of dollars worth of damage and tragic criminal activity. The U.S. now has 4% of the world’s population and 25% of its prison population. Minneapolis arrested 44% of its adult male population in 2001 (no duplicate arrests). There were 13 million prison and jail releases in our nation last year. The racial disparity in Minneapolis for unemployment is now worse than any other city in America.

No other industrialized nations routinely charge 11 year olds in adult courts, or makes a practice of using Ritalin, Prozac, and other psychotropic medications on five, seven, and nine year olds (without adequate mental health services) in their child protection services.

***When I study the quality of life indices from the other industrialized nations around the world I find that the U.S.suffers the highest pre teen pregnancy rates, child mortality rates, and sexually transmitted disease rates. To really prove the point compare Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, etc – where children are on par with children from third world nations.

What’s it gonna take to treat American children as well as the rest of the industrialized world treats its children?

“What we do to our children they will do to society” Pliny, 2500 years ago.

*perspective; Minnesotans will pay 60 billion dollars as their share of the Iraq/Afghan wars over the next two years, yet we do not have 6 billion dollars for our schools, infrastructure and safety net.

**As a long time volunteer guardian ad-Litem and forever Minnesota resident, I have experienced the impact of bad public policy on hundreds of children and their families. I have come to know the judges, social workers, educators, and policy makers that work with poor and dysfunctional families and how impossible their job is made without public commitment to good public policy.

***Voting for political figures trying to destroy our most basic social structures (education/health care/child protection) guarantees us a solid place at the bottom of the world’s quality of life indices and more dangerous and unhappy communities.

Judge Lucy Wieland’s article from the Star Tribune 4.16.11

I’ve been a Hennepin County judge for almost 21 years, in juvenile court for the last three.

I’m aware of the racial disparity we see daily in our courts, especially in juvenile court, where the majority of the children and families we see are nonwhite.

I’m also cochair of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, which works to reduce the unnecessary detention of juveniles. While we’ve had success at reducing detention rates, we’ve been unsuccessful at reducing the disparity in our detention center.

Right now, 90 percent of the juveniles locked up in the Hennepin County Detention Center are juveniles of color. This is an ugly fact — but it’s not the only ugly fact about race in this community.

The Star Tribune recently ran a front-page story exposing the fact that Minnesota has the largest gap in unemployment between blacks and whites of the 18 largest metro areas in the country.

We are No. 1 — worse than New York, Memphis or Detroit. The article added that experts attribute this to two main factors: education and criminal records.

Both have alarming disparity rates between whites and blacks in this state.

The education achievement gap in Minnesota between white children and children of color is widely recognized. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently noted that Minnesota’s achievement gap is one of the largest in the country.

Graduation rates for students of color are half that of white students. In Hennepin County, 63 percent of black students, 76 percent of Hispanic students and 86 percent of Native American students don’t graduate from high school.

This education gap is even more concerning when you take into account recent census reports estimating that currently 25 to 30 percent of Minnesota children under the age of 5 are African, African-American, Latino, Asian or American Indian.

This is our next generation. If we want our state to be competitive and productive, we must provide our next generation with an education.

The criminal-record problem is equally profound. Since 1981, the prison population in Minnesota has tripled, and 47 percent of inmates are now men and women of color.

The disparity between whites and blacks with criminal records is four times higher in Minnesota than the national average.

This gap is even worse in Hennepin County’s juvenile-justice system, where 56 percent of all juvenile-delinquency cases are brought against children of color.

Once youths are locked up, they are more likely to be charged — and more likely to be negatively affected in other areas such as employment and education.

The other disturbing fact is that juvenile court is no longer private. The juvenile record of any youth 16 and older is now a public record.

That means that even a petty theft charge brought against a 16-year-old will be accessible by anyone doing a criminal-record check. We have penalized our young people in a way that will haunt them in the workplace for years to come.

It is appealing for us white Minnesotans to view this as an issue of personal responsibility and choice.

People of color should make better choices and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. In my experience, children of color don’t have that option when, as third-graders, only 50 percent of them meet reading standards, compared with 90 percent of their white peers.

By 10th grade, less than 30 percent meet the standards, compared with 80 percent of their white peers.

Our children of color aren’t being educated, are being arrested and locked up disproportionately, and by the time they are 18, many of them are already out of choices.

Minnesota has tolerated a cycle of racial disparity in this state for many years, and as a result it has some of the worst gaps in employment, education and juvenile detention in the nation.

If we don’t do something as a state about these gaps, and do something soon, we are going to have a large percentage of our population uneducated, unemployed and in jail.

Not only is that wrong, but it is not cost-effective.

We need politicians, educators, businesspeople, police, prosecutors and judges to demand that we make the dramatic changes necessary to eliminate the “gaps.”

We need changes in criminal-record laws, in policies around arrest and charging of juveniles, in employment opportunities, and, most of all, in education services.

It is time we put away our rosy view of Minnesota as a land of opportunity and grapple with the ugly reality of racial disparity.

Lucy Wieland is a Hennepin County district judge.

Share this:

This is the punishment for their misfortune. American children of low income parents have the smallest chance of escaping poverty in growing to adulthood of all industrial nations. By failing to be able to read by their third grade, kids experience humiliation and only rarely manage to recover and catch up to their peers.

Studies show that children who can read by the 3rd grade are seldom ever involved with the criminal justice system. On the contrary, four of five incarcerated juvenile offenders read two years or more below grade and the majority are functionally illiterate.

This horrible truth puts a dagger through the heart of America’s most fundamental self-described exceptionalism. The belief that we are world champions of equal opportunity is false. It is a myth. It is a cruel reality to millions of our littlest citizens.

This crushed pillar of national pride is revealed in a half dozen studies of social mobility reported in recent years. They have come from researchers in Germany, Great Britain, Canada and more recently the Pew Charitable Trust and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). They are all slightly different, but all have the same conclusion. This sad fact is most recently revealed in Time magazine’s March 14 cover story “Yes, America Is In Decline”.

“Yet several studies, the most recent from the OECD last year, have found that the average American has a much lower chance of moving out of his parents income bracket than people do in places like Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Canada.”

So when conservatives blast liberals for supporting wealth re-distribution, they are ignoring the absence of fairness in how America’s wealth is distributed today. It isn’t fair at all. And liberals who argue that taxes on the rich are unfairly low, neglect the best argument of all. Income does not need to be equally distributed. What is needed are public policies that provide all kids a healthy start in life and a reasonably equal chance at prosperity. That is the equal opportunity environment that all other industrial nations seek and that they all support in varying degrees.

Ironically, the science of brain development that other societies use to convince taxpayers to support equal opportunity policies is a product of researchers here in American universities. We have some of the world’s best and they all show that healthy prenatal care and the first years of life are the most important for brain development. The only problem is our American policy makers have ignored this locally produced research.

And this is the high risk adventure America has embarked on. The single most important determinant or a nation’s success is the strength of its human capital. By squandering the lives of millions of children raised in low income families, America is creating a self fulfilling prophecy. Yes, America is in decline and it is our own fault.

Why is one of every four prison inmates in the world incarcerated here? Does it have anything to do with kids left without support in poor families, and then when they fall behind in school, and later drop out they conclude they never had a chance at the winning cards? Their mother didn’t get prenatal care, something all other modern countries apply universally. Their moms and dads didn’t get to stay home with them in their first year, like that available in all other countries, then they never could go to nursery schools and other pre-kindergarten places. And when they did get to the 3rd grade, they couldn’t read.

