New Student Aid Limitations Could Challenge Former Foster Youths

Looming changes to the Federal Pell Grant Program will jeopardize the college prospects of former foster youth, who often start toward higher education with no academic credentials and high financial needs.

A budget deal reached by Congress in December maintained the amount of the Pell grants, but will limit eligibility for the grants in two key ways starting July 1. First, students can only receive them for 12 semesters, down from 18. This change affects students retroactively, so for those students who have been in school for 12 semesters and planned to receive aid for another 6 semesters, they will run out as of July 1.

Second, students can no longer qualify for Pell grants through the Ability to Benefit Test.  The test allows those students who haven’t yet received a high school diploma or GED to prove they are college prepared and therefore eligible to receive federal funding.

Both changes take effect on July 1 of this year. More than 65,000 students won’t receive aid because of the changes, according to the Association of Community College Trustees.

Some of those students are foster youth, who not only rely on the financial support but also statistically take longer to graduate from college. Eight percent of foster youth alumni graduate from a two-year or four-year institution by age 26, compared to only six percent by age 24, according to the University of Chicago Chapin Hall Midwest Evaluation of Former Foster Youth.

“It’s like a moving train is told to immediately stop and let people off,” says Michael McPartlin, program coordinator of the Guardian Scholars Program at Community College of San Francisco (CSSF).

The Guardian Scholars Program provides comprehensive support to foster youth completing a GED, achieving an Associate’s  Degree or certificate program, or transferring to a four-year institution. McPartlin says a number of students have already visited his office with concerns about how they will now pay for school.

“This is just being thrown at them now. They already have academic plans in place as suggested by the school, and now they are stuck,” says McPartlin.

One of the students stuck between a desire to continue education and a way to pay for it is Nicole Rodriguez, 26, who has been working toward an Associate’s Degree since 2006.

When Rodriguez started school, she placed into English91 B, the lowest level English class offered at CCSF. In order to be eligible to transfer to a four-year college she must take and pass English 1B, which means there are five additional required classes for which she must pay.

She is now on her twelfth semester, and wants to transfer to a four-year college and study social work.

“For the vast majority of our students, because of multiple placements, they are placed in the most basic level classes and aren’t entering prepared for the collegiate level,” says McPartlin.

The last six years Rodriguez spent becoming college-ready was like a punishment, she now feels, without the financial ability to continue college.

“How can they do that, especially for foster youth who start at the lowest of the lowest?” says Rodriguez.

Rodriguez’s road to college was long and arduous.

With a mother who was a prostitute and drug abuser, her life was never completely stable. At 15 she delivered a baby and, because her mother was on drugs, couldn’t return home. As soon as Rodriguez left the hospital she and her baby entered foster care.

After graduating high school, she became a prostitute and drug addicted, a life that to issues with depression, PTSD, and anxiety. Yet eventually she made her way to Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco and was encouraged to continue her education at CCSF.

Now married with four children, she is devastated that the lack of governmental funding will allow her to become the professional she wants to be.

“It’s still my dream to become a social worker, so not having that financial option takes away my ability to take care of my family while going to school,” says Rodriguez.

There are financial alternatives for foster youth who, like all students, can apply for student loans. In California, there are Chafee grants available, which awards former foster youth up to $5,000 in aid per year. But the aid is only available until age 23.

Now, because Rodriguez can no longer receive federal aid, she won’t be eligible for the part-time job she has on campus, which is paid through work study.

“Yes I can take out loans, but I’m trying to get out of debt. Especially coming from foster care, I need to build a foundation,” says Rodriguez.

“I may have to give up on school to take care of my family.”

The Media As a Barking Dog

Fostering Media Connections, the publisher of The Chronicle of Social Change, also runs a program called Journalism for Social Change a unique collaboration between UC Berkeley’s Graduate Schools of Journalism, Public Policy and Social Welfare. Students from these disparate domains are encouraged to produce solution-based journalism on the foster care system.

The Chronicle will offer fellowship positions to some of these students, and will print their work.

This piece, exploring the media’s role in covering child welfare, comes  from Margaret Perry, an exchange student at UC Berkeley hailing from Cork, Ireland. An English and Theater undergraduate student, she is considering a career in journalism and hopes to work towards fostering social change in any way possible, large or small.

The relationship between social services and the media is a complicated one, fraught with mistrust. According to San Francisco Bay Citizen reporter Trey Bundy, who has developed a “foster care beat” to bring regular news and insight into the system to public attention, it shouldn’t be this way.

“A lot of people get focused on the idea that you need to find a great story and really do it in depth and blow the lid off? this broken foster care system,” Bundy said in an interview. “But in fact, what’s maybe even more useful, at least in my estimation, is the idea of covering it as a beat, the same way you would cover any other beat.”

The notion of the journalist as advocate, however, seems to be in conflict with the role of the journalist as an objective observer and reporter. A journalist is a teller of stories, but a socially conscious journalist should use the stories they collect in a way that creates transparency and draws attention to both the successes and the flaws of the system.

Journalism should relate to foster care “the same way journalism relates to any piece of civic life,” Bundy said. “We spend a lot of time covering council meetings, adult criminal court, public transportation agencies and that type of thing. What we don’t spend a lot of time doing is covering the foster care system, which is just another facet of civic government that essentially is there to serve the people, operates off the taxpayer dollars and is meant to increase quality of life for individuals in society as a whole.”

The concept of the journalist’s responsibility to their subject can be seen to clash with the pressure of the media “beast,” constantly hungry for a story, any story. How can you report both honestly and sensitively about the system, even under the duress of a deadline?

“A lot of the time, you have to work around the edges,” said Bundy. “You’re writing about young people who are vulnerable, whose privacy is paramount, who do not necessarily understand what it means to speak to the media, or who perhaps didn’t even ask for their story to be a part of your story.”

Working around the edges, he explained, means getting your information “through documents, through second-hand sources … from social workers, from the heads of agencies, from attorneys.”

It is not a foster child’s responsibility to be a mascot or a success story for a journalist hungry to make a difference in the system through their work, Bundy said.

“It’s not their job to save the world and better the foster care system by putting their story out into the world,” he said. “Their job is to focus on themselves and their own healing, their own progress.” However, it is not the role of a social worker to provide fodder for stories either. Social workers have amazing stories, said Bundy. “They are in amazing circumstances all the time … they see families in crisis situations all the time. The stories are there …often times you hear complaints about the constraints in which they work.” It is the constraints of sensitivity and privacy that makes telling the stories within the system that need to be heard a difficult task for any journalist.

The power of the media as both an advocate and a watchdog for the foster care system lies in the regular production of a constant stream of stories about the system. Bundy described a series of stories he wrote about a single foster care agency in Contra Costa County that closed down after twelve years.

“If you put stories like that out into the world on a regular basis, people get used to thinking about the foster care system, they get used to thinking, that’s an issue, that’s something the newspapers cover, that’s something I should expect and I should look for.”

Constant, clear reporting on all facets of the system, from an individual to policy level, is needed if the media is ever to make any real difference to the way foster care operates in California. Foster care stories, simply told, have the ability to tug at the heartstrings of public consciousness, with no need for sensationalism.

“The more dramatic the situation is, the easier it is to set the words on the page and let that speak for itself,” said Bundy. The stories are there, and the journalist can impact reform in the foster care system by regularly reporting them as they find them and allowing them to speak for themselves, acting as a “barking dog” wherever injustice or corruption emerges in the system and chronicling the system’s successes, not just its failures.

Youth Services Insider: Notes from the JDAI Conference in Houston

JDAI Inter-Site Conference, Houston Mall Edition, is finito. I managed about eight hours of hallway chatter, six workshops, got my ear pierced and bought a massage chair at Brookstone (two of those things are not true).

Here’s a smattering of news Youth Services Insider (YSI) picked up over the two days:

Plunging into the deep end. JDAI master and commander Bart Lubow used the morning session to inform attendees about the foundation’s mission to halve the number of incarcerated juveniles.

The basic plan is to start with a public awareness campaign that both touts the downward trend in secure juvenile commitments and makes the case for greater strides in de-incarceration. That will be followed by Casey-supported pilot projects to reduce populations in the facilities of a few states,  with training and technical assistance available to some extent for other states.

