INVISIBLE CHILDREN

“Teachers were either ordered to cheat or pressured by administrators until they felt they had no choice, authorities said.”

Standardized tests were corrupted at 44 schools by 178 teachers & principals (over half have confessed) & a former “superintendent of the year” in Atlanta Georgia will not seek extension of her contract. Criminal charges are probable.

Just for a moment, think about this from an obtuse angle friends.

It is easy & automatic to hate and blame the perpetrators, but perhaps because I have 12 years in as a volunteer within the institution of child protection I find myself more forgiving than someone who does not know what it’s like to be almost guaranteed of failure in the work we do

Remember; we fail and the children fail.

Yes, all across the nation, our institutions are producing the exact opposite of what they were designed to produce.

Child protection services create preteen mothers and adolescent felons.

Juvenile justice manufactures dysfunctional human beings that average ten years in jail & prison.

Our schools graduate only a percentage of their students and about 25% of graduates cannot go on to junior college without remedial math and reading.

Who could possibly want to be a teacher, social worker, or administrative official in this failing system?

As someone from the outside, who worked alongside career social workers, teachers, and administrators, I believe the answer to be;
committed and caring people.

This work really doesn’t pay that well – especially social for workers.

These professions draw people that want to make a difference in the lives of the children they work with. I could not do this work for a living, nor could most of the people that I work with in the business world.

Call me crazy, but getting to know hundreds of social workers, educators, and juvenile justice workers, I truly believe this.

After I spoke at the United Nations 4th Annual Youth Assembly in 2008, social workers and educators from all over the east coast shared their sad stories of why they left their chosen field of endeavor. I’m from Minnesota and conditions were not yet this bad (I was troubled to know just how bad the east coast cities were suffering).

Minimal support, inadequate resources, and the never ending failure of poor children in their care. One worker confessed that she made four times more money caring for one child as a nanny than she had with 22 children as a social worker (and results were much happier and more successful-there was little success with 22 children). She also clearly articulated what it is like to work in an environment of minimal support, fear, and failure.

America is way behind the curve in supporting the change that is needed for educators and social workers to meet the challenges that are facing our youth today.

Let’s do what we can to convince our friends and legislators that teaching is important work and that children have rights and deserve protection from terrible circumstances. Support the change that is needed to make American children safe, smart, and happy.

Police will get more days off, school performance will improve, and our communities will be more livable.

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

Continue reading ‘Coming To Your State Soon? “A culture of fear, intimidation, & retaliation”’

Share this:

Recently a class action lawsuit was filed in Oklahoma claiming that children are being mistreated within the child protection system. http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=14&articleid=20100708_14_A1_Marcia556191

It was filed against various DHS officials in Tulsa federal court in February 2008. The judge is unhappy that DHS is taking too long to prepare for the trial.

The plaintiffs (children) ask for improvements in the following areas:

Lower Caseloads for DHS workers and supervisors.

Education and training for agency employees, foster parents and adoptive parents.

Monitoring of the safety of children in state custody.

The original plaintiffs were nine children who are alleged to have suffered in DHS placements. The case has since become a class-action lawsuit with thousands of children in DHS custody as plaintiff

How many states have caseloads that are just too high to provide a realistic safety net for the children they support? How many states need more training and education for the agency employees, foster parents, and adoptive parents?

Without educating judges, court workers, and criminal justice people, this nation is still on the path to maintaining excessive prison populations and disastrous school performance among the population of abused and neglected children.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Legislators in many states ought to be finding money to make these changes without class action lawsuits. To think that we are a nation forced to sue on behalf of abused and neglected children because legislators did not see the need to provide the services or resources to keep children safe shows a deep failure within our system.

To those social workers and supervisors that will be made to look bad as this case becomes news; you need to stick together and make your arguments clear and concise. Support each other and recognize that it is a glaring fault of an uncaring institution that would make the people doing the hard work look bad when failure is almost guaranteed as resources are stretched too thinly. Stick together, support each other, and make your arguments to the public. The size and scope of this problem has become too large to keep buried and silent.

America’s child protection systems need help at many levels. Like all of us, social workers do the best they can with the resources they have.

Children need this victory. They will have more resources and support if the case is resolved fairly (& maybe legislators will see the wisdom of avoiding class action lawsuits and vote for more child friendly programs).

There needs to be more money for training and services.

Without it, abused and neglected children will continue to become preteen moms & felons and lead dysfunctional lives in and out of our institutions, costing our nation a multiple of what we might have spent saving them with the price of training and services when they were young.

America is on trial here. Oklahoma is not the only state to abandon its abandoned children.

Continue reading ‘What Oklahoma Will Show The Nation’

Share this:

This generation has it in for American children. By all significant indicators, U.S. youth will not be as educated, financially well off, live as long, or be as healthy as their parents. Comparing these same indicators in other developed nations the results are very different.

For many years the U.S. was a leader among the developed nations in health, quality of life, education, and mortality. Not so any more. America’s public policies have become punitive to where we now have 5% of the world’s population & 25% of its prison population & there were 13 million prison and jail releases last year alone.

Public policy makers have been satisfied building more and bigger prisons, and schizophrenic about dealing with dysfunctional families and the problems their children pose to the schools and larger community.

Any valid study of U.S. institutions shows a direct correlation between abused and neglected children, failed schools, unsafe / unhealthy communities and full prisons.

A serious look at other industrialized nations (and many emerging nations) will show that these nations do not suffer the same terrible crime problems, failing school problems, and generational poverty issues because their public policy makers have come to understand that investments in early childhood programs & support for young families are a much better investment than prisons and jails.

Some states are fighting to keep programs that protect and foster their poor and vulnerable children, but many are not.

What can be said to people that would deny health, education, and the most basic needs for the babies and young children living among them that would change their mind to a more compassionate (and practical) understanding that we all benefit when healthy children become healthy citizens?

Perhaps, remind them that all religions demand caring for the weakest and most vulnerable among them.

“When institutions are defined by what they create, instead of what they were designed to create”, it must be said that American courts and legislatures are now creating preteen moms and juvenile felons.

*(Kathleen Long, DANCING WITH DEMONS)

Share this:

A new federal study will soon be getting rave reviews and making us feel like the nation has made great progress in ending child abuse.

From where I stand, the reported decrease in incidents of serious child abuse tells only part of the story, and is certainly not a cause for celebration.

If anything, this years financial chaos and increase to poverty is having a multiplier effect on families experiencing abuse and violence.

While strides were made during the years measured, there are serious problems in accepting the results as “mission accomplished”.

Continue reading ‘This May Not Be The Case’

Share this: