Legally Kidnapped University - Following the Money

Legally Kidnapped University offers its first, introductory course on the administration and operations of the of child welfare fraud.

We will be offering courses on each segment of child welfare for the purposes of understanding what has now been adopted as the term "child trafficking".

Below, is a Wikileaks release from the Congressional Research Services on Child Welfare Financing, 2005, focusing on maximization of revenue through privatization, which has nothing to do with the "well-being" of a child.

Wikileaks CRS Child Welfare Financing: An Issue Overview Emilie Stoltzfus, Domestic Social Policy Division... by Beverly Tran on Scribd

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Family First Prevention Services ACT for Title IVe FosterCare Reform

We are spending Constitution Day at the Supreme Court of The United States. To Demand Constitutional Rights for Natural Parents !

Family First Prevention Services ACT for Title IVe FosterCare Reform

We will spend 24 hours on the steps of the Supreme Court!

September 17th 2017, overnight until September 18th 2017, where upon we will join in with the rest of the Million Parents March on DC. #MillionsOfParentsCannotBeWrong about the abuse of power and violations to their constitutional rights by #DCF #CPS aka Child Protective Services in Every State.

We have seen a rise in the number of people who are under duress due to case fixing and out right LIES about families in order to "Capture" Title IV Funding out of our social security funds.

This is the biggest most organized racket the states have ever pulled and we need to demand our families be restored.

We can not sit idled by. Join us on Constitution Day, September 17th thru September 19th in Washington DC.

Meet us at The Supreme Court of the United States at 10 am Sunday September 17th !

You can purchase items below that will help in our efforts to bring parents of #Taken Children to Washington DC for a Rally For Rights Sit in at the Supreme Court of the United States, and visits to their Representatives to discuss Family Rights Federal Funding Reform and The Passing of The Parental Rights Amendment!

DISCLAIMER:  I do not support the Parental Rights Amendment, being an original writer of the Michigan Resolution, nor do I support the Families First Act in its current form, I do support anyone who is brave enough to go public on the atrocities in child welfare.

Happy Compassionate Child Trafficking Month!

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DOJ and HHS Finally Team Up To Address Civil Rights Violations In Child Welfare

Well, it is about damn time!

The U.S. Department of Justice has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to offer joint guidance into civil rights violations in child welfare.

Child Welfare:  The Residuals of the Peculiar Institution

Why, you may inquire?

Well, because there are no civil rights in child welfare. 

"So, why are there no civil rights in child welfare?", is the next logical query.

  

The answer is quite simple because the child welfare system is a residual of the peculiar institution, devoid of any feasibly constructed oversight.

Of course, there are those who will quickly defend the entire child welfare industry, but steadfast as they are, they fail to disclose their financial and political conflicts of interest for personal inurement, which is currently another scope of investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice.

An action, or inaction, of a civil rights violation, is even more egregious when it is perpetrated through the use of federal funds, in order to maximize revenues, in the name of God.

As these child welfare organizations are classified as nonprofits, many Christian, everyone knows that...say it with me..."you cannot audit God."

This means that the iron curtain of child welfare has been impenetrable since its Emancipation Proclamation inception.

This now begs the question, "How are the DOJ and HHS to investigate alleged civil rights violations in child welfare when the databases do not have mandated reported variables?"

The University of Michigan Law School has a civil rights database.

The Department of Education has a civil rights database.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children & Families has a National Youth in Transition Database.

But there is no database on civil rights violations of children and families involved in the child welfare system.

There is not even an exclusionary database of child welfare organizations which have been found to engage in questionable billing practices in dealing with Medicaid, Title IV-B or IV-E.

Here we have U.S. Representative John Conyers speaking upon H.R. 40, a Bill to establish a commission to study the "residuals of the peculiar institution", affectionately misunderstood, as the Reparations Bill.

The study is to address the history of the means and ways of why and how the U.S. has ignored the civil rights (including human rights) violations of the poor but it must be inclusive of all targeted populations.

Only the poor are eligible for the programs in which this joint federal partnership is investigating; therefore, the only way to payback for the social assistance, where being impoverished is statutorily considered moral turpitude, is to lose one's children through termination of parental rights, the edifice of the 13th Amendment.

Canada issued a formal apology on how it has treated aboriginal children and families and did not even have slavery, but not the U.S.

This letter of guidance should be considered more along the lines of a notice of intent.

There are other areas of awakening within the DOJ and HHS, but the work will be slow and arduous as there are many, many, powerful players who do not want a single thing to change.

To my #Superfans ... you know where to find me.

Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services Issue Joint Guidance for Child Welfare Systems by Beverly Tran on Scribd

Here is the guidance for the DOJ and HHS.

Who knows, perhaps one day when the U.S. admits child welfare has no civil rights, it will finally agree to sign on.

U,N. Convention on the Rights of the Child by Beverly Tran on Scribd

If you believe you or a child's civil rights have been violated, file up with your stories.

Information about filing a Title VI complaint with DOJ can be found at www.justice.gov/crt/howfile-complaint.

Individuals who believe they have been aggrieved under Title VI should file complaints at the earliest opportunity. You can also file a Title VI complaint with OCR at www.hhs.gov/ocr/civilrights/complaints/index.html.

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It Takes A Presidential Election To Raise Child Welfare Issues

The fact that it took a presidential election to raise to national discussions the issues behind the most secretive, sardonic policies of our time, is quite sad.

This is a very well written piece on the Adoption Safe Families Act, including its background which has been omitted from any main stream media coverage.

I cringe each time Hillary Clinton touts her child welfare partnership with Tom Delay.

Selling chattel is the oldest form of survival.

Enjoy.  I surely did because there are no civil rights in child welfare.

We all know about the crime law and the welfare law.  But she pushed a third law that’s just as bad – and she’s still bragging about it.

Let me get three things out of the way right at the top: I run a small nonprofit child advocacy organization. Often I repost items from that group’s blog here.  This is NOT one of them.  I’m speaking only for myself.

• I will vote for Hillary Clinton over any Republican. Poverty is at the heart of almost every problem in child welfare, and while I don’t know that Hillary will make that problem better, the Republicans will make it much worse. 
• Since foster care has not become an issue in the campaign, I don’t know if Bernie Sanders’ views are any better than Hillary Clinton’s.

But Hillary still needs to account for the awful laws she supported during her husband’s presidency.  Michelle Alexander did a great job in The Nation calling her out for two of them, the welfare law and the crime law.  (I disagree with Alexander’s ultimate conclusion – she says she’s “inclined to believe” it would be better to form a third party.  That strikes me as self-indulgent, in the sense Susan Faludi suggests in the course of doing the best job I’ve seen of making the case for Hillary.)

But there is a third law Hillary backed that was just as bad as the other two.  And unlike the other two, no one can say “that was Bill, not Hil – don’t blame her for what he did.”  This law was pushed by Hillary.  And while she’s backed away from the crime bill, she still brags about this law.  When she says “I worked with Tom DeLay, one of the most partisan of Republicans, to reform the adoption and foster care system,” this is the law she’s talking about.

The law is called the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA).  But that’s one of those Orwellian titles Congress loves.  It’s not about adoption and it’s not about safe families. Passed in 1997, one year after the welfare law, it had exactly the same target.  ASFA was about demonizing impoverished women, especially women of color, and taking away their children.

Here’s what ASFA did:

• ASFA encouraged a take-the-child-and-run mentality on the frontlines of child welfare. Thousands more families, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately families of color, were destroyed by wrongful removal of the children.
• Instead of reducing the foster care population, ASFA increased it, trapping thousands more children in a system that, according to one major study, churns out walking wounded four times out of five.
• ASFA effectively turned the child welfare system into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.
• And when the army of childless yuppies didn’t show up to adopt in anywhere near the numbers predicted, ASFA created a generation of “legal orphans” with no ties to birth parents and no adoptive homes either — probably at least 100,000 more such “legal orphans” than had ASFA not become law.

ASFA encouraged the misuse and overuse of foster care in much the same way as the crime bill encouraged mass incarceration.  And just as the crime bill hurt entire communities of color, so does ASFA.  As Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, the removal of all these children “disrupt[s] the family and community networks that prepare children to participate in future political life.” And this needless removal of children reinforces the very stereotypes about Black families that are used to excuse such removals in the first place.

It happened because ASFA was built on a foundation of false premises:

False premise #1: Any parent who loses a child to foster care is a sadist, a brute, or a hopeless addict who “puts drugs ahead of the children.” 

Fact: Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect; other cases fall between the extremes.  So it’s no wonder that two massive studiesinvolving more than 15,000 typical cases found that children left in their own homes fared better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

False premise #2: An earlier federal law, passed in 1980, requiring “reasonable efforts” to keep families together supposedly led to some children being left in dangerous homes and other children languishing in foster care.

Fact: The law did nothing to change the federal financial incentives that encourage foster care and discourage better alternatives. So the number of children taken from their parents kept right on increasing in almost every year after that law was passed.  And though known cases of child abuse peaked in 1993, entries into foster care still kept going up.  The reason children languished in foster care was the failure to make reasonable efforts to keep families together.

Meanwhile, in 1994, soon-to-be House Speaker Newt Gingrich made his notorious proposal to consign poor people’s children to orphanages.  Republican polling guru Frank Luntz sent House Republicans a memo telling them they could get what they wanted – if they stopped using the O word.

So suddenly, the Republicans started framing the issue in terms of adoption.  They told us millions of childless Americans were desperate to adopt foster children but a Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy supposedly was trapping the children in foster care.

The Republicans knew better; a lot of Democrats were suckered.  ASFA passed nearly unanimously – Bernie Sanders voted for it, too. 

By 2000, one of the authors of ASFA, Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, couldn’t resist a little gloating.  As he explained to the New York City publication Child Welfare Watch

Initially, this was just supposed to be a safe families bill, not really an adoption bill at all. The adoption component was a way of sanitizing the bill, to make it more appealing to a broader group of people. Adoption is a very popular concept in the country right now. [Emphasis added.]

ASFA blows huge holes in what little was left of the “reasonable efforts” requirement.  It pays states bounties of thousands of dollars per child for adoptions over a baseline number.  And since the states can keep the money even if the adoption fails, it encourages quick-and-dirty slipshod placements.

Most important, ASFA sent a message to the child welfare frontlines: Rush to take away more children.  And it sent that message to a system permeated with class bias andracial bias.    So even as child abuse continued to decline, the number of children in foster care on any given day kept increasing, peaking in 1999.  It didn’t fall below the number when ASFA became law until 2003.  The number of children taken away over the course of a year kept increasing until 2006.  Now, after slow declines, both figures are increasing again.

Notwithstanding all the talk, and the bounties, adoptions increased marginally, while the number of “legal orphans” children who languish in foster care for years and then “age out” with no home at all, soared 40 percent.

As I said, a lot of Democrats were suckered.  I remember in 1997 being lectured on how horrible any mother who lost children to the system must be, in terms worthy of the worst Republican stereotypes – but this lecture came from a staffer for Sen. Ted Kennedy.

But there was one Democrat who knew or should have known at the time that the premises behind ASFA were false.  And she certainly should have realized by now that the law has backfired.  That is the Democrat who did more than any other to push ASFA through Congress:

Hillary Clinton.

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Child Welfare Reform Comes To A Political Hault

"How am I going to tell the House Judiciary Community Policing
Strategies Working Group that they have to deal with
child welfare, too?"

People fail to understand that there is too much money involved in child welfare.

This proposal would disrupt major child welfare organizational structures.  They would actually have to start an entirely new propaganda campaign to "maximize revenue".

The Bill still has no compliance mechanism to prevent fraud, waste and abuse.

The Bill does not contain any civil rights provisions nor does it address record keeping of data.

It does not even address interstate jurisdictional issues.

It completely ignores due process in the child welfare legal arena (because it actually does not exist).

The U.S, House Judiciary Community Policing Strategies Working Group refuses to even admit there are major systemic issues in dealing with Child Protective Services when they proved they are sequestered from reality by naming the working group "CPS".

This is a major election cycle where congress has, once again, kicked the budget can down the road until December, and, with current leadership, there is no way any funding decisions of this magnitude are going to go through during the political battle for control of both chambers in November and committee chairs in January.

There is much work to do as the election approaches.

Rumor has it the Bill will be reintroduced in the 115th  Congress.  We shall wait and see.

Family First Act, Proposed Overhaul of IV-E, Dies as Senate Adjourns

The U.S. Senate adjourned this afternoon, and in doing so ended any chance for the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2016, a bill that would have dramatically altered the federal IV-E entitlement, the largest conduit of funds to states for child welfare services.

Family First was conceived of by Senate Finance Committee leaders Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and paired two legislative objectives: increasing federal investment in services aimed at preventing the need for foster care, and curbing federal spending on congregate care.

Wyden and Hatch negotiated a bill with House Ways and Means leadership that used a delay in new federal spending on adoption assistance to make the act a cost-neutral proposition. Ways and Means marked Family First up in June, and it passed in the House the next week.

