Perspective

Today I spoke with 40 social workers and service providers in a small room for almost 90 minutes.

We talked about perspective and how each of us has a different experience with abused and abandoned children and the institutions and services that work to help them.

Like the "elephant in a dark room" analogy- each of us has a hand on a different part of the elephant. It’s the same elephant but it feels very different depending on if your hand is on the trunk, the tail, or a leg.
We all agreed that the systems and institutions designed and built to serve troubled children are not working properly and changes need to be made.

We all agreed that it’s not educators wrecking schools, nor social workers purposefully trying to destroy the lives of the children under their care.

We are confident that the police and juvenile justice workers are not trying to incarcerate poor and needy children.

What seems to be the underlying dysfunction is the poor public policy that has continued to deny services to children in Child Protection while creating more jail cells, harsher sentencing, and a focus on punishment and away from rehabilitation.

The children this group works so diligently to help for the most part end up as adolescent felons and preteen mothers no matter what the service providers do.

As long as government resources continue to pour into Criminal Justice systems and not Mental Health services;

graduation rates will remain at 50%,

recidivism at 66%

our insurance rates will reflect the twenty year statistic that about one out of five Americans is the victim of a crime each year.

The sad thing is that we all know it’s broken and we kinda know what needs to be done.

It’s just that our policy makers are so often clueless and don’t appear to appreciate the failed history of punishing abused and neglected children.

Most lawmakers ask, "where is the money going to come from?" when they should be asking, "where is the money going?"

Child Summit

At last, a movement to bring public attention to the larger issues of abused and abandoned children (the best article I've seen on Child Protection Issues to date) MikeT


Process to find lasting homes for kids is under fire

Jean Hopfensperger
Star Tribune

Published September 22, 2005

After a particularly painful beating by his mother, Roosevelt Huggins stuffed some clothes into garbage bags and dragged them to school with no plans of turning back.

Then 13, he hoped it would be the first step toward ending years of abuse and starting a new life. Instead, he bounced from foster home to foster home -- about six in all -- before finishing high school.

The courts didn't seem to notice that he wasn't following a plan to find a permanent home, as required by law. In fact, his case just seemed to drift. It's precisely the problem that a national summit of high-powered court leaders is tackling this week in Bloomington.

"Every time I went to court they talked about family reunification," said Huggins, now 21 and living in Marshall, Minn. "They didn't seem to understand that wasn't an option."

During the next two days, hundreds of judges and children's experts -- including about 25 chief justices of state supreme courts -- will participate in a summit designed to spare other children the rootlessness Huggins endured.

It's based on the premise that courts must take the lead in managing child protection cases, not just act as arbitrators, said Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz.

All 49 states who brought teams to the summit -- Louisiana had to cancel -- will return home with concrete plans to make that happen, she said.

"If a case sits on our docket, a child sits in foster care," said Blatz, who welcomed an overflow crowd of about 400 people to the summit Wednesday.

Managing child protection cases, she said, "means one judge, one family. It means you don't [delay] these cases because someone is sick. You don't make a kid wait in foster care three months while we tend to adult problems. It means that when parents leave the courthouse, they have a written notice of the next court hearing and a written case plan so they're not wondering what the judges meant."

Such changes aren't just practical, they're also critical for the child's long-term well-being, speakers at the summit said. Foster care children, for example, disproportionately end up in the criminal justice system and in homeless shelters.

One child's story

Huggins could easily have ended up that way. Upon leaving home, a teacher invited him to live with her family for a while. After that, he bounced through short-term foster homes as the court tried to reunite him with his mother. The trouble was that she had moved to California, he said.

"I lived in homes in North St. Paul, Woodbury, St. Paul Park and another place, I don't even know where I was," he said. "It played chaos with my mind. These are people you don't even know. It was hard enough living with new people, but you're also changing school districts. You feel like you're alone. And you always worry you'll have to leave again."

Finally Huggins moved in with a foster family in Cottage Grove -- a single mother and a son about his age. It wasn't exactly a match made in heaven, but they worked things through, he said. And Huggins finished high school there.

And thanks to a lot of help from teachers, social workers and others -- plus his own inner drive -- he's now attending Southwest State University.

"Kids need to have some options," Huggins said. "They [courts] have to evaluate the situation and plan ahead better for the child."
Huggins' message was repeated at the summit. Keynote speaker William Byars told the crowd that child protection "isn't a parent-protection system." If parents can't get their act together, it's time for the child to move on, he said.

And courts need to make child protection a priority, said Byers, a former South Carolina judge who now runs the state juvenile justice department.
"This is not a rent case or a land dispute," he said. "This is a child's life. And a year is an eternity for a child."

Next steps

More than half a million children are in foster care nationally, staying for an average of three years with three different families, national data show. That situation has become the subject of growing national scrutiny.
Recommendations by a Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care this year have inspired a bill in the U.S. Senate that has a good chance of passage, said former Minnesota U.S. Rep. William Frenzel, the commission's chairman.

For starters, he said, courts need to start tracking children in the court system, monitoring their placements and adoptions and the time it takes to find them permanent homes. The commission also recommended more training and better collaboration for court and child-protection workers and financial incentives for attorneys pledging to work on child-protection cases.