Conservatives and liberals, did you know that a woman experiencing childbirth has a greater chance of dying here than in 49 other countries. That includes all other industrial countries plus places like Cuba? Isn’t that something to be ashamed of? Equally shameful is the fact that we don’t know how to keep babies alive in the first year of life-our terrible infant mortality proves it.

Here is what other countries do routinely to ensure reproductive health and to guarantee that all children have a good chance to succeed.

* income of full-time employment provides families above poverty living standard.

* universal housing for all families with children.

* universal health care.

* paid maternity and parental leave for both parents with guarantee of return to the previous job.

* women’s guaranteed right to breastfeed at work.

* universal pre-school child care and development.

* guaranteed sick leave for illness and family care.

* minimum of 5 to 6 weeks of paid vacation.

* taxpayer paid college tuition for qualifying students.

* protection of children from predatory marketing by consumer product companies.

None of these programs exist in the United States. That is why it is accurate to describe our country as a mamouth incubator for prison inmates. And that is why the US is in 30th place in government tax revenue as % to GDP. We are easily the lowest taxed country of the developed world.

Yes conservatives and liberals, Americans should pay more taxes and the top 10% of us who have amassed nearly all the growth in wealth in the past three decades should pay the most. And the reason isn’t to “redistribute wealth”, it is to begin living up to our words we so often pay homage to, that all Americans have the right to the pursuit of happiness.

Those who have prospered the most have the most at stake to correct this injustice.

This isn’t even paper airplane science. It is common sense. You don’t let children play with guns or drive cars. And you don’t punish them for poverty they are born into through no fault of their own.

I don’t think much of people like me, and conservative and liberals and people in the middle, who punish kids for their misfortune of birth, which means America is not fair.

It’s time we stop it. If we don’t, the words of Pliny the elder will be our fate. “What we do to our children, they will do to society.”

Reprinted from
Strand tidings and view 3.22.11
By David Strand,

Aitkin Age Newspaper Aitkin, Minnesota
dlstrand@msn.com

Share this:

Politicians make political hay by blaming “civil servants” for a multitude of institutional failures that they themselves are responsible for. It is a poor understanding of underlying issues and lack of concern for the children and poor families that is killing us.

I’ve met hundreds of educators, social workers, and health workers as a volunteer guardian ad-Litem, and almost every single one of them did their work to the best of their abilities and to my knowledge, none of them were in it for the money.

How dumb must we be to accept that when a baby is found in a dumpster it’s the lowly social worker at fault? Or, when attacking the profound problems of education lay our failures at the feet of lazy & overpaid teachers? The work is getting harder every years as poverty, violence, and misery affect more and more children that have to be managed by fewer and fewer teachers, social workers, and health care dollars.

There is no question that poor governance is the root cause of the dramatic collapse in the quality of life indices America has suffered these past twenty years.

The U.S. has have fallen so far that we no longer compare ourselves to the 23 other industrialized nations with 200 year old democracies. These are our peers with the infrastructure and money to provide the highest levels of education, health, and safety within our nation. We should not compare ourselves to Pakistan, Mexico, or Afghanistan, but those nations we have always measured ourselves against.

America has the highest sexually transmitted disease rates, more preteen moms, crime, poverty and criminals than any other industrialized nation.

As a baby boomer that grew up in new schools with good health care and safe streets, it hurts me terribly to see the lack of support for at risk children, education, and healthcare that are necessary to make today’s youth capable of leading productive lives.

*Instead of investing and facilitating progressive programs, our courts and justice system have become our short sighted answer to everything.

This criminal justice policymaking has brought immense suffering to our cities, 13 million prison/jail releases and over 1 trillion dollars in insurance estimates of crime costs last year alone.

We are jailing eleven year olds as adults, denying health care to poor families and seriously troubled children, and trailing the industrialized world in almost all quality of life indices.

In Minnesota, we don’t have six billion dollars for infrastructure and support for social programs over the next two years, but we will pay our share of the Afgan and Iraq wars (sixty billion dollars will be paid by MN taxpayers over the next two years).

Support the people, programs, and policies that bring positive change to our nations youth and stop blaming the people doing the work for the problems of poor governance. Always Vote (it really matters).

Pass this onto people that need to know.

*Terrific article on American prisons from Aljazeera

Share this:

dropout rates,
sexually transmitted disease rates,
murder & incarceration rates

Some states have quality of life indices for children that rival Afghanistan. Child poverty in Mississippi, uninsured children and births to preteen mothers in Texas, infant mortality and child death in Louisiana are comparable to conditions in third world nations.

23 of the 24 industrialized nations have universal health care, paid maternal leave at child birth, & family dependency grants. Almost all of the rest of the world provide prenatal care and medical programs to guard against early childhood diseases. The U.S. does none of these things.

America believes it is saving money by ignoring the needs of young families and poor children.

Poverty and abuse begets poverty, abuse, crime, & lifelong dysfunctional behavior.

All the children I worked with in child protection wanted to be “normal, successful, children”. I believe that all of them could have achieved it with a little more help from us (doing the right thing).

Instead, a troubled system, low on resources & training, provided inadequate services to five and nine year olds that will struggle to develop coping behaviors to live among us.

Because my community refuses to support what it takes to build normal, successful children learning in (and graduating from) school, we live with juvenile crime*, school failure, and seriously troubled youth becoming problematic adults, draining instead of contributing to our community.

This is opposite a values based, or economics based approach to a problem that is only getting worse in this troubled economy.

The cost to my community of each child failing to procure the tools to learn & become a productive citizen is far greater than just the drain on schools, crime & institutionalization. Consider the generational impact of their children having families just like the one that brought them into the world. The average number of children born to mothers incarcerated in Cook County Illinois jails has grown from 2 to 4 over the last ten years.

Who admits to defunding day care, early learning programs, and blaming teachers for failing schools?

This nation full of Christians has abandoned the weakest and most vulnerable among us and forsaken the very heart of biblical teaching.

To quote Minnesota’s last Governor, (said to Andy Dawkins & David Strand when asked his opinion about child friendly programs, Tim Pawlenty stated that ; “children that are the victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the State of Minnesota”

*60% of youth in juvenile justice have diagnosable mental health issues and half that number have multiple & serious diagnosis. Former MN supreme court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated that 90% of the youth in juvenile justice have come through the child protection system.

Share this:

One, a bright fellow & past executive director of a nonprofit serving at risk youth, the other a successful businessman that has adopted many children over many years. Both have good hearts and great minds.

The political fellow tried to make a life in the nonprofit world as an executive. He quickly realized that his nonprofit (and he extrapolated that most of them) could not make rational, sustainable decisions to create outcomes consistent with their mission statements.

That’s the long way of saying that most non profits are badly run in his estimation.

He left his executive position (& the nonprofit world) after continued disagreements with the board of directors and I believe, the opinion that nonprofits could not sustainably meet the needs of abused and neglected children.

The other fellow, a long time businessman, explained that his experiences with adopted children and government agencies were bad, and therefore government should stay out of the lives of abused and neglected children.

These gentlemen believe that non profits can’t fix the problem, and our social service agencies can’t help either.

What’s left for abused and neglected children if this level of failure in the non profit and social service sector exist?

Should we let these children just sink to the bottom (as in Jonathon Swift’s MODEST PROPOSAL)?

This is what Minnesota’s last Governor, Tim Pawlenty said to Andy Dawkins & David Strand when asked his opinion; “children that are the victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the State of Minnesota”

To start with, three million children a year are reported to child protection services in the U.S. (when there is funding and calls are being answered). Multiply 3 million by the next generation of abused and neglected children (this is a generational issue).