The hope was to “hotline” Family First in the Senate before the summer recess, but the bill started to meet opposition from state and county leadership in California, New York and Washington.

Ultimately, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) placed holds on the bill.

The Senate will return for a lame duck session after the election, but it will be too late for Family First. When the new fiscal year begins on Saturday, it will wipe away the $500 million offset provided to the bill through the delay on adoption assistance funding.

So what comes next in terms of federal child welfare policy? The Congressional focus in fiscal year 2017 will likely be on the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program, which was established as part of the Affordable Care Act and needs an extension. Two other big youth- and family-related items up for reauthorization: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

You might see movement on some more modest pieces of legislation, like the proposal to add foster youth to a federal work tax credit started for veterans. But as far as broad finance reform, the guess from Youth Services Insider is that it could be awhile.

Youth Services Insider could see both of Family First Act’s architects, Wyden and Hatch, continuing to pursue reforms on their own. Before Family First came together, Wyden was pushing a much more expensive bill that provided a much wider array of time-limited services to help families at imminent risk of entering foster care, the same standard that found its way into Family First.

Hatch’s priority is curbing congregate care funding. As far back as 2013, he has previously introduced legislation that would forbid states to use federal money in the placement of a youth under age 13 into congregate care, while setting a one-year limit on funds for older youths.

“Chairman Hatch remains committed” to ensuring that “the provisions in the Families First Prevention Services Act – particularly those that would reduce reliance on unsafe and inappropriate group homes – are able to become law,” said Senate Finance Committee Spokesman Aaron Forbes, in a statement provided to YSI today.

Opponents of Family First in California and New York offered several criticisms of the bill, many of which boiled down to a central problem. Child welfare leaders in both states felt their states had already recalibrated their systems around prevention-oriented systems and less congregate care, and a massive shift in federal support would threaten the new ecosystem.

Leadership on the bill sought to assure critics that much could be worked out in cleanup legislation and federal program guidelines. But with a new administration on the way, and the potential for turnover in Congress, that overture was never taken seriously.

The most recent round of federal waivers on IV-E funds expire in fiscal 2019, which is the year that Family First provisions would have taken effect. It seems unlikely now that another major reform will come along until that date is a little closer on the horizon.

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Debtors' Prison For Kids: The Residuals Of The Peculiar Institution

Now that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee has held its first Community Policing Strategies Working Group in Detroit, where the Community was not invited to participate, let us examine a few issues I have identified.

To begin, ya might not want to refer to this Community Policing Strategies as "CPS" as "CPS" stands for Child Protective Services, the biggest elephant in the room in dealing with community policing strategies.

People fear CPS.

Even though it is not a law enforcement agency, it possesses those super special ultra vires powers where they can enter your home without warrant, remove children from the home without a court order, or just a rubber stamped order, proceed to prosecution without the ability to face one's accuser, where one is considered "guilty until proven innocent".

Oh, and the parent, where the criteria to enter the child welfare system are based on the Title IV-A poverty means test, must pay for the child in the system, where the system bills Title IV-E (called double jackets) and/or Medicaid, and keeps collects child support, while collecting Title IV-D.

Then there is the nomenclature of child welfare.  Let us begin with "targeted populations".  What the hell do you think a targeted population is?  It is prey and there is a bounty.

In a nutshell, the juvenile justice system was designed for children to linger to "maximize revenue" and God forbid, the system is a non-profit because we all know, you cannot audit God.

And yes, my fine friends on the Hill, you must speak upon child welfare if you are to engage in reforming the justice system because CPS is the first call police will make if a parent is being arrested.

Many of these kids who go to debtors' prison hail from the child welfare system where many are in need of mental and physical health care.

As for the fraud which runs rampant, I can only state that this pervasive issue in the juvenile justice system can no longer be ignored.

Just keep in mind, it takes a judicial determination to turn the funding spigot in child welfare.

This report focuses on families in poverty but there are many, many youth who have no family or support system.

So, without further adieu, allow me to present to you what you have ignored for...well since the inception of the child welfare system, the residuals of that peculiar institution.

DEBTORS’ PRISON FOR KIDS? The High Cost of Fines and Fees in the Juvenile Justice System by Beverly Tran on Scribd

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A Very Interesting Move By Paul Ryan On Child Welfare

I am in my Provocatively Pretty
Pungent Pundit Hat

I found this precious little gem just floating out there in the cyberverse.