Which states will get the nod as pilots? Few would even hazard a guess to YSI. One attendee that works closely with Casey threw out Kansas as a decent option, because it has a couple state-run facilities that currently house a healthy amount of low-risk offenders.

Whichever states get chosen, it looks like the idea is a two-pronged attack. The Pew Center on the States (Casey’s major partner on this project) will work on statutory reforms, crafting legislation and policy that codifies an approach that relies less on incarceration and, ideally, reinvests savings from the decreased use of facilities into community programs.

Without a reinvestment from de-incarceration, Lubow told the crowd, “Those who are wishing for greater investments for alternatives and community programs will continue to be wishing because the money will go down the incarceration drain.

Meanwhile, Casey will also invest in improvements to the array of incarceration alternatives, and avail pilot sites of the foundation’s many consultants and trainers.

JDAI’s Future. Lubow assured the audience on Wednesday morning that it would not be delegating away oversight of JDAI any time soon. A Thursday afternoon panel co-hosted by Lubow began the discussion about what comes after “any time soon.”

“The current framework is gonna change,” said Tim Murray of the Pretrial Justice Institute, who co-hosted the panel with Lubow. “It’s inevitable.”

The session was a first conversation with people out in the far-flung JDAI field about the reality of scaling down an effort that has been operated and financed by Casey for years.

“Foundations are incubators, not intermediary organizations managing vast enterprises,” Lubow said at the panel. Eventually, the foundation’s board will want to turn the day-to-day attention of its juvenile justice staff toward new ventures, starting with the new project on de-incarceration.

The likely scenario is that some organization, or perhaps more than one, will operate a national association of some kind that contracts with Casey and perhaps other funders to maintain the JDAI effort. Within that umbrella, you could see regional networks that serve as the primary conduits of training and information exchange, with periodic summits and webinars and whatnot at the national level.

You have to think Murray’s Pretrial Justice Institute, a major partner in JDAI for years, will figure prominently in whatever comes next. It oversees the JDAI Helpdesk, the web depot for every published material related to the initiative, and it is the Casey partner with a mission the fits most exactly with the overall thrust of JDAI.

One big challenge will be how to shift the regular oversight of JDAI to others while still keeping Lubow prominently involved. More than one person at the workshop mentioned how valuable it is for them that Lubow can call or meet an official or judge and have a tense conversation that might cost a local his job.

Another interesting idea for the initiative, mentioned by Bob Balicki of New Jersey: Figuring out a way to get information on JDAI into the curriculum of college classes about law enforcement and juvenile justice.

Selling Risk Assessments. Caught a presentation on risk assessment instruments (RAI), and learned that a small cottage industry has popped up of vendors selling assessments to counties or states.

RAI are a key aspect of detention policies, because for systems that use them they are an expression of what factors those systems see as determinant of the need for detention.  The score on a RAI drives the decision to detain, unless the decision-maker at intake chooses to override the score.

Many of the assessments for sale from vendors gauge the likelihood that a juvenile would endanger people if released, or that he would fail to appear in court. They also gauge the juvenile’s needs (mental health problems or special education) and potential deficits (drug use, being a runaway).

It is the need and deficit aspect of the vendor assessments that are a headache for JDAI proponents, because the philosophy of the initiative is that only two factors should steer a decision to detain a child: risk to the public and risk of failing to appear in court.

After the workshop, we asked veteran JJ expert David Steinhart what a rational override percentage would be for an RAI. In other words, is there a sweet spot where you’d know that a RAI was being relied upon, but not blindly?

His estimate: 15 to 20 percent.

Mississippi & Compliant. I never thought I’d type those words without the phrase “will never be” between them. For years it passed up most of its federal allocation under Title II because of noncompliance with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. But in the past two years, Mississippi has been in full compliance with the act.

I caught up with Ray Sims and Zach Pattie, who handle federal JJ funding and compliance for the Mississippi Division of Public Safety Planning, who explained how things turned around.

Monitoring efforts had all but disappeared in the state, with about 10 of the approximately 150 facilities even giving information to Sims and Pattie.