A lesson I learned right away as a volunteer guardian ad-Litem;

It may not matter how hard foster parents & adoptive parents work to cure the wounds from damage done to children in their birth homes, the failure rate of children aging out of foster care is still 80%.

I have tracked damaged children and the families that have tried to help them for over 15 years.

My heart goes out to all the people who try, and always, the child with developing mental health issues that must deal with the same type of serious PTSD issues that our politicians and communities recognize in soldiers but refuse to acknowledge in abused and neglected children.

The Chapin Hall study of 2010 shows what I witnessed repeatedly;

the mental health issues resulting from extended exposure to violence and deprivation (that were responsible for a child’s removal from the home) were profoundly more serious than average, caring people could deal with successfully.

One boy had 27 placements by the time he was 14. An 11 year old girl broke out of St Joe’s home for children to have 3 terrible sexual experiences by the end of the day, another family had to guard against the homicidal tendencies of the boy they adopted.

Violence experienced by neglected & abused children finds its way into that child’s behavior pattern if not dealt with in a therapeutic & professional way (in a timely manner).

I have witnessed stabbings, rape, and arson committed by very young children that were in need of professional help (but did not receive it).

From a community perspective it is impractical and expensive to make educators deal with the growing population of very troubled children (think Prozac, Ritalin, & other profoundly impactful psychotropic medications) and the effect dysfunctional youth have within the classroom.

Add the costs of building of more prisons (13 million jail & prison releases in the U.S. last year), paying more insurance (1.6 trillion $ in estimated costs of crime last year), and the concurrent deterioration of our home communities.

The Chapin Hall Study proves my experience to be true. Children aging out of foster care suffer the worst transition to adulthood than any other population in this nation.

By the time they were 24 years old;

Only 6% had completed any post secondary college degree,
25% had no high school diploma or equivalency degree,
60% of males had been convicted of a crime,
73% of females had been pregnant (many preteen moms)

Consider also that two states (NY & CA) pay over $250,000 per year for each juvenile in their juvenile justice system, almost all those youth graduate into the adult criminal justice system (30 years of incarceration over a child’s lifetime is not uncommon) & yet we don’t have the money or motivation to help a child lead a normal life.

It is more effective and less costly to treat mental health issues in children than after many years of established sociopathic behaviors.

Programs and policies exist that work to help children lead normal lives (they just need our support and attention – example)

Is it ethical to ignore these issues just because no one outside of the impacted community cares (as my nonprofit friend suggests and his political party endorses)?

Abused children have no lobby & no voice in their daily lives or their own future.

Is there a religion on the planet that would continue to abandon abused and neglected children?

What kind of people are we becoming when we can look squarely at the most vulnerable people in our community and agree that they do not deserve our attention?

Can any of us be ethical or religious pepole without supporting sustainable efforts to solve this great American problem?

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

Share this:

The children that commit these crimes have almost all come out of horribly abusive homes. As a nation, we have avoided even a basic effort to ensure that American youth have at least a small chance to lead a normal life. The rest of the industrialized world has left us behind in this measurement.

The last MN governor (Tim Pawlenty) was quoted as saying that “children that are the victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the state of MN”

After many years of working with abused and neglected children, I have witnessed the grim reality of MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz statement that “90% of the youth in the justice systems have come through child protection services”.

Not many Edina or Suburban MN youth end up in County Child Protection (their families have insurance, day care, and mental health programs for troubled youth).

The children in Child Protection are there under the federal “Imminent Harm Doctrine” and have been removed from their homes because their lives have been endangered by their birth parents.

As a volunteer guardian ad-Litem, I can testify to the trauma abused and neglected children live with every day. The World Health Organization defines torture as “extended exposure to violence and deprivation”. This is exactly what I have witnessed happening to the children in my case load in Hennepin County MN.

Hating the parents solves nothing. They were almost all abused themselves as children. Many of them are preteen moms with no parenting skills and their own dysfunctional lives.

It’s horrid enough to witness the abuse these children live with all of their young lives. To think that five and ten year old children have not been punished enough by living with sex abuse, neglect, and other unspeakable act, that we must try them as adults and make sure that they never have any chance of living a normal life is just awful.

There is not a religion in the world that sanctify’s discarding ten year olds.

Once these children enter a criminal adult system they are ruined forever. The rape and insanity of youth entering the criminal justice system is well documented.

It is extremely costly to our state to try and solve these problems with more prison building (it’s also immoral).

It is common that these children will spend 30 to 60 years as returning felons, wards of the state, and dysfunctional citizens unable to hold a job or avoid drug dependency. Consider also the many years of violence and perpetual criminal behavior our prison system fosters.

MN spent 500 million on prisons last year. New York and California spend $250,000 per year on each youth in their juvenile justice systems.

It would be far less costly to our communities to provide resources to young and troubled families to insure that young children receive what they need to lead a normal life.

Just a few years ago a federal mandate forbid the the execution of youth that had committed crimes as juveniles.

Representative Westrom’s bill to try 10 year olds as adults is a step backwards and completely destroys any chance that an already abused and neglected child will ever have the opportunity to lead a normal life.

I write the following while remembering the unspeakable things that happened to the children in my caseload.

While this is harsh, I see the motivation for Jonathon Swift’s Modest Proposal;the children he speaks of lead such miserable lives, that killing them early would reduce their suffering.

Abandoning children to a criminal justice system that rapes and destroys them may be worse than death.

Share this:

David Strand, a fellow guardian ad-Litem, had an audience with Tim Pawlenty a few years ago and made an appeal for the soon to be governor’s support for abandoned/abused children. Tim Pawlenty told David (and Andy Dawkins) “children that are the victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem, nor are they the problem of the state of MN”.

At least economically, this is a false statement. Youth that do not graduate from high school are much more likely to lead dysfunctional lives and end up preteen moms and adolescent felons. Also, 80% of youth aging out of foster homes are leading dysfunctional lives.

MN spent 500 Million dollars on prisons last year, and our recidivism is as bad as the rest of the nation (about 66%). About 60% of the youth in juvenile justice have mental health diagnosis, and fully half of that number have multiple and serious diagnosis.

The state pays for children that don’t become contributing members of society in many ways. Today at the Pilgrim House Church the state economist Tom Stimson explained the need for trained workers in the coming years and how it will be negatively impacted by the falling graduation rates.

20 years ago 92% of youth graduated in MN. Today, 46% of minority youth graduate.

As a guardian ad-Litem I am saddened by the lack of resources for the youngest and most vulnerable among us. And in my experience, most abused and neglected children go onto lead dysfunctional lives.

Not valuing children is costly to the state, a terrible display of misplaced values within our community, and it hurts all citizens by lowering the quality of life in MN. Vote for people that support Minnesota children.

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Support KARA buy our book or donate

Become part of KARA’s email network by sending a request to join to;

amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

trand tidings and view

By David Strand, Aitkin, Minnesota
dlstrand@msn.com
General interest, politics, public policy
Friday, January 14, 2011

Hypocrite Tim Pawlenty tried to silence me

David Strand

Hypocrite Tim Pawlenty tried to silence me

This week (January 12) Tim Pawlenty was a guest of Jon Stewart’s on the Daily Show. Stewart asked Pawlenty if he agreed with GOP leaders such as Newt Gingrich, John Behner and Rush Limbaugh that the Obama administration was expanding government in socialistic directions, even though President Bush had also grown government with no such criticism from the Right Wing?