This is taken from U.S. Speaker of the House, Representative Paul Ryan's page.

Even though he is not the author, I find the timing of its publication to be extremely suspect.

Why, you may ask?  Well, (this is the part where I get really comfortable and put on my provocatively pretty pungent pundit hat.)

This piece comes across as a dismantling tool to the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and we all know who was behind it.

Oh, you do not?

Allow me to refresh your memories and enjoy the show called Election 2016 because it looks like Mr Ryan has joined the fun!

It’s time to rethink our foster care system.

Every year, an estimated 265,000 children are removed from their homes by welfare officials, thrown into a foster care system that often isn’t prepared to welcome them. Every one of those 265,000 children represents a family torn apart: parents who won’t raise them; siblings who won’t grow up together.

It’s a severe—and often unnecessary—measure to take when there are other solutions available. Enter the Family First Prevention Services Act, introduced by Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida.

This bill would allow states to use federal foster care dollars to pay for family services, preventing the need for foster care for some and keeping more families together.

It would provide funding for evidence-based services to prevent child abuse and neglect—in other words, make sure there are real, substantive reasons for a child to be removed.

And, when foster care is the best option, this bill would ensure foster children are placed in appropriate, family settings—not group homes or communal facilities.

By providing evidence-based prevention services, we can work to keep children out of foster care who don’t have to be. We can reduce the number of inappropriate group housing placements—meaning more family-friendly, pre-vetted homes, ready to welcome their foster children with open arms. And most importantly, we can reduce the risks of substance abuse and homelessness and ensure America’s children grow up in safe, healthy environments.

That’s why, this month, the bill passed both the Ways and Means Committee and the House on a bipartisan basis, to the satisfaction of dozens of organizations across the country:

The Children’s Defense Fund said this bill “takes historic and long overdue steps to direct federal child welfare dollars to improve outcomes for vulnerable children and families.”

Generations United applauded that it “offers relatives the support they need to keep children out of foster care and help them strive.”

It “expand[s] the availability of such services and reflects the reality that many families, including adoptive families, need targeted, effective services to meet their children’s needs and prevent foster care entry,” said the North American Council on Adoptable Children.

As Rep. Buchanan said, breaking up families should be a last resort—and this bill will help make it so.

Family First Prevention Services Act Summary 061016 by Beverly Tran

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Child Welfare Funding Bill Omits Civil Rights, Again, But Should Sail Through Congress

The White House has taken steps to overhaul the delivery of services of foster care through apps.

Its purpose is to create a database to, basically, follow the money as a quality control mechanism yet
there is nothing on the public agenda to address Medicaid fraud in child welfare.

Neither is there discussion on the role and powers of the States Medicaid Fraud Control Units as this bill will, without any temper tantrums, expand Targeted Case Management services into home-based, community-based delivery.

Nor is there any discussion about the omitted data of child welfare from the Civil Rights Database on the rapes, beatings, drugging, attempted suicides, suicides, pregnancies, etc. in child welfare.

What worries me the most is that there is a major shift for data collection and maintenance of personal information to use predictive databased models which will, just as it is called, "predict future behavior of abuse and neglect" using aggregate data.

Even though there is mention of interstate databases for monitoring services, there is nothing addressing the lack of decision-making authority and understanding of the Interstate Compact on the Placement of a Child and its jurisdictional violations, thereof.

I shall now complete the list of omissions in child welfare reform with the complete silence of Judiciary on the "guilty until proven innocent" standard in dependency courts of child welfare to authorize certain funding.

This Bill should sail through Congress quite smoothly now that...well, I shall leave like this for now, but there is much more work to be done.

Bill to Overhaul Child Welfare Funds Will Move in Both Chambers

The slightly re-named Family First Prevention Services Act, an overhaul of federal child welfare financing aimed at supporting more efforts to prevent foster care placements, will likely be introduced next week in both the House and Senate.

“At a time when an opioid epidemic is tearing families across the country apart, Congress is fighting to keep families together,” said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas), in a statement released late on Friday.

The bill “provides bipartisan solutions for families and children affected by the opioid addiction crisis,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who developed the legislation with fellow Finance member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “The bill also aims to reduce the reliance on group homes for children by providing services that will keep families together.”

