Obama Signs Bill to Speed Up Transfer of Foster Youth School Records

The Uninterrupted Scholars Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Monday, paving the way for easier access to the education records of foster youths by their caseworkers.

“The records of foster youth could not be easily obtained by the agency with custody of them, and that made no sense whatsoever to us,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the bill’s authors and co-chair of the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth.

The bill creates an exception for child welfare workers in regard to the protections included in the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which until this week required child welfare workers to either obtain parental consent for a transfer of education records, or receive a court order from a judge.

“These children get labeled, and then they get lost,” Landrieu said, speaking on a press call about the bill today. “This is one of many acts we’re working on to assist them.”

The Administration for Children Families (ACF) will issue a joint letter with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to alert state education and child welfare departments about the changes, said George Sheldon, who oversees ACF at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Foster youth are often forced to switch schools when they change foster or group homes. Many schools will not enroll a student until his records have arrived, particularly information related to immunizations received by the child.

When incomplete student records accompany foster youth to new schools, it often costs the student credits. R.J. Sloke, a former foster youth from South Carolina, said he made it to his eleventh school as a 17-year-old freshman before someone took interest in his academic history.

With the help of a faculty member, not his social worker, Sloke pieced together his whole record and was immediately reclassified as a rising high school junior.

The Uninterrupted Scholars Act eliminates the biological parent’s right to prevent the use of those records by child workers. The act amends FERPA to create an exception for “an agency caseworker or other representative of a State or local child welfare agency…when such agency or organization is legally responsible, in accordance with State or tribal law, for the care and protection of the student.”

Child welfare workers can only share or discuss those records with individuals or other entities “engaged in addressing the student’s education needs.

“It’s 100 percent cost effective because it doesn’t cost an extra penny and removes all the barriers social workers have,” said Sloke, who interned last summer for Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Kan.) and now works on Landrieu’s staff.

Early versions of the legislation included a similar exception for use of records for research on “federal and state education-related mandates governing child welfare agencies.” An early House version specifically referred to enrollment practices, attendance and school stability as three issues of interest.

According to Landrieu, that aspect of the act was killed by objections from “one or two” Senate Republicans, including Mike Enzi (Wyo.), the ranking minority member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“We fought hard for that, but we ran into a brick wall,” a disappointed Landrieu said of the research exception. “The only promise we got was it would be considered when FERPA reauthorization” came up.

The act originated in the House as the Access to Papers Leads to Uninterrupted Scholars Act, co-authored by Reps. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), Tom Marino (R-Penn.), Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Jim McDermott (D-Wash.).

The Senate version was submitted by Landrieu, with Republican support from Sens. Roy Blunt (Kan.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa).

The bill addresses one challenge within a bigger problem: The fact that foster youth have to jump from school to school in the first place. The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, passed in 2008, requires child welfare agencies to keep children in their school of origin unless it is not in the child’s best interest to do so.

Sheldon, who led Florida’s Department of Children and Families before joining the administration, said that and other requirements of Fostering Connections were difficult to comply with because of FERPA.

“I recognize the importance of privacy,” Sheldon said on the press call today. But when a child is in foster care, “the state is a parent of that child and is responsible to know everything about a child’s advancement.”

John Kelly is the editor-in-chief of The Chronicle of Social Change

News Series on Stressed Family Courts Wins duPont Award

Jessica London and Karen Foshay won a duPont Award for coverage of L.A.’s cash- and time-strapped family courts

By. John Kelly

A television production exploring how budget cuts to California’s court system have adversely affected Los Angeles Counties Juvenile Dependency Couts was awarded one of this year’s prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards.

SoCal Connected, a program of community television network KCET, was granted constrained access to a Los Angeles family courtroom and interviewed key players in the city’s dependency court process.

What producer Karen Foshay and correspondent Jennifer London found in the piece, “Courting Disaster,” was a court where judges were overextended by large dockets, attorneys were appointed to represent more than 200 people at a time

“It’s actually fairly accurate to say that…we’re dealing with these families in a much more superficial way than we really need to in order to achieve the best outcome for kids and families,” L.A. County Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash told London in the piece. “And trust me, that’s a problem.”