Again and again, Pawlenty ducked the question. He kept referring to the freedom of speech as a legitimate right of critics of the president and government. Pawlenty, suddenly big on freedom of speech, is the same guy who tried to silence me when I wrote something he said to me several years ago. It proves he is a hypocrite.

Six years ago I wrote a column for the Aitkin Age that included these words from Tim Pawlenty. “Children who are victims of failed personal responsibility are not my problem or are they the problem for our government.” He said that to me and my Minnesota representative during a meeting with Pawlenty when he served as House majority leader. His comment, stunning to me at the time, came after I had enumerated a long list of statistics showing that American kids are living in the most hostile environment among modern industrial countries. The statistics included child poverty, homelessness, infant mortality, high school drop outs, teen pregnancy, teen abortions and teen births.

Pawlenty was governor in 2004 when I included his comment in a column, fully believing that those words were an accurate reflection of his stance. Republicans are big on personal responsibility, plus his choice of words were so foreign to me they literally stuck in my mind. I could not have fabricated such a statement about children.

What did Governor Pawlenty do? He ordered his lawyer, Karen A Janisch to write me a letter stating that the quote attributed to Governor Pawlenty was false and inaccurate. I was told

“to immediately cease any action to further publish in any manner or to in any manner take any further action to attribute this purported quote to Tim Pawlenty. We have already notified the newspaper about the inaccuracy of the quote.”

In fact, I had every reason to believe his statement was a reflection of his beliefs. I had earlier written letters to both Pawlenty and to Dan McElroy, Pawlenty’s Chief of Staff, that included the same quote. Neither Pawlenty nor McElroy responded to object to the accuracy of it.

So here is the upshot. Pawlenty, who considers himself qualified to be president of the United States, is perfectly willing to use the constitutional right of freedom of speech to answer questions from Jon Stewart, but also obviously comfortable to sick his attorney on me in an attempt to silence me.

In several letters of response to Ms Janisch, I related my past correspondence to the governor and his commissioner (enclosing copies), adding that my representative Andy Dawkins fully corroborated my version. Of course she did not have the decency or good manners to respond to my letters containing the aforementioned evidence. All I received was silence.

Actually, I was initially relieved to learn that his earlier words were uncomfortable to Mr. Pawlenty. That relief did not last long. Any hope for him as a governor who cared about these victimized children was dashed by the evidence certainly of his 8 years in office. Children fared badly during those years, as evidenced by any number of statistics on education, health care, poverty and homelessness. He was certainly not “the children’s governor”, instead he was “the rich people’s governor”, carefully shielding them from tax increases that would have reduced the unfairness of Minnesota’s current tax structure.

I am very happy Pawlenty is gone. And yes, he did say those words.

Share this:

Other causes of death receive far more media attention that child maltreatment deaths;The most current figures show the following annual numbers for much more widely publicized causes of death:

• U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan: 479.
• H1N1 pediatric fatalities: 281.
• Food borne illnesses: 74.
• Toyota accelerator malfunction: 34.
• Coal mining accidents: 33.
• Total of above: 901.

In my own experience, when a baby drowned in a bath tub after 14 police calls to the home, the reporters that called me were very surprised to find out that I had experienced 49 police calls to a home before a child was removed (and only then because the seven year old tried to kill the five year old in front of the police officers).

Newspapers no longer have the financial luxury of assigning reporters to areas of news that don’t generate big readership.

Child abuse is a painful subject and much under reported. I encourage everyone to read the following article and make some effort to positively impact the lives of abused and neglected children.COALITION: END THE “NATIONAL MEDIA BLACKOUT” ON CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT DEATHS IN ORDER TO AID NEEDED REFORMS

“National Epidemic” of Nearly 2,500 Deaths Each Year Covered Significantly Less at National Level Than Other Issues Involving Far Fewer Deaths; Above-Average Child Maltreatment Death Rates in FL, NE, NM, TN, OK, TX, AR, MO, LA, OH, GA and CO Highlighted.

WASHINGTON, D.C. December 14, 2010 Every death is tragic, but why does the national media in the U.S. ignore the nearly 2,500 deaths each year that result from child abuse and neglect? Why do other issues involving far fewer deaths – such as the H1N1 virus, food-borne illnesses, Toyota accelerator malfunctions and coal mining – get far more attention from major news media outlets?

These are the tough questions that are being posed today by the National Coalition to End Child Abuse Deaths (NCECAD) in calling for an end to the “de facto national media blackout” on coverage of deaths due to child abuse and neglect. The Coalition stressed that the lack of media attention to U.S. child abuse deaths is the No. 1 impediment to the enactment of needed federal and state reforms, including a seven-step national strategy to curb child deaths due to maltreatment, $3-$5 billion in additional federal funding, and reform of state confidentiality laws.

The little-reported-on national scourge of child abuse and neglect deaths is so severe in the U.S. that it even eclipses the combined number of annual U.S. combat fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to NCECAD data. The most current figures show the following annual numbers for much more widely publicized causes of death:

• U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan: 479.
• H1N1 pediatric fatalities: 281.
• Food borne illnesses: 74.
• Toyota accelerator malfunction: 34.
• Coal mining accidents: 33.
• Total of above: 901.

(See the NCECAD data online at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=dgVN%2FSxNz4GCx%2Ba3WGA%2BR3tIl72dRyfJ.)

Though U.S. government reporting tracks only about 1,800 child maltreatment deaths (which is still twice all of the other causes listed above, including combat deaths in Iraq/Afghanistan), flaws in the abuse/neglect reporting system obscure a true child death toll that is estimated at an annual average of nearly 2,500. The flaws leading to underreporting of child abuse and neglect are, in fact, one of the issues that would be remedied under the Coalition’s recommended reforms. (See below.)

A search of Google News for ”child abuse deaths” shows more than 700 stories for January-November 2010, with nearly all of the stories being of the local “crime beat” variety and with almost no national coverage in the mix. This contrasts sharply with much more nationally oriented news reporting on the other topics, including flu deaths (1,180 stories), food illness deaths (over 3,000 stories). The Coalition emphasized that it in no way is minimizing the importance other causes of death and, instead, is seeking to ensure that child abuse and neglect deaths get the attention they deserve from the news media.

While the child abuse/child neglect crisis is one of major national concern, it also is of particular significance in the top 12 states that are above the national average for child abuse/neglect deaths (2.33 per 100,000 children): Florida 4.62; Nebraska 3.80; New Mexico 3.78; Tennessee 3.72; Oklahoma 3.42; Texas 3.32; Arkansas 2.99; Missouri 2.95; Louisiana and Ohio (both at 2.71); Georgia 2.67; and Colorado 2.65.

Michael Petit, President, Every Child Matters Education Fund, said: “The plain truth here is that our nation is suffering from what is nothing short of an epidemic of child abuse and neglect deaths and the U.S. media is turning a blind eye to this problem. We are here today to call for an end to this de facto national media blackout so that more Americans and policymakers can come to understand the need for action that will otherwise never happen if this crisis continues to lag in obscurity. This is a real wake-up call for national media, which we are calling on to start doing its job in casting a long-overdue spotlight on child abuse and neglect deaths.”

Scott Burns, executive director, National District Attorneys Association, said: “A District Attorney’s job is not just to prosecute offenders, but to protect victims. Who is more vulnerable than a child? There are what experts believe to be nearly 2,500 child abuse and neglect deaths each year in the U.S. This is staggering compared to the number of widely publicized Toyota accelerator deaths (34), H1N1 deaths (281), and even the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (479). While each death is tragic and important, child abuse deaths receive virtually no national media attention. America can do better.”