The reports from those 10 facilities were full of misreported data that made them look worse than they really were on detaining of status offenders, jail removal and sight/sound separation.

Making the prospects of compliance even worse, Pattie explained: the numbers from that small group of reporters serve as a projection for the numbers for the 100+ that didn’t report.

Sims and Pattie said job one was to start visiting facilities and getting their home counties to report again; most were happy too, Pattie said, and simply had not been asked to do so in years. Sims could easily coerce the more resistant jurisdictions, he said, because his office controls federal money for a slew of other county services.

Job two was traveling around the state and training facility representatives to correctly develop the compliance reports. Pattie handled that himself, he said, by organizing group trainings around the state.

Job three was figuring out how to do the necessary monitoring on a thin budget, made thinner of course from years of penalties for noncompliance. To help Pattie get to all the facilities, the department paid retired law enforcement officers $16 per hour for three-day monitoring trips (two days to visit facilities, one day of paper work).

Once the state monitoring scheme was functional, Sims said, it was simply a matter of discussing compliance problems with specific judges, particularly those with a proclivity to detain homeless or runaway youth.

In a bittersweet twist for the state, Mississippi got back into compliance just in time for federal Title II funds to fall of a cliff. The minimum allocation has dropped from $600,000 to $400,000 over the past two years.

Shrinking funds for juvenile justice monitoring is a headache everywhere now, so Sims’ concept of paying former law enforcement to make facility visits is worth noting. It prevents the need to hire part-time staffers to do it, and the officers often are well-received by facility staff. And the $16 per hour is enough that most of the officers continue to participate, reducing the need for repetitive training.

Also worth noting: Because the juvenile justice funds flow to a state agency that controls other funding, Sims appears to have more leverage than he would if all he had to barter with was JJ money.

Probation Violations: Leading Cause of DMC?

In a few different workshops where racial disparities were discussed, a common theme seemed to be that violations of probation was the main reason that a higher percentage of minority youth were being detained than white youth.

It made YSI recall a conversation I had years ago with a researcher in New Mexico, who discovered that Latino juveniles were getting way more rigid terms of probation than white juveniles got for similar crimes, and not surprisingly, violating those terms more often.

When the researcher took this information to the judge who set those terms, she told YSI, the conversation was over before it started. He took it as an accusation of racism.

Things went better for Gail Grover, who is director of the Baton Rouge Department of Juvenile Services in Louisiana. She and her staff noticed a huge disparity in detentions for probation violations. Searching for offenses by zip code, they discovered that a handful of probation officers working in a nearly all-black area were skipping the graduated sanctions that most officers used. The officers would simply recommend detention on the first violation.

The discussion about this was not acrimonious, Grover told me. The officers said they didn’t realize everyone else was stepping up gradually to detention, and told Grover they would follow suit from now on.

Kathy Collins of Monmouth County, N.J., told a Thursday morning workshop that some black juveniles Monmouth’s Asbury Park are landing in detention because residential programs they are referred to give them the boot for things like sneaking outside to smoke cigarettes or, as one juvenile’s notes said, for “breaking stuff.

Probation officers, trusting in the quality of the programs, would often immediately sign off that the juvenile had violated probation and send them to detention, Collins said.

One response of this has been the establishment of a coach program at Mercy Center, a community organization in Asbury Park. It is in the early stages, but the idea is to connect violators with a coach who can work with the juvenile’s probation officers in an effort to avoid a detention placement.

That’s all from Houston! Check the The Chronicle of Social Change’s temporary website for more YSI columns,  other news, and updates on the Chronicle.

Youth Services Insider, formerly Weekly Notes: I’m Back!

Live from the JDAI Conference in Houston, Texas

Oh, hi there! For the uninitiated: I’m John Kelly, I used to cover juvenile justice and a bunch of other things for Youth Today, and I wrote the “Weekly Notes” column on its website. I’m now with Fostering Media Connections, and we’ve launched a new web publication called The Chronicle of Social Change.  We have a temporary website for now while we build our permanent home on the ol’ Internet.