At the same time, London and Foshay found, funding cuts to programs and services for parents and children have delayed and at times jeopardized the reunification of children with their birth parents.

“It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had to think that I might not get my little girl because I’m on some waiting list, and I have this time limit and I’m doing everything I can to try and get into somewhere,” parent Michelle Dodge told London, referring to court-ordered drug rehabilitation she managed to access at the last minute.

In a video for the DuPont Awards, Foshay and London recounted a drawn-out process to gain access that was nearly derailed.

“It took a year of me returning to that courtroom, meeting the judges, the attorneys, trying to gain access,” Foshay said.

The two were running out of time before the SoCal Connected season ended when Judge Nash notified them one day that, if they could file a petition by 5pm to cover Judge Amy Pellman, and she agreed, he would grant access.

Pellman signed off on the project, although on the day the team showed up to film, they ran into further resistance.

“We still ran up against a number of attorneys who on the day, said. ‘We don’t want you here, and we’re filing motion with the court to block you from coming in,” recalls London in the video segment.

Months after SoCal Connected spent a day with the court, but before the piece aired, Judge Nash made a  controversial decision to grant greater media access to reporters. A group that represents many of Los Angeles’ dependent children, Children’s Law Center of California, has expressed concern about the decision.

Last month, Nash and law center Executive Director Leslie Starr Heimov were featured speakers at Fostering Media Connections’ forum on open courts. Click here to watch part one of the forum, and here to watch part two.

SoCal Connected re-aired the piece tonight on KCET at 5:30pm and 10:30pm. It is also available here on the program’s website.

Cockerton Wins Purpose Prize Award

Judy Cockerton, CEO and Founder of the Treehouse Community in Easthampton, Mass., was named one of five 2012 Purpose Prize winners and received a $100,000 award to be given to the organization.

“I want to be part of creating new norms in foster care that are so much more humane. It’s wonderful to think that I have a shot at that,” said Cockerton in a press release.

The Purpose Prize is given by Encore.org to individuals over age 60 who use passion and experience for social good.  Formerly called Civic Ventures, Encore.org is an organization that recognizes purposeful work later on in life.

The Treehouse Foundation is an intergenerational community that brings together foster and adopted families, and older individuals who want to live and be part of a young person’s support system.

Cockerton founded the organization in 2006 after having fostered and adopted two young girls, wanting to create a way for more people to get involved in the lives of youth in care. Now, over 100 people ages between ages four and 94 have lived together at Treehouse.

Cockerton was named a 2010 “Angel in Adoption” for her work at Treehouse Foundation by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.

Purpose prize winners aren’t restricted to spend the money in certain ways, but Cockerton says all of the prize money will be invested into Treehouse and other foster care innovation ventures.

Fiscal Cliff Solution? It’s Anyone’s Guess

by John Sciamanna

It has been a half century since the Cuban Missile Crisis when, according to many historians, the world came as close as it ever has to a full nuclear war.  At one point during that 13-day crisis the Soviet Union ships stopped short of the U.S. embargo line, delaying the first chance at military confrontation.  “We were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy just blinked,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk commented at the time.

One of the biggest challenges in the pending budget/tax negotiations is to come up with an agreement whereby neither side is able to claim that the other guy just blinked. As a result, there are probably as many reports in Washington claiming positive movement on a deal as there are negative reports that time is running out.

The terms of a spending agreement, or the failure to achieve one, affect federal funding for most aspects of youth and family services. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and the IV-E entitlement program, both vital to state and county child welfare systems, are protected from across-the-board cuts.

The big worry isn’t that all the tax increases and automatic cuts and various other expirations will take place and remain in place forever.  The greater fear by some is that no deal by Dec. 31 will once again slow down the economy just as it appears to be gaining ground.  This would theoretically occur for a number of reasons: people not spending as usual during the key holiday shopping season, the IRS not disbursing refunds early next year to low- and middle-income families because they won’t be able to accurately produce tax forms; and loss of unemployment benefits.

Members on the Republican side have talked about increased revenue and breaking of old anti-tax pledges, there seems to be a strong resistance to raising the top tax rates back to the 39.6 percent rate that existed at the end of the Clinton Administration.