Teresa Huizar, director, National Children’s Alliance, said: “Child abuse deaths are misunderstood by the public, and often reported by the media, as isolated and largely inexplicable family events. They are neither. Rather, they are preventable tragedies and our national shame. We are calling on policymakers to implement a national strategy to end these needless deaths.”

Joan Zlotnik, director, Social Work Policy Institute, National Association of Social Workers, said: “Every day, too many children are abused, neglected and murdered in our communities. The only way to truly protect these vulnerable lives is to address the most serious problems facing families in crisis. Well-trained professionals serving in community-based prevention programs and in adequately funded service agencies are essential, but they are not enough. Our national leaders must decide that vulnerable lives are also valuable lives, and then support policies that make real change possible.”

SEVEN-POINT PLAN ON U.S. CHILD ABUSE/NEGLECT DEATHS

The following recommendations are supported by the National Coalition to End Child Abuse Deaths:

1. Building upon the best of current child protection systems, the government should develop a strategy for stopping maltreatment deaths. It should include public health and social services aimed at strengthening families and preventing maltreatment in the first place: voluntary, universal home visiting, substance abuse and mental health treatment, teen pregnancy prevention, pre-natal care, and other policies proven to work, along with state of the art assessment tools to identify and properly assess those at risk.

2. Current levels of federal spending are far below the level needed to protect all children at imminent risk of harm. An estimated $3-$5 billion in additional funds are required, for example, to allow child protective workers and other frontline personnel to have smaller caseloads and better training not only so that they will be better prepared to immediately protect children but so that they will consider lifelong careers in child protection thus bringing needed maturity and experience to the system. Continuing education and training across disciplines should be mandated, focusing especially on licensure, accreditation, and support for sub-specialties. Funds are also needed to provide a wide array of public health and social services to help at-risk kids, including comprehensive in-home services for all children already in the system.

3. In consideration of expanded federal spending, states should be required to adopt national standards drawn from existing best practices and policies for protecting children.

4. Originally intended to protect living child victims from publicity, confidentiality laws have become a hindrance to a better public understanding of child abuse and neglect fatalities. The withholding of information, especially between jurisdictions and between agencies can be detrimental and cost children their lives. Congress should consider modifications to confidentiality laws to allow policy makers, the press, and the public to better understand what protection policies and practices need to be improved in the aftermath of a child’s death, while still protecting the rights of children and families.

5. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should standardize definitions and methodologies used to collect state data related to maltreatment deaths and should require states to provide such data to the Department and within and across systems in order to receive federal funds. This would require that state child death review teams be adequately funded.

6. HHS, in cooperation with state child protective and public health agencies, should conduct a public education campaign to encourage reporting of child maltreatment, and to enlist communities in the protection of children. Because much maltreatment and many maltreatment deaths arise from neglect and abuse, neglect should receive equal focus in the campaign and by those involved in child protection.

7. To better protect children at imminent risk of severe harm, the federal government, led by HHS, and in cooperation with states, should adopt a model protocol for assuring that civil and criminal legal proceedings are closely coordinated between child protection and law enforcement agencies.

ABOUT THE COALITION

The National Coalition to End Child Abuse Deaths is made up of five national organizations that came together following the release of the report “We Can Do Better: Child Abuse and Neglect Deaths in America” at the Summit to End Child Abuse and Neglect Deaths in October 2009. The report recognized the growing number of American children who die each year as a result of child abuse and neglect — nearly 2,500 — and several studies suggest that this is a low estimate of the actual number of deaths. Among rich democracies, this rate is three times higher than that of Canada and 11 times higher than that of Italy. The Coalition members are: National Association of Social Workers, National Center for Child Death Review, National Children’s Alliance, Every Child Matters Education Fund and National District Attorneys Association.

MEDIA CONTACT: Ailis Aaron Wolf, (703) 276-3265 or aawolf@hastingsgroup.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A streaming audio replay of the news event will be available on the Web at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=4QK3omWYJPTB7DE%2FCfG%2FTntIl72dRyfJ as of 5 p.m. EST on December 14, 2010.

Michael Petit
President
Every Child Matters Education Fund

Homeland Insecurity …Why new investments in children and youth
must be a priority for the Obama Administration and the 111th

Share this:

From my perspective the decline reflects a change in policy and refusal of child protection agencies to accept cases (MN now rejects 2/3 of all reports of child abuse).

The equation works like this; if fewer cases are investigated, that must mean there are fewer cases of child abuse, which leads to less funding and fewer resources for terrified and traumatized children.

This report flies in the face of what we read in the newspaper and data that relates to abused and neglected children.

More children died last year at the hands of their parents and teen suicides had the highest rate increase in 15 years.

This is the same logic that has hidden child sex abuse from the public eye. When I wrote the book INVISIBLE CHILDREN in 2005, there were 895 cases of child sex abuse reported in the state of MN.

At that time I counted fifty children that I knew had been sexually abused. There were about five hundred guardians at that time. It is my experience that child sex abuse is the most underreported crime in America.

Again, the equation works like this; if a problem is not reported, it gets no attention and is not perceived by the public to be an issue that needs to be addressed.

Until our communities begin to solve the terrible problem of generational child abuse, our schools will continue to fail, our jails and prisons will remain full, and we will continue to lead the world in the number of very young women with sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy.

By DAVID CRARY
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 16, 2010; 5:16 PM
NEW YORK — The rate of child maltreatment in the U.S. decreased in 2009 for the third consecutive year, according to new federal figures.

Although the decrease was slight, it ran counter to the predictions of some experts that the onset of the recession in late 2008 would trigger an upsurge of abuse.

The annual report from the Department of Health and Human Services, issued Thursday, said the estimated number of victimized children dropped from 772,000 in 2008 to 763,000 last year. That’s down from 903,000 in 2006.

The rate of abuse was 10.1 per 1,000 children, down from 10.3 in 2008, to reach the lowest level since the current tracking system began in 1990.

The number of fatalities arising from abuse and neglect, however, rose slightly, from 1,740 in 2008 to 1,770 last year.

More than 80 percent of the fatalities were 3 or younger, while infants less than 1 year old had the highest overall rate of abuse and neglect. Of the perpetrators, four-fifths were the parents of the victim.

David A. Hansell, the HHS acting assistant secretary for children and families, said he was pleased by the continued decrease in maltreatment.

“However, we also know even one child abused is one too many,” he said in a statement urging more support for preventive programs and services.

David Finkelhor, a University of New Hampshire sociologist who is a leading authority on child abuse, said some people might attribute the decline in maltreatment reports to cuts in spending for investigation. But he said researchers thus far have not found evidence to support this interpretation and noted that crime also declined in 2009, contrary to expectations related to economic hard times.

“My view is that some of the improvements we have achieved that are bringing down violence and child abuse are deeply rooted and resistant to short term influences like unemployment and economic stress,” Finkelhor said.

These might include improved parenting skills, psychiatric medication and increased surveillance, he suggested.

Of the victims, 78 percent suffered neglect, nearly 18 percent were physically abused, 9.5 percent were sexually abused and 7.6 percent suffered psychological maltreatment.

Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform said much of the speculation about child abuse increasing during a recession “actually is a reflection of more people becoming poor and having that poverty itself mislabeled ‘neglect.’”

