Michigan Should Remain Under Federal Jurisdiction Based on its Child Welfare System

Michigan knows how bad its child welfare system is.

It is so bad that the State hired a high-priced mouthpeice to judiciously lobby U.S. District Court

U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds

Judge Nancy to talk her out of keeping Michigan under federal monitoring even though it has failed to , not just keep children safe who are in foster care, but to provide services so the children do not have to remain in foster care.

See, in Kent County, there are no homeless shelters for LBGT kids, mainly the ones who age out of foster care.  Shelters like Mel Trotter, privately run as a christian organization, refuses to take in gay youth and families, leaving them to do the fend for themselves.

Mel Trotter is running a SNAP benefits scheme, snatching from the clients.

Lest not forget the practices of "targeting vulnerable populations", code words referring to anyone who is not of predominatly European decent, such as the removals of Native American children and predictive measurement tests for social success based on the color of one's skin.   Michigan has adopted a model which directly coorelates the color of one's skin to the parent's future ability to provide for a child.

So families, in order to survive, are living together with relatives and friends who, more than likely have been targeted and the state wants to spend more money coming in and busting up families instead of changing its arcanely perverse policies on promoting thier version of christian family values?

Then Kent County has poor opportunities for affordable and quallity housing, if an applicant can get past the housing discrimination which runs rampant.

Then you have Michigan, as one of the first socio-economic policy experiments implementing a privatized child welfare system where there is still no opportunity to file complaints or greivances on its performance because everyone knows, you cannot audit God.  Non-profits which are mainly faith-based run state policy designed from their belief systems, not the will of the people and cannot be externally scrutinized due to privacy execptions and exclusions.

I would be remiss not to mention the fact that the Departments of Community Health and Human Services have recently merged, meaining there is no structual authority in place to go after Medicaid fraud in child welfare, or rather fraudulent billing.

Not having any oversight through the creation of privatization leaves families defenseless against any civil rights litigation because everyone knows poor people cannot afford justice, let alone a decent place to live.

Has anyone even considered the fact that the one person, who is the sole legal guardian for well over 7,000 children, of whom the Children's Rights lawsuit was originally filed on behalf, has never once been mentioned in litigation or in monitoring?

Michigan Chiildren's Institute, the secret organization which is impervious to any accountability, has never been audited nor reviewed to see where it falls in the grande scheme of privatization.

This is why Michigan needs to remain under federal oversight of the court for its child welfare system.

Keep cutting services and see how much it will cost you when you snatch these kids and put them in the child welfare system.

These folks just do not get it.  Poverty is not a crime.

County eyes first performance-based child welfare system

‘Precarious’ housing can end with kids in foster care, or worse — homelessness.

The first-of-its-kind performance-based child welfare system in Michigan will be considered by Kent County commissioners at their meeting this week.

The county’s Department of Health and Human Services has partnered with the 17th District Court, Network180 and five private agencies to create the system, aimed at helping families in a “precarious” housing situation where the children may be at risk of removal to foster care by court order.

“Precarious” housing generally means a family is doubled up with another family or families.

In some cases, the disintegration of the family may lead to homelessness before the local government can get involved.

As part of the proposed pilot project, the state passed PA 0520 of 2014 to streamline funding between DHHS and the county. It also created a $1.7 million annual investment in the provision of in-home services for families.

Matthew VanZetten, business analyst for human services in Kent County administration, told the County’s Finance and Physical Resources Committee the goal is to do a better job of keeping children out of the child welfare system.

Children may be removed by Child Protective Services when substantiated complaints are received about them living in “a precariously housed situation with individuals that have a history of abuse/neglect or domestic violence,” according to county documents.

County officials were advised there is no program or funding available to relocate families into a safe housing situation.

The Kent County Essential Needs Task Force and its Coalition to End Homelessness, involving the DHHS, the Court and several private social services agencies, has been meeting to look at potential solutions to the problem.

One decision was to use the local Housing Access Program, which is run by Booth Family Services, part of The Salvation Army, to do a housing assessment and then partner with a housing agency to provide housing and case management. Booth’s partner in the pilot project will be Community Rebuilders.

VanZetten told the Business Journal the state required that if DHS staff worked to help families in precarious housing situations, the cost was completely covered by the state of Michigan and the federal government. However, if a county used a private agency to do the work, the county had to provide the funding.

“We had advocated that needed change,” said VanZetten. “It should not matter if a case is managed by a private agency or the public sector. They should be funded by the state of Michigan.”

He said the policy led some counties to not use private agencies at all because of the financial disincentive.

“Outcomes should drive care, not the financial incentive or disincentive. Whoever performs it better should serve the kids and it should not be about who pays,” said VanZetten.

The main change reflected by the Kent County pilot project is the redirection of existing state funding spent by the county on foster care services. The new concept is to relocate families into a safe housing situation where the children are able to remain with the biological parents.

The pilot project will not require any increase in taxes; $400,000 is already available in the county’s 2015 DHHS Childcare Fund budget, and $600,000 will be available for the 2016 budget. Childcare Fund expenditures are reimbursed 50 percent by the state of Michigan.

VanZetten said the metrics for determining the performance are still being worked out, but he said there are essentially two metrics: whether or not the children are able to remain with their parents, and whether or not they experience any homelessness during the family’s problems.

VanZetten said it is hard to determine how many families in Kent County might now be in a precarious housing situation.

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