Blogger Co-Op

On August 30, the death of seven-year-old Adrian Jones after years of abuse was once again in the news as family members filed suit against the agencies and staff that failed him.

“What did Grandma do for a job?” asked my 12-year-old grandson. “Well,” his grandfather replied, “she raised your dad and his eleven brothers and sisters, took care of our 14-room house, and even took care of her dad when he got old and lived with us.”

In “California Bill Aims to Create Better Foster Homes,” Holden Slattery reports on new legislation (AB 507) that would require social workers to help foster parents develop training plans tailored to the needs of the children in their homes.

Our child-oriented culture of the 1950s has changed and the foster care system has failed to adjust. The result is a decline in available foster homes. Headlines like these throughout the U.S.

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A new report from L.A.’s Office of Child Protection (OCP), as recently reported by Daniel Heimpel in The Chronicle, recommends revising current policy to enable the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) to offer services to families of children at high risk, even if they do not have a substantiated allegation of maltreatment.

Prolonged temporary care, whether unintended or not, amounts to child abuse.  Child protection agencies have the power to radically reduce time in foster care, but too often back off, waiting to see how the birth parents do.

Last week I wrote a column about the missing children who have run away from District of Columbia foster homes. Youth Services Insider estimated that foster youth account for about 10 percent of missing children reports and a larger fraction of the current pool of missing children in the District of Columbia.

John Kelly’s article, The Foster Care Aspect of the D.C. Missing Girls Story, draws an important connection between recent uproar about missing girls in the District, many of whom turned out to be runaways, and the city’s foster care system.