The new report “suggests that, at long last, child welfare systems are getting better at distinguishing actual maltreatment from poverty itself,” Wexler said. “They’re getting a little more careful about trying to help families instead of tearing them apart.

Earlier this week, a recently formed coalition of five organizations urged the federal government to do more to reduce child-abuse fatalities.

The National Coalition to End Child Abuse Deaths called for an increase in federal funding of $3 billion to $5 billion, an increase in home visits to troubled families, and changes in confidentiality laws that limit information jurisdictions can release about abuse cases.

—

Online:

Administration for Children and Families:http://www.acf.hhs.gov/

More reporting on Child Abuse;Child Welfare in the News

IL: Fostering strengths, not just red flags
Miller-McCune December 15, 2010
The Carole Robertson Center, which has three sites in this neighborhood, was one of those visited by the Center for the Study of Social Policy when it scoured the country for early child care centers that — knowingly or not — seemed to be doing a good job of supporting families less likely to mistreat their children.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/fostering-strengths-not-just-red-flags-26134/

NJ: Report: DYFS fails to meet foster kid requirements in NJ
Associated Press December 16, 2010
A new report examining New Jersey’s child welfare system says the agency is falling short in reuniting foster children with their families.
http://www.app.com/article/20101216/NEWS03/101216087/Report-DYFS-fails-to-meet-foster-kid-requirements-in-NJ

Monitoring Report: http://www.childrensrights.org/wp-content/uploads//2010/12/2010-12-16_nj_monitoring_period_viii_final__embargoed_report.pdf

OH: Help available for child violence victims
Cincinnati Enquirer December 15, 2010
The non-profit Center for Family Solutions officially opens Thursday in the county’s Educational Services Center building on Ohio 4 after more than five years of research and planning.
http://communitypress.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20101215/NEWS01/12160310/Help-available-for-child-violence-victims

OR: Foster-care abuse victim sues DHS for $5.25 million
Statesman Journal December 17, 2010
The lawsuit, filed recently in Marion County Circuit Court, alleges that DHS “failed to conduct an adequate investigation into Alderson’s background” and “failed to monitor plaintiff’s safety and well-being while in the care of Alderson.”
http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20101217/NEWS/12170333/1001

PA: Court program pairs volunteer advocates with kids in crisis
The Times-Tribune December 17, 2010
Lackawanna County’s Court Appointed Special Advocate program launched two years ago with 14 volunteers, according to program director Shawna Salerno. Since then, it has grown to 24 volunteers who spend countless hours gathering facts about the child’s needs and situation to present to judges.
http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/court-program-pairs-volunteer-advocates-with-kids-in-crisis-1.1078544#axzz18NWMjsLn

PA: A break for children of prisoners
The Philadelphia Enquirer December 17, 2010
Philadelphia is introducing Saturday visitation as a pilot program. It could become permanent if the trial works for families and the facility.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20101217_A_break_for_children_of_prisoners.html

UT: Utah County families complain of an adoption scam
ABC 4 News December 17, 2010
The families’ claim they were mislead by the LuckyHill International Foundation. Mislead, they believe, by paying money to adopt African children only to find out either that the paperwork was false or they weren’t able to adopt their children even after making the trek to Ghana.
http://www.abc4.com/content/news/slc/story/Utah-County-families-complain-of-an-Adoption-Scam/PVmP51YauEG1EA2YZ3biaA.cspx

WA: New clothing outlet caters strictly to foster kids
KXLY December 16, 2010
When children are taken from their parents because of abuse or neglect, many leave with only the clothes on their back. Now there’s a place in Spokane called “The Clothing Perk” where foster parents can get warm, clean clothes for those young children.
http://www.kxly.com/news/26166506/detail.html


Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Share this:

I’m looking forward to reading her constructive ideas for helping America’s weakest and most vulnerable citizens.

So far, Sarah has not shown support or many workable ideas for the millions of children that are reported as abused children each year, nor for the educators, social & health workers, grandparents, foster, & adoptive parents that struggle every day to help these children lead normal lives.

As a long time guardian ad-Litem, I’ve come to appreciate people that vote for affordable day care, crisis nurseries, early childhood programs, and I have come to understand the economic practicality of doing so.

It causes me great pain to watch as politicians put their own short term gains in front of sound public policy year after year.

Don’t support day care? I was ordered to take children away from a decent father because he could not afford it. The county would save no money by taking his four children and putting them in foster homes. Who voted for this?

On the issues of child protection and juvenile justice our nation has reached a pinnacle of wrong headed policies and near sighted politicians willing to sacrifice very useful people and programs for their own professional gain.

Don’t support crisis nurseries? The impact sex abuse, violence, or drug abuse is the trauma that lives on forever in a child. Crisis nurseries work and they save big money when children avoid the terrors of a violent home.

These are the children that can’t cope with life or school. These are the children we can help while they are young (and it is a fiscal bargain). 80% of youth aging out of foster care are leading dysfunctional lives.

Save money by incarcerating children and longer sentencing?

New York and California spend about $250,000 per year per child in their juvenile justice systems. 25% of America’s juvenile criminals are charged as adults and those that enter the system spend most of their lives in and out of prison.

Instead of lobbying for more and better programs to interrupt the cycle of abuse and violence, selfish politicians throw rocks at the people doing the hard work and make the false argument that less support for schools and children and more jails will solve our problems.

America has 5% of the world population & 25% of the world’s prison population. 13 million prison and jail releases last year in America.

Blaming teachers for failing schools is not much different than blaming social workers when a baby is found in a dumpster, or the officer for the crimes committed in the neighborhood (but it gets politicians elected because we are gullible voters).

We are to blame for electing politicians that mistakenly think that they can have safe streets by building more and bigger prisons, better schools by not providing resources to schools or troubled youth while teachers struggle to deal with the growing problems of mental health, violence, and poverty in their classrooms.

The Prozac, Ritalin, and other psychotropic medications being used by very young children has grown exponentially and complicates the lives of all those working or living with them.

Education is complicated by problems that did not exist thirty years ago. Social work has changed and our institutions need change and our support.

We have programs that mend troubled children and the ability to help kids make it through school with the right help.

I’m sure that if Sarah missed it in this book, she’ll give us some constructive ideas in the next.

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Share this:

Judge Heidi Shellhas shared her genuine concern with me about the psychotropic medications proscribed to large numbers of very young children that passed through her courtroom. I was often moved by the heartfelt attempts a judge would make to see that these hearings would be personal and meaningful to an abandoned/abused child. It is not an easy task.

How impossible the job of judge must be, removing a child from her mother, or denying visitation rights to a father and knowing the system has such limited resources and is so unable to adequately serve the poor vulnerable children that come before them. Month after month, year after year, seeing these children grow up in your courtroom.

This book, RAISED BY THE COURTS: What happens when a judge has to be the parent?, brings home the feelings and heartfelt observations of a judge that has spent years working with abused and neglected children in Florida’s juvenile justice system.

This quote from the book hurts, but it needs to be circulated; “I remember bringing my Norwegian cousin to my Florida court. She runs her own child welfare agency outside of Oslo. When she saw kids ages 10, 11 and 12 in handcuffs, leg restraints and jumpsuits, she scowled and asked, “Does Amnesty International know about this?”

Judge Irene Sullivan’s observations are very painful & very accurate, and I wish everyone could know what she knows. We would treat children better, our schools would work, and our communities would be safer and happier places to live.

Raised by the courts: What happens when a judge has to be the parent?