At any rate, I fully intend to continue with a weekly roundup of juvenile justice, a catch-all column of sorts that elaborates on the Chronicle’s articles and all sorts of other federal and local news and happenings. Instead of Weekly Notes, I’m going to call it Youth Services Insider, frankly because that is a much catchier and descriptive name.

One key change: Youth Services Insider (YSI) will cover both juvenile justice and child welfare. It might be a combo of juvenile justice and child welfare each week; I might alternate each week between the two. I haven’t decided yet.

Once the Chronicle’s real website is up and running (hopefully by late summer), YSI will be a weekly part of our coverage for subscribers. For now, as your humble reporter deals with a lot of planning-stage stuff, I’ll be posting YSI columns whenever I can for free!

Our first YSI installments will tackle the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) annual conference, which is happening over the next three days in sunny Harris County (Houston), Texas. After a year off, Casey has brought back the JDAI conference for the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. It will be held April 24-26 in Houston.

YSI is glad it’s back. If last year’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention conference was Juvenile Woodstock (NO idea who started that nickname), call the JDAI conference Juvenile Jazz Fest, since it’s held with more regularity.

It’s an interesting time for JDAI. When you look through the agenda for the conference, it’s still very much focused on responsibly reducing a system’s reliance on detention, the act of holding a youth securely before a judge has determined his or her actual guilt and punishment.

But the foundation and its juvenile justice leader, Bart Lubow, have made clear an interest in addressing a deeper end of the system: Reducing the number of juveniles who are actually confined for crimes that a judge has adjudicated them for. As four Texas dignitaries welcomed guests with dinnertime speeches tonight, it was noticeable that they all focused on the reduction in juvenile confinements at state facilities, particularly by Harris County, which has dropped its annual referrals to state juvenile prisons from 691 to 97 in the past few years. There was very little mention of detention.

YSI will report over the next two days on interesting tidbits from the workshops and the hallways. For now, two more thoughts on the conference:

1-The setting: Westin Galleria, which is basically a hotel/conference center infused into a shopping mall. Never seen anything like it. You could take the mall YSI grew up near in Connecticut, and fit that entire mall into just the Macy’s in this mall. Always good when one complex offers you the ability to learn about detention alternatives, ice skate, and purchase a Cadillac. [Seriously, there is a SKATING RINK and a Cadillac dealership here].

2-Lots of people, and lots of new people.  I’m guessing 700 people total are here for the conference, and at least two-thirds of them are people who have never attended a JDAI conference. So as the foundation eyes an expansion of its juvenile justice portfolio to include long-term incarceration, it is bringing on a big slate of new people on detention reform.

That isn’t a big surprise, considering how many states have joined the JDAI since the last national conference in 2010. On the list of newbies: Nebraska, Maine, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, New York and Wisconsin.

More to come! Good to be back!

Life on the Bubble

State-level worries about the cost of extending foster care have left California’s counties holding the bag; but unless something changes it is the 2,000 foster youth who will turn 19 who will really pay the price.

With only weeks until his 19th birthday, David C.’s future looks bright. In June, he will graduate from his Contra Costa County high school in the top one percentile of his class, and is excited about starting his college career at the University of California- Berkeley in the fall.

“They have a good physics club there,” the teenager says. “It’s gonna be hecka fun.”

But for David’s understandable exuberance at this pivotal moment in his life, the next months could be very rocky, as he may be cut off from foster care on his birthday because of the way the state’s new law extending care is structured.

With the passage Assembly Bill 12 in 2010, California set itself on a path to extend foster care to age 21. Despite a federal match on funding foster youth until that age, state lawmakers opted to phase the extension in over time to save money.

The way the law is written, David and the other 2,166 youths who turn 19 this year will lose state-funded support services on their 19th birthdays; May 6, in David’s case. On Jan. 1, 2013, David and other youth who are “on the bubble” like him will be eligible for foster care again when the age range expands to 20.  In May of 2013, he will again lose that support until January of 2014 – that is if the legislature takes the extra step of extending care all the way to age 21.

This leaves California’s 58 counties with a tough choice: keep teens like David connected to services without financial assistance from the state, or cut them off. It is unclear whether some, or any, will continue to support the foster youths caught in the state coverage “bubble.”