The legislation would, for the first time, enable states to use federal Title IV-E dollars to pay for time-limited services to help families with children who are at risk of entering foster care. Title IV-E is an entitlement program that currently can only be used to pay for foster care and adoption.

Under Family First, a state or county agency could use matched IV-E dollars for time-limited services for 12 months after identifying a child deemed at risk of being removed to foster care. States would be responsible for developing a federally approved plan for such services, and would eventually have to report on the impact of these services. State agencies would need to show results; by 2021, they will need to report how many children deemed at risk of foster care did not end up in foster care after these services were rendered.

Earlier iterations of the bill cast a wide net on what might be considered time-limited prevention services, including assistance with affordable and safe housing. The draft planned for next week includes just three areas: mental health, substance abuse treatment and “in-home parent skill-based programs.”

Family First would also reframe the use of Title IV-B money, a much smaller block of funds that go to states, to focus on the reunification of children in foster care. The bill would remove the 12-month time limit for reunification services, and then also allow for service continuation after the child has returned home.

As Hatch described, the bill stops federal funding for congregate care placements after the second week of a child’s placement into a congregate care setting, referred to in this bill as a “child care institution.”

There are three exceptions made to this rule:

• Qualified residential programs.
• A prenatal, post-partum or parenting support program.
• An independent living program or people who remain in foster care after age 18.

The definition of “qualified residential programs” is spelled out in seven sets of criteria within the legislation. They include credentials from one of several accreditation providers, use of a trauma-informed treatment model and the presence of licensed clinical and nursing staff on site during business hours.

The restrictions on congregate care spending are the main offset to spending increases caused by this legislation. The other offset is a two-and-a-half year delay in the federal government’s expansion of support for adoption assistance. The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, passed in 2008, ended a rule that tied adoption assistance to certain income standards related to the parents of the adoptee.

Fostering Connections set a timeline that would have all adopted children eligible for adoption assistance by 2018. The Family First Prevention Services Act would delay the phasing in of that expanded coverage until at least 2020.

Legislators have also tacked on several key extensions and revisions of other federal child welfare programs to Family First. Among them:

• Extension of the adoption and guardianship incentives program, which rewards states for increasing the number of finalized adoptions and guardianships of foster youth.
• Extension of Promoting Safe and Stable Families, a major part of IV-B, at $345 million annually.
• Permission for states to increase the age range to 23 for the John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program, a program that generally sends about $180 million to states to help youth who are transitioning from foster care into adulthood.

Child Welfare Funding Restructuring Bill

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Marie Cohen Is A Classic Example Of A Chattel Hustler

I came across this particular piece, under child welfare, of by this former child welfare worker,

— Marie K. Cohen

Marie K. Cohen is a writer and child advocate and a mentor to a foster youth. She is a former social worker in the District of Columbia's child welfare system. She has a Masters in Social Work from the University of Maryland and a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton. Find her on Facebook at Fostering Reform or on Twitter@fosteringreform.

This is the comment I left because I am quite sure she will not approve my comment:

This has to be one of the most convoluted, contrite proposals I have seen in a long time. I would prefer applying the term "ass-backwards" but that would be redundant, considering the fact that this comes from the mouth of a former child welfare worker who is poorly attempting to find her way back into the industry with a made up authority.

Seriously, you wish to promote legislation to pay someone else a substantial living wage to raise kids whose original parents have had their kids removed for living in poverty, and suffering the ills of such.

In short, this is nothing but a roadmap to selling chattle. 

The reason the Families First Act disregards foster care shortage is because it is designed to help families, you know, not use foster care because it does not work and is too expensive.

This is why the act is focused on home based, community based services, not, institutional.

It is a bill to keep families together.

This is the mentality which keeps poverty codified as a crime.

I guess she did not read my congressional testimony on this.

This woman is nothing more than a chattel hustler.

Families First Act Disregards Foster Care Shortage, Need for Some Group Homes

Congress appears to be on the right track with child welfare reform, as evidenced by a summary of the new Families First Act, which may soon be marked up by the Senate Finance Committee. The centerpiece of the legislation is the expansion of Title IV-E to provide preventive services to assist children in danger of being placed in foster care.

With the passage of this legislation, federal funding will support keeping children at home as much as it does foster care. It is a change that almost everyone seems to support.

The other major part of the legislation, however, is not without controversy. That is the part that seeks to eliminate most federal support for foster care group homes.

The legislation eliminates funding for placements that are not foster family homes after two weeks, with three exceptions: Qualified Residential Treatment Programs (QRTP’s), facilities for pregnant and parenting teens, and independent living arrangements.

The definition of QRTP has not been released, but it appears that Congress has in mind the types of arrangements that are currently known as residential treatment programs, which are large institutions where clients attend school and receive mental health treatment.

I have several concerns with this provision.

First, the bill fails to recognize the need for a continuum of care depending on the child’s needs. Such a continuum should include family foster care, therapeutic foster care, therapeutic community group homes and residential treatment centers. A child who leaves residential treatment is not necessarily ready for a foster family, and a child who can’t function in a family may not need a residential treatment program. What’s missing from the options provided by the new bill are therapeutic group homes, such as those operated by Boys Town, using the evidence-based Teaching Family model.

Secondly, the bill contains no provisions to increase the supply of high-quality foster care to meet the needs of all the children who will need to be accommodated when group homes close down. Today, there is a critical foster care shortage around the country, with children staying in offices, hotels and emergency shelters because foster homes are not available to them.

To make matters worse, many existing foster homes provide care that is neglectful or even abusive. As a former social worker with District of Columbia foster children, I have writtenabout neglectful foster parents. There was the foster parent who hadn’t been to her foster child’s school in more than a year, and refused to pick her up even when she was vomiting. There was the foster parent who refused to go to a meeting at her foster child’s school, saying, “If I cared I would go, but I don’t care.”

I asked my agency to close these homes, but the request was not granted. With the shortage of foster homes, agencies are reluctant to close homes that are anything short of abusive. And even in the case of abusive homes, we have all heard the stories of children who have been killed or injured in foster care.

Sometimes, as in the case of two-year-old Laila Marie Daniel in Georgia, it turns out that agency staff disregarded multiple reports of trouble in the home. I’m sure that the critical shortage of foster parents is part of the explanation.

Abusive and neglectful foster homes need to be closed, but they must be replaced and added to with a new source of high quality foster homes. How can this be done? The only way is to pay foster parents enough so that one foster parent in each home can stay home with the children, thus attracting a completely new source of foster parents.

In an earlier column, I wrote about the SOS Children’s Villages in Illinois and Florida. They not only pay foster parents a salary but provide houses large enough for six children. The provision of housing is particularly important in order to attract foster parents to cities with high housing costs, where many foster kids live.

Paying foster parents a full-time salary is an expensive proposition. But this expense can be offset by recruiting foster couples (either married couples or two single people living together as house parents) to care for five or six children. By locating them in communities like those provided by SOS Children’s Villages or the Mockingbird Society, foster parents can be empowered to help each other, and services to the children can be provided on site.

It would be irresponsible for Congress to pass the Families First Act without provisions for a therapeutic option between foster homes and residential treatment and for increasing the supply of quality foster care. The Senate Finance Committee should modify its bill by adding a provision for short-term therapeutic group homes and by providing new funding and incentives to encourage states to improve the quantity and quality of their foster homes.

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Why Foster Care is a Hustle

Home Sweet Hustle

Mary Holden runs one of the largest foster care agencies in Portland. For years, she’s been accused of financial misdeeds and neglecting vulnerable children. Why is she still in business?

ANSWER:  Child welfare is too big to fail.

The child welfare system is dilapidated never having met one benchmark or goal of which it was originally designed.

As long as poverty increases, there will be a direct correlation with the rate of children entering the system.

As long as state contracted individuals (corporations included) face only civil penalties in fraudulant billing practices, no one will ever be held accountable because the States Attorney General do not possess the power to criminally prosecute.

Besides, who cares.  Poverty is the crime of child abuse and neglect and you cannot audit God..

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Parents v. Foster Parents: Senate Finance Committee Hearing on Child Welfare and Its Competion for the Funding

Here, in this Senate Finance Committee hearing, it is evident that the child welfare system does not work, nor has it ever as witnessed in the expert testimony.

It should be noted that this hearing was assigned to the venue of finance as legislation has been introduced to reconstruct the purpose of child welfare.

The U.S. Government wants to stop removing children from families and stop wasting money on foster care by investing in individuals, parents and children, to become productive members of society.

The Competition.

In this video, you have the Christian-based organization, the Foundation for Government Accountability which is not advocating for change in child welfare system, but is rather promoting its conservative postition of profiteering from others.

Instead of using the term "Foster Family", it has adopted the term "Safe Family".

Still functioning under the faith-based initiatives in foster care, these "host parents" will be financially compensated by the federal government through state foster parent payments.

Notice how there is no mention of providing direct financial assistance to the origianl parent.


There is a direct correlation between poverty and foster care.

As long as there is poverty, there are those who will find a way to profit from it.

Child welfare is a multi-billion dollar, unregulated industry and the war has begun on who gets funding:  Parents v. Foster Parents

I stand to applaud Senator Orin Hatch's bold initiative to bring this matter to the public light.

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New Child Welfare Bill Focuses on Keeping Families Together

I believe this Bill is going to survive.

Call your Senator and tell them to support this.  

Poverty will no longer be a crime and jobs will be created.  

Lots of jobs.

Wyden, Stabenow, Casey, Bennet, Brown, Cantwell, Schumer, Menendez introduce bill to promote family stabilization and prevent foster care

WASHINGTON – Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., was joined by seven other members of the committee today in introducing a bill to keep families together by allowing the nation’s largest child welfare funding stream to support front-end family services to reduce unnecessary foster care stays.

Currently, the majority of federal child welfare dollars is spent on foster care. The Family Stability and Kinship Care Act would give states the flexibility to use federal funds to pay for preventive services that can stabilize families and keep kids out of foster care and safe at home or with kin. Senate Finance Committee cosponsors include: Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Bob Casey, D-Penn., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Bob Menendez, D-N.J.

“Somewhere in America, a mother has to choose between leaving her kids at home alone to work a nightshift, and losing the wages that allow her to barely scrape by,” Wyden said. “The current child welfare funding system provides two choices: put kids in foster care or do nothing. There must be a better option for families who need just a little bit of extra help and this bill will give the system flexibility to respond to real-life situations of families in need.”

The bill is based on Wyden’s discussion draft from May aimed at opening up those dollars – Title IV-E of the Social Security Act – for evidence-based services to help children return to – or remain safely with – their families or be placed with kin.  

Twenty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington State currently have Title IV-E waivers that have allowed them to test innovative approaches such as investing in front-end child welfare service delivery to help families remain safely together. Wyden’s legislation would allow every state to permanently make these types of investments with federal support.

The Family Stability and Kinship Care Act would also allow states to provide these support services to extended family members who are called upon to take care of relatives’ children at a moment’s notice.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas and Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means subcommittee with jurisdiction over the nation’s foster care system, will soon introduce a companion bill in the House of Representatives.

“I am pleased to join Senator Wyden’s important initiative. Our current system is failing too many children and dividing too many families. More resources must be directed toward preventing abuse and neglect of children and to providing the support to keep families together,” Doggett said. "With early engagement, the need for foster care can be reduced substantially."

More than 60 organizations have expressed support for the bill, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators and the Children’s Defense Fund.

“The Children’s Defense Fund believes the Family Stability and Kinship Care Act represents a long overdue, giant step forward in protecting children by strengthening families,” the organization’s Policy Director MaryLee Allen said. “It will improve outcomes for children by offering services necessary to keep them safely with their families and out of foster care, and assist children in foster care to move quickly to permanent families and protect them from needing to re-enter care.”  

The bill’s cosponsors said:

“Our children deserve a permanent, safe and loving home, and that starts with community support for families,” Stabenow said. “This bill targets children who are at risk of entering the foster care system by providing access to critical family services. Not only will this approach keep more families together, it will prevent children from unnecessarily having to enter the foster care system in the first place.”

“This is commonsense legislation that will help more families in difficult circumstances stay together,” Casey said. “Under this proposal states can innovate to come up with the best solution to help these vulnerable children. If we can help families with challenges on the front end then we increase the likelihood that these children will have a better shot at pursing their dreams.”

“We have a responsibility to every single kid in Colorado and throughout the country to do everything we can to ensure they grow up in a supportive and loving environment,” Bennet said.“Providing states with flexibility to use their federal dollars on proven prevention efforts will help keep our kids safe from abuse and neglect.”

“When hardship forces an unexpected stay in foster care, it disrupts children’s routines, ripping them away from their families and often forcing them to switch schools or leave their communities,” Brown said. “We should make every effort to provide parents and kin with the support and resources they need to provide a healthy and safe living environment from the start. By investing in preventive family services, we can help ensure stable home lives for all children and keep them in the care of their families.”

Family Stability and Kinship Care Act of 2015

Family Stability BillSummary_08!05!15

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