By Waveney Ann Moore, St Petersburg Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, October 10, 2010

Editor’s note:

Judge Irene Sullivan could write a book, so much has she seen in her Unified Family Court. Now she has. In Raised by the Courts, she recounts the balancing act she performs in trying to help rehabilitate kids who often grew up in horrible circumstances in her geographical area, which stretches roughly from Ulmerton Road in Pinellas County south to the Skyway, excluding the beaches. She has strong ideas about what works and what doesn’t for young offenders as well as society.

Her book is timely, coming as the NAACP just held a crowded community forum in St. Petersburg to sort through solutions to the dismal graduation rate of black males in Pinellas schools — among the worst in the nation by one measure. Staff writer Waveney Ann Moore interviews the judge, who is retiring in December, and intersperses Sullivan’s observations with edited excerpts from the book.

Standing before me, he looked younger than 15. Slim, with neat dreadlocks, sad brown eyes, his trademark jeans and plaid shirt and silence. That set him apart, the silence, because most juveniles are anything but silent in court. Trying to avoid incarceration, they are agitated, pleading, imaginative and dramatic. They flap their arms, raise their voices, beg, smile and agree with everything you say. The clever ones write letters.

“I’m turning my life around, Judge, you gotta believe me.”

“You can’t send me away. I gots me a shorty (a child)” — or “a job,” or “a test to take,” or “a sick grandmother.”

“I know you gave me a second chance before, but this time I really mean it. I won’t go near those guys again. I’ll keep my curfew. I really mean it.”

When sentenced, some of those same youth scream “F— you!” when taken into custody.

Javaris didn’t say a word. He stood silent and alone. None of his relatives was with him in court. I wanted to hug him rather than sentence him.

“Javaris is a good kid, but we can never find him,” said his probation officer, a large, kindly black man, his hand resting on the youth’s shoulder.

“He’s a drug dealer and a thief,” the victim in the front row interrupted, “and his family doesn’t give a damn.”

Family? What family? A bed or a couch at his grandmother’s or aunt’s house?

“He’s basically been raising himself,” the psychologist said at the podium, “roaming the streets at night, occasionally at school, finding his own food, violating curfew.”

“I’m sorry, Javaris,” I said after sentencing. “I can’t excuse your crimes, but somehow I think that we failed you too. Your family failed you, the system failed you.”

His sad eyes met mine, and he still didn’t speak when handcuffed and led away.

— From Raised by the Courts

Judge Irene Sullivan, 68, speaks forthrightly about juvenile justice and her passion for kids. There are no bad kids, says the woman once referred to by a local Fox TV reporter as Judge Hug-A-Thug. After all, children don’t choose their parents. “We want people not to have children if they can’t responsibly raise them in the first place,” she says. “Secondly, we want them to be there for their children, both parents, ideally.”

So instead, she claims as her own the kids who appear in her courtroom at the Criminal Justice Center in Clearwater — making cocky excuses, cajoling, hanging their heads or struggling to hold up drooping pants while being fingerprinted. Some have been neglected and abused by parents who lost their rights or simply gave them up without hesitation. Many stand before her for infractions from skipping school to shoplifting to serious crimes such as gun and vehicle thefts, drug sales and home invasions.

She’ll miss them when she retires in December. In her nine years as a juvenile judge, she has presided over the lives of children for whom a court appearance often is more routine than an outing to the beach and whose future points to adult prison, not a college campus. That world is at once hopeful and tragic.

WATCHING a 10-year-old jump for joy, pointing and screaming, “That’s my judge!” brings a bittersweet smile. Why does he have so many criminal charges at age 10 that he has his “own” judge? Where are his parents? Why is he living in a group home?

— From Raised by the Courts

Even though the United States locks up about 1 million teenagers a year — more than any other nation in the world — Sullivan offers a surprisingly upbeat outlook, focusing on the people and organizations committed to alleviating this national crisis of teens awaiting trial and serving time in detention facilities.

For Sullivan, who has traveled the country speaking to experts and sharing her own knowledge, the good news is about prevention, diversion and innovative programs that are keeping juveniles from crime or relapsing into crime. It’s about a U.S. Supreme Court decision that said it was unconstitutional to impose the death penalty on defendants younger than 18 and another more recent ruling stating that it is cruel and unusual punishment to send juveniles to prison for life without parole if the crime they commit does not involve killing someone. Her message is about giving young people and their families the help they need and even a second chance.

“I’m not trying to be soft,” she said at her home in Pinellas Park. “It’s just that you have to recognize that these are kids. Not to excuse their behavior. They have to be taught, mainly. Also punished, sometimes.”

One morning last week Sullivan presided over cases dealing with abuse and neglect and juvenile crime. She praised a caregiver who stepped forward to give a home to a 14-year-old whose father regularly abused him. She listened to a young mother who had used opiates and marijuana throughout her pregnancy. Her baby was positive for OxyContin at birth. A couple appeared before her who had been arrested after their five children were found in filthy conditions in their home. A neighbor found their 18-month-old and 4-year-old wandering a nearby street.

That morning, a 14-year-old getting A’s and B’s at Dunedin Middle School looked shamefaced in his detention uniform. He had been picked up for burglary. Sullivan didn’t want to interrupt his schooling, so she placed him on home detention for 21 days. His co-defendant got the same. The boys were not to have contact with each other, she instructed.

“He won’t have contact with anybody,” said the stern-faced mother of one boy. She already “has put his punishment in place,” she told the judge.

Sullivan ordered home detention for two more boys. One had left the scene of a crash and another was arrested for possession of cocaine and marijuana. All four boys in trouble that morning were African-American.

Disproportionate minority contact (DMC) is the elephant in my courtroom. Nobody mentions it, yet twice a week when I take the bench in delinquency court, I face a courtroom full of black faces. Most of the kids put on probation are black, as are the vast majority of kids committed or charged as adults.

— From Raised by the Courts

It frightens her to see African-American males, ages 12 to 17, enter what she called the “pipeline to prison,” Sullivan said in her book. Close to 70 percent of the juveniles in her delinquency court are African-American, though roughly only one in five people in her court’s geographical area is black. She believes she knows the prime reason the numbers are so high.

“If there is an area of white kids exposed to guns and gangs and such, they would have the same problem, but there are so many more single black mothers than there are single white mothers,” she said.

“And there are — this is from my observation in the court over nine years — there are more single black fathers having multiple children. This is done very young. … I’m talking about 16 years old, boys and girls, 14, 15, 16. I’ve had a number of people 16 and 17 who have two children, young men who have two children and one may be two years old and another on the way.”

I remember bringing my Norwegian cousin to my Florida court. She runs her own child welfare agency outside of Oslo. When she saw kids ages 10, 11 and 12 in handcuffs, leg restraints and jumpsuits, she scowled and asked, “Does Amnesty International know about this?”

— From Raised by the Courts

Sullivan’s court takes in an area of St. Petersburg recently in the headlines for a middle school’s brawls, an 8-year-old girl killed in a drive-by shooting that sent bullets ripping through her bedroom and a high school senior shot in the head while standing in front of a house.

Sullivan has toured the area with state Rep. Darryl Rouson. She was impressed with the parks, community centers and many modest but neat homes. She made a point to attend the 8-year-old’s funeral. She later saw a juvenile involved in the shooting in her courtroom. More than a year after the funeral, Sullivan can’t forget the little girl lying in her tiny coffin.

As she sat in the spacious home she shares with three rescued cats and a rambunctious golden retriever, she discussed the cumulative effect of what she referred to as “risk factors.”

“Kids can live in poverty or poverty level if they have parents that are urging them to get an education and reading to them at night and interested in their grades and wanting them to succeed,” she said.