Last year, as the legislature worked on clean up legislation, CWDA highlighted the Solomonic position counties would find themselves in if the state would only fund youth until their 19th birthday in 2012.

But, according to some members of the sponsoring organizations, the California Department of Finance reported that the cost would be too high – killing CWDA’s effort in the state Capitol, and effectively pushing this tough decision onto counties and ultimately juvenile dependency court judges – who in turn choose whether or not youth like David should be left to themselves or be given the added support that may help them excel.

“The bubble occurred in the process to get AB12 signed,” says CWDA Executive Director Frank Mecca. “And beyond how horrible it is for the kids in this situation, it puts counties under pressure to allow kids to stay with the county’s the only ones paying.”

Amy Lemley, policy director for the John Burton Foundation, understands the unenviable position counties find themselves in, but is disappointed that an argument over cost in Sacramento at the 11th hour has left the fate of so many young people up to chance. “If we did this kind of planning with our own children, we would be called irresponsible parents,” Lemley says. Lemley points to the second round of AB12 clean up legislation currently being considered in Sacramento as a good opportunity to fix the issues faced by “bubble kids” like David.

The “bubble” created by AB 12 is worth noting on the national level. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, which allows states to use federal foster care funds under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act to extend services to youths between 18 and 21.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has approved had plans to implement IV-E extensions past age 18 to 10 states and the District of Columbia.

Tough fiscal times have forced many of those states to make only small steps toward expansion. Washington is among the 10 that have received approval from the Department of Health and Human Services for an extension of care to cover foster youths up to age 21.

So far, the state has enacted extensions that State Representative Mary Helen Roberts (D) says amount to “baby steps.” Services were extended to age 19 in 2011, but only for youths who were still in high school and had yet to graduate. This year they expanded the supports to include college students, but again only until 19.

“We don’t have the money to do it bigger,” Roberts, who is among the state legislators pushing to extend foster care supports for older teens, says.

California is not yet among the states approved to use IV-E funds for older foster youths. But AB 12 is by far the most comprehensive expansion of foster care since Fostering Connections was signed by Bush.

That AB 12’s graduated age expansion has created bubbles may give other states pause in pursuing that course, rather than say a law that expanded to 21 all at once but took effect years down the road.

In California, the 19-year-olds in “bubble” situations can still appeal to juvenile court judges to maintain their status as dependents of the court, and David, through his attorney, has done just that.

“The dependency courts need to know that they have the power to maintain jurisdiction,” says Angie Schwartz, policy director for the Alliance for Children’s Rights. “The responsible thing for the courts to do is keep kids in care.”

On May 4th, two days before his 19th birthday, Contra Costa County juvenile court judge Joni Hiramoto will decide whether to let David stay in care or not. Contra Costa’s Deputy County Counsel Patricia Lowe has moved to terminate services, arguing that when the legislature passed Assembly Bill 12, it intended the three-year transition period in which certain youth like David – would be ineligible.

David’s attorney, Darren Kessler, has filed a brief arguing that closing David’s case is against the intent of the law, and is further in violation of equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

In a brief submitted in April, Kessler argues that even if the law “was designed to be an incremental step towards addressing the needs of NDMs [non-minor dependents],” excluding youth like David must have some plausible rationale, and that the fiscal savings won through such a practice do not meet the “rational basis” test used in such an equal protection challenge.

David, who has been in foster care since 2005 and who has three siblings who have also been in the system at one time or other, understands the interplay of state and county budgets on the lives of kids better than most.

“We know funding is very tight right now,” he says ‘”The whole U.S.i s in debt. I know we need to cut them [Contra Costa County] some slack, but then again, when you are leaving these kids to go out and be homeless and not financiallystable or to end up in jail, that isn’t good either.”

John Kelly and Anna Jacobi contributed to this story.

Daniel Heimpel is the director of Fostering Media Connections and the publisher of The Chronicle of Social Change. 

