The latest

....news and musings on child welfare.

It’s been a crazy month! I just returned from Uzbekistan, where I was grateful for the opportunity to spend four days training local judges as part of a USAID-funded program with East-West Management Institute. That, and a lot of other travel, will (I hope) explain the lack of regular child welfare news updates.

If there’s one thing that the opportunity to work on child welfare issues with professionals in other countries has taught me, it’s that we’re all dealing with the same issues. As one judge rightly noted in our sessions, the child welfare laws are generally pretty good everywhere — the difficulty is putting those laws into practice.

So with my brain still foggy from jet lag, let’s get in a bit of news before the holiday, shall we?

• “According to summer reports from Legislative Finance Committee staff, New Mexico hospitals fail to identify up to 40% of babies born with drugs in their system and struggle even more with families’ follow-through on plans to care for those children.” Read about legislative concerns over New Mexico’s child welfare system.

• In New York City, the ACS Commissioner is resisting releasing information about children who have died despite being known to child protective services, allegedly to protect the family’s privacy.

• Speaking of New Mexico, here’s an article detailing the state’s difficulties in addressing the needs of foster children with complex behavioral issues.

• From here in Georgia, there’s an interesting story about efforts to implement our law requiring school systems to identify children in foster care and assess their needs.

• Texas Public Radio held a panel discussion on the state’s child welfare system. Here’s the video.

• Here’s a report from Alaska on failures of the system to address children in care with significant behavioral needs.

• Scripps news service has documented a number of cases in which young children whose families had serious known drug involvement died of fentanyl overdoses. Law enforcement didn’t report the families to CPS prior to the children’s deaths.

• The US Department of Justice has faulted Arizona’s child welfare system for failing to properly treat the needs of children and families with disabilities.

• 145 child welfare agency employees in Maine have written a “no confidence” letter in the agency’s leadership.

• In Michigan, there’s a fight between the child welfare agency and providers over cuts in payment rates for services.

• Washington State has a new child welfare leader.

Thanks!