After the summit, every state will design a plan to improve its court performance on child protection cases, organizers said. They will share them at a National Call to Action later this year.

Said Blatz: "We've got to start looking at the system through the eyes of children."


Jean Hopfensperger is at http://www.blogger.com/.




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Saving Money Saving Children

Hurricane Katrina caused great suffering for thousands of innocent people. Katrina’s adult victims have lost everything but with help, they can still have hope for a return to normal. In five, or ten years the majority of Katrina’s adult victims will have started new lives and Katrina will only be a painful memory.

Ignoring well-known and completely understood dangers creates harm that lingers for years and innocent people will struggle to recover their broken lives. Children removed from a birth-home because of abuse and neglect, have also lost everything. But abused children do not have the benefit of having lived a normal life to which they can return.

A key difference between Katrina’s adults and abused and abandoned children stuck in Child Protection systems is that adjusting and returning to normal is just not possible for most children.
Abandoned children are unable to even envision just what "normal" is.

They see it around them, they want it, but they can’t achieve it. They weren’t taught "normal" in their birth homes. These children learned chaotic and insane behaviors at a young age. Instead of learning how to interact with peers they learned about violence and alcohol, sex and drugs.

Children raised with sex, drugs, violence, and insanity develop differently than normal kids. Abandoned children do not have the skills of socialization.

Abused children have adapted their behaviors to survive in impossible environments. Most of their adapted behaviors are asocial and personally destructive outside of their toxic home environment.

Generally they fail at school, with peers, and with authority figures. The consequences of these deficiencies are ruining the lives of At Risk Children and our society.

Failing schools, preteen pregnancy rates, and burgeoning prison populations point to the severe and lasting impact abused and abandoned children are having on our communities.

About 90% of the children in juvenile justice systems have come out of child protection systems (MN Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz). About 90% of the adults in the criminal justice system have come out of the juvenile justice system. We have created a Prison Feeder system.

Child abuse is to children, what Katrina was to the tens of thousands of
Louisiana’s suffering adults. A catastrophic disruption in the normal process of life on earth.

Three million children a year are referred into child protection systems in the U.S. Almost one million children are removed from their birth families. It’s eerie that 600,000 felons are released from American prisons every year.

Had the Army Corp of Engineers been allowed to make the necessary upgrades to Louisiana’s locks and levies the huge expense of rebuilding an entire city could have been avoided. The catastrophic death and suffering of tens of thousands of Louisiana residents could have been avoided also.

If America was to practice a proactive approach to our abused and neglected children, we could avoid the huge expenses of crime, prisons, failing schools, and preteen pregnancies.

Our schools would work and fewer fourteen and fifteen year old girls would have babies that they cannot care for.

We have the resources.

We know what the problem is.

We must quit wasting money on prisons and punishment of children that have been punished all their lives.

Vote for early childhood programs and support mental health initiatives.
Support programs for At Risk Youth.

Grand Rally

On Weds September 14, I spoke at the Grand Parents rally at the state capital in St Paul. State Representative Jeff Vandeveer and Children's Defense Fund representative Beth Haney spoke also.


At the same time in Washington DC, the national rally was held.
This is one of America's most active and powerful resources in the struggle to save our At Risk Children.

Grandparents need the attention and appreciation of our policy makers to help them in their efforts.

The following links will provide information on the organization and its issues;

www.grandrally.org
http://www.grandmagazine.com/

For those of you who have stories or comments on the issues facing grandparents in their struggle to make the lives of their grandchildren better, please post them to this blog.

Shortsighted culture

Abused and neglected children cannot vote and lack the skills and resources to stop the violence besieging them. Direct care workers slave tirelessly to navigate a mired system of social services that is inadequately funded and doing only as much as public will allows. We have been caught focusing on crisis, looking shortsightedly at the behaviors and crime plaguing our communities. There are a vast array of issues facing Child Protection Services.

The economic impacts of bad contemporary policy making will disable our communities for years to come if we continue to ignore the critical physical, emotional and mental health needs of these vulnerable children. By continuing to operate in the same haphazard fashion, medicating and incarcerating at risk children, who deserve so much better, we doom ourselves to continued crisis, crime, teenage pregnancy, drug use and overcrowded prisons.

Long-term sustainable solutions are needed.

This political shortsightedness discredits and debilitates social services. Paying taxes does not entitle anyone to apathy or selfishness. Public outcry is needed. Personal engagement is essential. Please consider becoming involved in the fight to help save At Risk children and make their needs visible to our policy makers and community at large.

Chad M. Ramaker
Intern at Grasstops
275 East Fourth Street
St. Paul, MN 55101
651-228-7222

Hibbing, MN Daily Tribune - article/review

On Aug. 28, 2005, the Hibbing, MN Daily Tribune ran an article about me and my book, Invisible Children, titled A serious book about a serious problem by reporter Cathy Braun.

The article is not on their website, but the above is a scan of the cover and below are scans of the article itself (click the images to enlarge.)

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Book review: Armchair Interviews

Armchair Intervews is a website that works at "connecting authors to their readers."

My new book, Invisible Children, was recently reviewed by Barbara Broom.

Here's a quote:

The author packed the book with his passion and purpose: society's involvement in children' in abusive and dysfunctional homes' foster care and the system in general. If you care about your community's welfare, it is a "must read."