NCCPR, Family Preservation Advocacy Shop, Goes Dark (Updated Apr. 24)

UPDATE: The Chronicle has learned that Richard Wexler has left Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and is returning to the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. The board and Wexler have decided to spend the next three months trying to develop new funding for the organization, which advocates for increased reliance on family preservation in child welfare.

***
The March 29 update on the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform blog, an acknowledgement to the organizations donors and supporters over the years, was labeled simply -30-, a journalist’s signal that a story has ended.

The post, written by the group’s founding Executive Director Richard Wexler, may indeed mark the end of the cash-starved NCCPR, which announced that it was suspending operations on March 30 “due to lack of funding.”

“We have slowly but surely over the last couple years lost the capacity to secure level of grants made it possible to keep a full time executive director,” said NCCPR Board President Martin Guggenheim, a professor at the New York University School of Law.  “Money is the only reason we closed. This is something Richard loved to do and board would love to continue.”

Wexler, a former journalist, had little administrative assistance in advocating against what NCCPR and its board viewed as a media and policy-fueled overreliance on removing children from their families.

He was a one-man show with a tone that was often abrasive. A recent foe, nonprofit litigation firm Children’s Rights (CR), often appeared in Wexler’s columns and blogs as “The Group That So Arrogantly Calls Itself Children’s Rights.” Wexler, and thus NCCPR, opposed what he saw as the omission of family preservation demands and solutions from the firm’s class-action lawsuits against state and local child welfare systems.

The NCCPR board backed Wexler’s approach. “The positions he took fit perfectly within the policies of the board, and we believed that boards are there to set policy and hire or fire staff but not tell them how to do the job,” said NCCPR Board President Martin Guggenheim, a professor at the New York University School of Law.

“Given how much influence for good an organization that cost less than $100,000 a year had,” he said, the fact that funding dried up “speaks volumes to how hard it is for progressive child welfare reform to even remain afloat in this country.”

Wexler has joined the D.C.-based Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as director of communications. The organization promotes honesty and integrity among politicians and seeks to expose unethical conduct in Washington.

Guggenheim said that NCCPR will not dissolve, but will not operate.

“Hope springs eternal,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t realize the great value of someone until after they’re gone.”

- John Kelly

Kelly: Wexler’s Unorthodox Style Worth Studying (Updated Apr. 24)

UPDATE: The Chronicle has learned that Richard Wexler has left Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and is returning to the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. The board and Wexler have decided to spend the next three months trying to develop new funding for the organization, which advocates for increased reliance on family preservation in child welfare.

***

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) was borne of a 1991 meeting in Cambridge, Mass., in which its founders decided it was necessary to create a single entity that would identify and challenge media coverage and what NCCPR Board President Martin Guggenheim described as a “powerful desire to blame the worst things that happen to children on their parents.”

Eight years after that founding meeting, the board was financially able to hire an executive director to lead NCCPR. It tapped Richard Wexler, a journalist of 19 years who had in 1991 published a book challenging the growing role of child removal and foster care in the public response to domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and maltreatment.

In “Wounded Innocents,” Wexler sardonically used the term “child savers” to describe the array of professionals who believed the removing a child from a potentially dangerous family situation was favorable to improving the potentially dangerous family situation.

The book’s sarcastic tone and digestible presentation of facts and research were a preview of things to come in the 13-years Wexler spent at NCCPR, which ended last week when Wexler left the organization he has led since 1999 to lead communications for a watchdog group on ethics in politics.

Just as it did in its early years, NCCPR will exist but without enough cash to pay for Wexler.

“The decision to suspend operations really was made for us,” Wexler wrote in an e-mail exchange this week. “There wasn’t enough money to continue and no prospect that this would change for the foreseeable future.”

Some in child welfare will mourn the loss of Wexler’s voice. Plenty of others, “consistent targets of his writing, really are celebrating,” Guggenheim said. “They’re not going to continue to be attacked.”

I’ve covered child welfare services and policy for about 10 years, first for Youth Today and now for The Chronicle for Social Change, a new publication we are launching here at Fostering Media Connections. Here are a few things that stood out about the way Wexler and NCCPR did business:

-National interjection into local situations. NCCPR is based just outside the Washington city limits, where many youth advocacy organizations focus on tying local examples to a national entreaty for reform and investment in youth services. Wexler weighed in from time to time on federal issues, but more often focused on taking the aggregation of national information and using it to influence local matters.