“If you combine poverty with drug use in the home, which might be a reason for the poverty, then you have two risk factors. It’s very common to combine poverty and drug use. Many combine them with domestic violence, because a mother who is poor and on drugs can’t support herself, so she has to put up with a man she meets at a bar on Monday night moving in with her on Wednesday night and certainly is a stranger to her little girl. He will often become violent with her, either because he’s prone to domestic violence, anyway, or because they have no respect for each other. He wants sex and she wants support, financial support. … It always amazes me and has broken my heart when sometimes in court, these mothers choose that person and the children are removed for foster care.”

Still Sullivan mines nuggets of hope from what appear to be dismal prospects. She says there’s public support for reform. They generally understand “that services on the front end, counseling, drug treatment, preventing kids from being locked up, preventing removal of kids, is really the way to go,” she said.

Advocates for that approach, though, can’t seem to get the support of legislators, she said. Instead, Sullivan said, lobbyists for prison industries tend to get the ear of candidates running on a platform of being tough on crime.

“It is true when you start an infrastructure of prisons, juvenile jails, they have to be staffed, they have to be air conditioned and it’s hard to shut them down and go in the other direction. It can be done by not building any new ones. In fact, that’s kind of what’s going on nowadays. Due to a shortage of funds in Florida, they’re closing residential programs,” she said. “Bad times kind of make for good decisions that should have been made a long time ago.”

There have also been bad decisions, she said. Last legislative session, funding for Florida’s Healthy Families Program was cut by $10 million. “It’s going backwards, because we know from the evidence that Healthy Families, which is a nationwide program, works to prevent child abuse and neglect at a very early, critical time in children’s lives and we know that preventing abuse and neglect prevents delinquency,” Sullivan said.

Innovative intervention and prevention programs can be found in Pinellas County, across the state and throughout the country, she said. Some are funded by organizations like the Annie E. Casey, MacArthur and Eckerd Family foundations. A few require stable infrastructure, but some are dirt cheap, like the chess club initiated by Sullivan’s colleague Judge Raymond Gross. The game is taught by volunteers in St. Petersburg and participation sometimes is part of the disposition of a juvenile’s case.

A member of the Juvenile Welfare Board, Sullivan attended an institute offered last year by the lauded Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City. The program headed by Geoffrey Canada motivates children in poor, high-crime areas and emphasizes education and parental outreach. Recently it was introduced at Fairmount Park Elementary in St. Petersburg, an area covered by Sullivan’s court.

Canada’s message, she said, is that kids without hope commit crimes and that those with hope succeed.

Picture the scales of justice sitting on the bench in juvenile court. Stacked on the left scale is a bunch of blocks, sacks or bars of gold, with labels that say: “teenage brain,” “victim of abuse,” “can’t control the situation,” “acting in self-defense,” “failing in school,” “influenced by bad adults,” “untreated mental illness,” “uncontrolled anger,” or, simply, “a child.” On the right side is one huge block, sack or bar of gold that says in big black letters: “Public Safety.”

Absolutely, it is my duty to commit a youth to a locked-down, secure, residential facility if there is no other way to protect the public from the crimes the youth is committing. Public safety concerns trump social, psychological and parental concerns for the child. A juvenile judge has the same obligation as an adult criminal judge to protect the public’s safety. That’s the first order of business. It makes sense. A community held hostage by juveniles committing crimes is not going to be interested in rehabilitating those kids.

— From Raised by the Courts

Sullivan is finding it a little difficult to let go as she prepares to leave the bench. She’s watched the same kids come before her again and again, like the boy who stole a monkey.

“He struggled through his teens. He was a foster kid and went back with his parents and they were homeless and had drug problems, so we moved him out a lot in and out of foster care,” she said.

At 17, he was charged as an adult for burglary. He’s now 18.

“So he came in the other day. Fortunately, not from jail,” Sullivan said. “He came in and he said he had a good chance of getting a job and we put him on a payment plan to pay off this couple hundred dollars he stole. The state attorney set a hearing in three months to four months to see if he got the job and could start making the payments. The hearing was set for Jan. 5, and so that’s the first time I thought, I’m not going to see him in January. I’ve known him since he was 10. So I got a big pang in my heart.”

No other division of the court provides a judge with such a chance to make a difference in a person’s life for better or worse. Juvenile judges hold delinquent or dependent children in the palms of their hands, looking for solutions: programs that work, caregivers that are nurturing and responsible, therapy that’s appropriate and punishment that is effective. The contradictions break my heart.

— Raised by the Courts

Waveney Ann Moore can be reached at wmoore@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2283.

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/KidsAtRisk

Support KARA buy our book or donate

amy.rostronledoux@yahoo.com

Share this:

Much research exists that identifies failed education systems as a source of juvenile delinquency. More research shows that juvenile delinquency leads to criminal activity when a troubled youth reaches adulthood.

The need for strong education programs should be a primary concern for state and local governments. In addition to improving students’ chances for success in college and their subsequent careers, effective education programs can help keep juveniles from engaging in delinquent activities. This, in turn reduces costs to taxpayers for funding court proceedings and, if necessary, housing juvenile offenders.

Due to the importance of education and the widespread benefits of a successful program, one might question why some programs that have shown wonderful results are being cancelled in the interest of saving money. One such program, implemented by the New York City Council and rallied for by the Coalition for Educational Justice, was very successful in improving the test scores at some of New York City’s worst middle schools. The program, which focused $5 million of its budget on 51 middle schools in northern Manhattan, helped to improve test scores at 40 of them early in its implementation (Melago, 2008).

The extra funding at these middle schools was used to purchase new computers, increase the length of some school days, and improve social service staffs. One of the middle schools, located in Harlem, received a mere $38,000 and was able to use the funding to purchase 20 computers, extend the school day three days a week, add Saturday academies, and add arts programs for students. At this school, the Renaissance Leadership Academy, the passing rate for state English exams rose from 12% in 2007 to 54% in 2009. Meanwhile, the passing rate for state Math exams went from 14% to 80% over the same period (Kolodner, 2010).

So why would the city cancel such a wonderful program? There is just not enough money to keep such a program going. Unfortunately, city officials who handle the budgeting of educational programs are either unable to identify the potential for cash savings by educating middle school students rather than trying and housing juvenile delinquents, or they have been unable to gather enough support to make education a priority in the city’s budget.

If officials in cities across the country can rally to get more funding for programs like the recently abandoned program in New York City, it might be possible to help adolescent kids do well in school and avoid trouble in their lives.

My note on Dave’s piece;

25% of juveniles charged with crimes are prosecuted as adults in our nation. My experience as a guardian ad-Litem convinced me that communities save big money by investing in programs like the one Dave writes about. Safer communities and healthy citizens are a also bonus for doing the right thing.

References
Kolodner, M. (2010). Successful education program faces ax even though it helped turn middle schools around. NY Daily News. Retrieved September 10, 2010 from http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/06/17/2010-06-17_class_act_taking_a_budget_hit_successful_middle_school_program_faces_ax.html
Melago, C. (2008). City has plan, cash to revamp failing middle schools. NY Daily News. Retrieved September 10, 2010 from http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2008/08/26/2008-08-26_city_has_plan_cash_to_revamp_failing_mid-2.html

Share this:

Children have no voice, no lobby, and no vote to impact the policies that impact their lives.

It is up to those of us that know the issues and understand the needs, to advocate for those who cannot.

If we don’t speak up for them, who will?

Share this: