Welcome to Child Abuse Prevention Month! It’s also Thank God the Legislative Session is Finally Over Month here in Georgia. Here’s the latest news!
A new series by Atlanta’s 11 Alive is asking questions about the significant weight that juvenile and criminal courts often give to child abuse diagnoses provided by specialized child abuse pediatricians. These specialists are often relied on by child protective services to explain, for example, that a child’s fractures or subdural hematomas could only have come from an incident of physical abuse. In Texas, the State adopted in 2021 a law that allows parents whose children have been diagnosed as abused to obtain a second opinion, including via in-person examination of the child by outside experts.
According to reports, Michigan is the first State to adopt rules giving kinship caregivers the same reimbursement rates as licensed foster parents. Because they’ve adopted licensing standards for kinship caregivers, those caregivers can now be reimbursed with federal funds. Currently, around 42% of Michigan children in care are placed with kin.
In Washington State, a law went into effect in 2023 that raised the bar for removals to foster care, requiring the CPS agency to demonstrate “evidence of imminent physical harm” to the child as well as a clear “causal relationship between imminent physical harm to the child and the particular conditions in the home.” A lawmaker is questioning whether that change contributed to the death of four-year old Ariel Garcia.
Amy Harfield at the Children’s Advocacy Institute alerted me to this CBS story about how foster care agencies continue to take children’s social security death and disability and veterans’ benefits.
North Carolina Public Radio has a series out that looks into the State’s use of psychiatric residential treatment facilities for children with complex needs and behaviors. Over half the children in those facilities are also in state foster care. In related news, a federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the State over the lack of appropriate placements for foster children and youth with high needs.
The status of unborn children has been in the news much of late, with a focus on IVF treatment and surrogacy. Michigan just lifted its ban on paid surrogates. Meanwhile, Pope Francis has called for a worldwide ban on surrogacy, a practice the Church deems “the commercialization of life.”
WABE’s Stephannie Stokes continues her in-depth reporting on how adequate housing can often be a barrier to a child’s returning home from foster care.
Back in 2019, West Virginia agreed in the face of threats by the US Department of Justice to reduce its reliance on group homes and institutions to care for children. This past week, the State rolled out a plan that critics fear would simply remove intensive treatment homes as an option for children with complex needs and leave them with no services whatsoever.
A Minnesota bill would require the state’s child protective services agency to use “active efforts” to avoid removing “African American and disproportionately represented” children to foster care, essentially extending the current ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act) requirements to minimize removal of any child “whose race, culture, ethnicity, disability status, or low-income socioeconomic status is disproportionately encountered, engaged, or identified in the child welfare system as compared to the representation in the state’s total child population.” Originally, the bill would have applied only to black children, which likely would have been unconstitutional. Query whether it remains an illegal race-based law.
As you may have seen in the news, Jamaican child protection authorities removed a number of US teens from Atlantis Leadership Academy, a “troubled teen” boarding school on the island. While it appears some of the youth are back home, they were originally placed in Jamaica’s foster care system.
Oregon continues to flounder in its efforts to provide appropriate treatment and care for foster children and youth with complex mental health and behavioral needs. The State continues to “hotel” children. A pending bill would “require the state to start and administer a program for children with high needs that would require the state to contract with child-caring agencies that provide residential services and other care, including mental health services, addiction treatment and therapeutic services.”
In an interesting Florida case, an appellate court has disqualified a trial judge from overseeing a dependency case involving a teen whom Florida’s DCF removed from her father’s custody because he would not support the child’s gender identity. In a preliminary hearing, the judge used the child’s cross-gender name and referred to the child, a male, as “she.” The appellate court found that through these actions, the jurist had pre-judged the case.
Thanks for reading!