Mike Arsham, executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, once said of Wexler: “Pick up a newspaper anywhere from Sacramento, to Duluth, to Providence, if it contains a story about child welfare, that story is likely to quote Richard. From a funder’s perspective, he is the living definition of ‘bang for the buck.’”

-Diplomacy before war. A child fatality, and the subsequent coverage of it, can carry significant implications for local child welfare policy. When the child is living with a parent who has had some history with child protective services, Wexler argued that there was a heightened potential for caseworkers to remove children from parents simply to err on the side of caution, lest they be the next worker in the crosshairs for returning a child to a parent that kills him.

Wexler has skewered many a reporter and paper for helping to fuel a foster care panic, but Guggenheim says his superior skill was the ability to prevent such coverage with phone calls to editors.

“When a child situation came up, Richard was the first one there to make sure system didn’t overreact and remove children from their homes just to make up for it,” Guggenheim said. “He sat down with editorial writers and got them not to say what they used to say before NCCPR. It was the stories never written, headlines never issued, that made NCCPR so amazing.”

-Use of the comment-o-sphere. Many online news outlets offer the opportunity for readers to chime in with their thoughts on a story; in stories about juvenile justice and child welfare, the space is often reduced to vitriolic arguments about race or the safety net. Wexler is the only national advocate who regularly used this space to make arguments, and he always signed the comments with his name and contact info for NCCPR.

Without being sure of the exact impact such comments had, I can say two things for sure: it is an absolutely free way to communicate thought on the pages of major papers, and reporters and editors absolutely track the comments pages.

-Thinking like a journalist. I can’t remember ever waiting more than a few hours for a response from Wexler, and whenever he promised to supply research or examples of news coverage to support his position, that was in my inbox within a few hours as well. Keep in mind, this is a guy who carried on NCCPR’s work with almost no administrative assistance.

There were plenty of times I disagreed with Wexler’s point of view on issues, or the spirit of columns he wrote. But I always wanted to know his opinion, not because it would come with a colorful quote (though that helped), but because he’d be prepared to back it with data and thoughtful argument.

The extent to which NCCPR’s views (as advanced by Wexler) were right or wrong is not the point of this column. Personally, I think the need for vigilant defense of family preservation services is a crucial part of the advocacy quilt. I also think Wexler is poignant and smart enough that he could achieved his goals without some of the incendiary bomb-throwing he did in some blogs and columns. Both the board and Wexler recognize that his methods and his words made it too uncomfortable for many a would-be funder.

This column is simply to recognize a distinct brand of advocacy that yielded a lot of bang for the buck, until those bucks ran out. The number of children entering foster care when Wexler and NCCPR really began in 1999 was 550,000; the total was 408,000 last year.

“It would be ludicrous to say that NCCPR was solely responsible for that,” Wexler said, but “it would be equally ludicrous to say that NCCPR did not play a role in it far disproportionate to our size.”

John Kelly is editor-in-chief of The Chronicle for Social Change, FMC’s upcoming web publication for youth work and policy professionals. Check here for news from the Chronicle staff and updates on our future web presence.

A New Publication for Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice and Youth Development News

Well, hello there! This is the first post on the temporary home ofThe Chronicle of Social Change, a new publication on youth services and policy from Fostering Media Connections.

Let’s start here: Right now, The Chronicle is led by Daniel Heimpel, founder of Fostering Media Connections, and me, John Kelly, former managing editor at Youth Today Newspaper. We joined up on this web-based venture with two huge ambitions: helping youth work professionals do their jobs better and armed with more knowledge, and connecting the public at large to the serious debates and issues of this field.The focus will be on child welfare, juvenile justice and youth development strategies.

The staff of TheChroniclehas begun planning and building the website we believe will serve as an industry leader in youth work news. In the meantime, we will use this temporary site to start writing youth work news and provide updates on our plans for the publication.

So check back here for regular updates and news!

Sincerely,
John Kelly
Editor-in-Chief
The Chronicle of Social Change