On the Democrat’s side, while there was an acknowledgement to accept cuts in programs including entitlement, there seemed to be a hard line in the sand against doing anything to the three biggest entitlements: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  The Administration put on the table via the Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner a proposal that increased tax revenue by $1.6 trillion with about $1 trillion coming from a restoration to a top rate of 39 percent with the rest coming from future tax reform, cuts of $400 billion in Medicare, a $50 billion stimulus,  and an extension of unemployment insurance and cuts in mandatory non-entitlement spending.  The Republican leadership through Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rejected the proposal, basically saying it was not a new offer from the President.

By week’s end here is one possible scenario for compromise that some have discussed as possible:

Instead of the $1.6 trillion in tax revenue sought by the President or the $800 billion sought by Republicans, the difference is split at around $1.2 trillion.  The tax revenue is generated with an increase short of the 39.6 percent it was at the end of the Clinton Administration with the rest of the revenue generated by tax deduction eliminations as the Republicans have been promoting.

This might all be tied to an agreement that future tax reform would have to accomplish as much revenue with rates and deductions set accordingly.  The entitlement cuts would start with savings mainly from Medicare with a small down payment now and future reductions spread out late into the ten-year budget cutting period, not unlike the way Congressman Paul Ryan spread out his Medicare cuts a long way off in his House budget proposal earlier this year.

That could be the broad outlines of a deal…and then again, it may not happen.

Legislation Still Waiting For the Big Deal: VAWA, Agriculture, Appropriations

Some of the big pending issues in the lame-duck congress are likely waiting on a deal on the cliff perhaps in the hope that it can all travel together legislatively or that a final deal on the budget allows Congress to focus on moving final unfinished business.  While cliff negotiations are pending, Congress has been using its time to sometimes pass lesser legislation such as naming various federal buildings, selecting committee leadership and addressing bills that are not controversial. The Senate has been working on a Defense Department reauthorization (which passes each year).  Earlier the Senate failed to pass a non-controversial hunting bill.

In regard to reauthorization bills one of the key bills waiting for action is the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).  There have been some behind the scenes discussions but no breakthrough yet.  The bill has been passed the Senate and House and is awaiting a conference committee. The two bills (HR 4970/S 1925) have three areas of significant difference: tribal authority to prosecute non-Indian men who abuse Indian women, the number of visas that are issued to undocumented immigrant women who are victims of domestic violence, and Senate language that formally extends the law to cover domestic violence when it involves issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. The Agriculture reauthorization (farm bill) yielded some progress when the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack brought the key committee leaders together for a positive discussion.  In addition to farm programs the farm bill includes funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/food stamps).  Finally there is still hope that a final deal on the cliff will allow appropriators to push through the rest of the FY 2013 appropriations which is currently funded at 2012 levels through the end of March but there has been no movement on this front either.

SSBG and Disaster Relief

As states on the East Coast hit by hurricane Sandy assess the damage and make their requests for emergency relief – states of New Jersey and New York are requesting and need tens of billions of dollars in new federal funds to help rebuild – the president and Congress may look to an old source of help: the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG).  SSBG, the entitlement block grant to states, which has been targeted by the House of Representatives for complete elimination.

The block grant has been a useful tool for emergency relief. In 2005, in the hurricane Katrina and Rita aftermaths funding of $550 million was appropriated through SSBG to help not just the states that were the biggest victims of the hurricanes (Louisiana and Mississippi), but the surrounding states that were taking in evacuees.

States were given additional flexibility to spend the funds as Congress would amend the law again to extend the states time frame to spend the dollars. In the case of these hurricanes all fifty states were eligible for some of the funding based on a formula that used Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data to determine where hurricane victims had moved but the bulk of the funding went to the Gulf Coast states.

Louisiana received $221 million, Mississippi received $128 million and Texas, Florida and Alabama received $88 million, $54 million and $28 million respectively. SSBG was used again for 2008 disaster relief (passed as part of FY 2009 appropriations) when Congress again provided $600 million, some of this funding was to reinforce Katrina/Rita funding but the bulk of it, $450 million, was for all states hit by various natural disasters in 2008.

Numbers Set, Both Houses Settle on 2013 Schedule

The final numbers for the House of Representatives were set last week when a final race was called in the state of North Carolina.  As a result, the 2013 House will have 234 Republicans and 201 Democrats.  That is a net gain of eight seats for the Democrats.

There are two remaining seats to be settled, one in Louisiana where two Republicans are in a run-off and an open seat in Illinois with the resignation of Congressman Jessie Jackson Jr (D-Ill.).  Neither election will change party affiliation.  A second significant development last week was that the Senate and House released their calendars for next year and unlike last year, they have now gone back to matching schedules. Last year the House and Senate took different breaks and as a result, there were very few weeks throughout the year when both houses were in session.

UPCOMING CAPITOL HILL BRIEFINGS/EVENTS

• National Foster Care Coalition, Quarterly Meeting, Thursday, December 13, 1:00 to 4:00 PM EST. Voices for America’s Children, 1000 Vermont Ave, NW Suite 700

• National Child Abuse Coalition, semiannual in-person meeting, Tuesday, January 8, 2013—9:30 EST—4:00 EST, Location: Futures Without Violence, 1600 Connecticut Ave suite 501 (actual conference room suite 500, Human Rights Watch)

• Presidential Inauguration, Monday, January 21, 2013 (private swearing-in Sunday, January 20)

In San Francisco, Dependency Court Trying to Roll with the Fiscal Punches

by Angela Penny

On a sunny Thursday morning earlier this month, San Francisco Judge Linda Colfax takes her place in Room 402 of the courthouse to hear four dependency cases, just her first series on the docket that day. Three of the proceedings end in continuances.

Colfax is in for plenty of days like this in the foreseeable future. Budget cuts have hit California’s juvenile dependency courts hard in 2012, and in San Francisco, the county’s court capacity to hear abuse and neglect cases was literally cut in half, leaving Colfax with the lion’s share of the county docket.

“It’s challenging to work with such a bare-bones budget,” said Judge Patrick J. Mahoney, presiding judge of San Francisco’s Unified Family Court. He oversees the dependency court as well as family law and juvenile delinquency courts. “We are constantly looking for creative solutions to make sure we meet the needs of the county’s children.”

The budget for the San Francisco Superior Courts is $74 million this year, down from $98 million five years ago. As a result, the county has reduced the number of dependency courtrooms from two to one.

The decline was one county’s portion of a sweeping cut made at the state level to court budgets in July of 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown approved spending measures that slashed $350 million from the statewide court budget of $1.5 billion in 2010.

San Francisco’s courts had a $13.75 million deficit for the fiscal year that began in July 2011 because of these cuts. They were forced to lay off 200 employees, or 41 percent of their staff, and closed 25 out of 63 courtrooms, including one dependency court.

The dockets of both dependency courtrooms are now largely in the hands of Colfax, a former public defender who was elected to the bench in 2010 and rotated to the juvenile dependency court in January.

She and Mahoney must also hear the majority of the cases that used to go to a special family law-dependency hybrid court, which was eliminated by the budget cuts. The cutbacks have predictably squeezed court functions. Settlement conferences, previously scheduled for 45 minutes, were reduced to 30 minutes.

That has had a taxing effect on the family members in the process, who often must wait longer times for hearings to start, said Patti Fitzsimmons, director of the University of San Francisco Child Advocacy Clinic, who represents low-income children and families as a member of the Association of San Francisco’s Juvenile Dependency Panel.

There are some additional stress factors on the horizon for the court. The juvenile dependency panel Fitzsimmons serves on is administered by the San Francisco Bar Association and is funded by the governing body of the California courts, the Judicial Council. It is also in financial crosshairs after taking a cut from $5.1 million in 2010 down to $3.9 million for this year.

This year’s cuts have been absorbed without a dip in productivity because of concessions by the panel lawyers. The lawyers have accepted more than doubling their administration fees to the bar association, Fitzsimmons said, and agreed to dropping the billing system from a per-minute to a per-half-minute system.

More significantly to the bottom line, says fellow panel lawyer Jill McInerney, the panel has been accepting of the city’s need to limit the amount of time they can pay for. “We have agreed, case by case, to just not get paid for everything we do,” she said.

Adding yet another layer to the time management challenges of the dependency court is Assembly Bill 12, which extends the age that youth can stay in foster care up to 21, creating another time burden on the dependency court because the progress of these young adults needs to be reviewed by the judge. The bill took effect in January of 2012.

Mahoney has begun to convene court stakeholders to discuss how to best function in crisis mode.

“I’ve just asked Judge Colfax to start a task force on how we are going to deal with this increased responsibility,” Mahoney said. “We have an informal task force including lawyers, judges, and representatives from the agency to discuss how we can streamline court functions. We meet about once a month.”

Fitzsimmons and McInerney both commended Colfax’s adjustment to the current situation.

“Judge Colfax does an amazing job of coping with these pressures,” said Fitzsimmons. Even with sped-up timelines on hearings, Colfax still “makes a personal connection with the youth, asking how they’re doing in school, or how their basketball game went.”

Campus Program Provides Summer Housing for Foster Youth

By: Eric-Michael Wilson

It all starts every year with a phone call in the midst of March.

“What are your plans for the summer?” asks Deborah Lowe Martinez on the other end, checking to see which Cal Independent Scholars Network (CISN) participants she should be adding to the list for summer housing assistance.

CISN provides former foster care youth and independent students at the University  of California-Berkeley with housing, books, resources, and community year round, including in the summer time, depending on funds.

But declines last year in both federal support for students and private donor funds earmarked for housing to CISN left former foster youth on campus struggling to pay for summer housing expenses.

“One of my biggest concerns for each [of the students] every year is housing,” said Lowe Martinez, CISN program director. “Because we’re donor-funded, we’re constantly concerned about having enough resources for students.”

Since it’s founding in Fall 2005, CISN has helped over 100 students with housing assistance. Ninety-eight percent of the freshman that start the program move on to their sophomore year. Of those who continue on, 100 percent of them graduate, said Lowe Martinez.

This summer, CISN was able to assist students in the program with up to $1,000 with summer housing assistance, dependent upon student need in order to cover three months worth of living expenses.

The supplementary assistance became even more important this past summer because the federal government halted  summer Pell grants this year.  Although students taking 6 or more units during the summer at UC Berkeley received fee grant waivers, they were only offered loans to cover summer tuition costs. As a result, some CISN students did have to rely on loans to supplement living expenses.

“All of our students are here on financial aid and there’s no room to save for summer living expenses,” said Lowe Martinez, who mentioned that many students are already working multiple jobs to make ends meet throughout the year, while taking on full course loads.

Martinez says some CISN students take classes just to get financial aid for the summer, so they can continue to receive housing support when all of the dorms are closed.

“I would only want for every one of the participants [in the program] to have as much as my husband and I were able to provide for our kids when they were growing up,” said Lowe Martinez, who has helped two sons graduate from California universities. “No one should have to go without the support of a family.”

Eric-Michael Wilson is a Media Intern with Fostering Media Connections.

Capitol View on Kids: Crittenton’s Plan to Address Child Trauma

by John Sciamanna

Note: On Monday, November 5, Capitol View on Kids will not be published.  We will return on Monday, November 12, after the election. Remember to vote on Tuesday, November 6.

 

Crittenton Foundation Offers Model to Access and Help Children and Families

On Wednesday, October 24, the National Crittenton Foundation presented findings on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) to Success for Young Mother Led Families.”  The briefing focused on the results of the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) ACE study, how it was applied by Crittenton agencies and how the evaluation can shape treatment and policy.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in partnership with Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego. According to the CDC, it is one of the largest investigations ever conducted to evaluate the relationship between childhood maltreatment and later-life health and well-being.

The study was conducted between 1995 and 1997 and included more than 17,000 people who were required to give detailed information about their childhood experience of abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction. The study evaluated incidence of psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, alcoholism or drug use in home, loss of biological parent from home, depression or mental illness in home, mother treated violently, and having an imprisoned household member.

The study then linked such childhood experiences and trauma to negative effects in adulthood including negative health outcomes, negative behaviors, social and emotional problems and even early death. Participants were given scores in terms of the number of negative experiences they had as a child.

As ACE scores goes up, so does risk behavior including: smoking, organic disease (pulmonary, heart & liver disease), adult alcoholism & drug use,  depression and suicide attempts, job problems and lost time from work, multiple sexual partners, STD’s and rape, hallucinations, risk for intimate partner violence, addictions, and dying early. http://www.cdc.gov/ace

In 2012, representatives of Crittenton Foundation met with investigators of the original ACE study and an ACE questionnaire was developed for use by Crittenton agencies, which then used that survey.  The results from that work and the survey of participants provide an examination of the exposure to trauma by the young mothers served by the Crittenton agencies.

The overall goal of the work is that the information on patients can help in several key areas including:

-        Building an infrastructure to work within a trauma framework across disciplines

-        -Developing training and promoting skills for the workforce

-        -Sharing information across providers and agencies

-        -Addressing the significance of health disparities and diversity challenges and issues

-        -Prevention strategies including early intervention for families and children and influencing policy decisions at the state and national level.

Briefing presentations were made by representatives from the CDC, the Crittenton Foundation, agency representatives from New York, West Virginia and Missouri, and three young mothers who overcame their personal trauma in childhood to a successful transition to motherhood.

In each case, the young mothers discussed what their ACE scores were and what their children’s ACE scores are, and how they have dealt with some of the challenges. A summary of Crittenton’s ACE Pilot research is available on its website.

This Week’s Fiscal Cliff Notes

During the last presidential debate on Monday, October 22, President Obama indicated that the sequestration would not happen when he said it was “…something that Congress proposed. It will not happen.”

There was some speculation by some political observers that the President may have tipped his hand as a negotiator, but the White House downplayed the comments.  The President also expanded on his comments during an interview with an Iowa newspaper, and said that no one wants sequestration to occur and that the budget sequester was a “forcing mechanism” to help push a sharply divided Congress to try to work out a deal on long-term deficit reduction.

At the same time, there were continued reports that Congress would develop a strategy that would offer up some short term cuts in December with a requirement that a more complete deal would be enacted later in 2013, perhaps four to six months later.

In the meantime, more than 80 executives of leading American corporations signed a statement calling for a deficit reduction compromise that would “include comprehensive and pro-growth tax reform, which broadens the base, lowers rates, raises revenues and reduces the deficit.” This builds on the Oct. 18 letter by the top twenty financial services companies called the Financial Services Forum, which called on the President and Congressional leaders to reach a compromise deal) on Thursday, Oct. 25.

According to newspaper reports, after the election next week the forum will push the parties to a compromise that would include not just program cuts but tax revenue increases although the letter was written in a way that does not necessarily require or advocate for tax increases.

UPCOMING CAPITOL HILL BRIEFINGS/EVENTS

• Child Welfare, Education, and the Courts: Achieving Educational Stability Milestones through Systems Collaboration, Monday, November 5, 2012, 3:00-4:30 PM EST,Webinar, Advance registration is required. Registration will close on Friday, November 2, 2012 at 3:00 PM EST. For additional details, and to register, please visit:http://www.nrcpfc.org/teleconferences/2012-11-05.html

• National Foster Care Coalition, Quarterly Meeting, Thursday, December 13, 1:00 to 4:00 PM EST. Location TBA

Advocates Call for Federal Investment in Girl-Focused Juvenile Justice Programs

by John Kelly

Advocates for girls in the juvenile justice system held a briefing for Congressional staffers this week to make the case for federal investment in research and development of programs and services designed for girls.

The briefing also marked the release of “Improving the Juvenile Justice System for Girls,” a report by the Georgetown Center on Poverty Inequality and Public Policy, which examines efforts in two states to develop gender-responsive strategies.

Among the recommendations voiced at the briefing and in the report:

-Support training on the unique needs of court-involved girls for judges, police and juvenile justice practitioners.
-Allocate federal funding for gender-specific programming.
-Eliminate the valid court order exception, which allows judges to detain juveniles for status offenses when a youth has already been ordered not to commit the offense.
-Seed the development of national standards for gender-responsive programs.

While juvenile crime and incarceration rates have generally since the mid-1990s, the drop has been far more pronounced with males, significantly increasing the proportion of juvenile offenders who are female. And the female juvenile rate of incarceration increased more than 30 percent in 14 states between 1997 and 2007, according to the Center for Girls and Young Women.

Of the approximately 600,000 girls arrested each year, half are for nonviolent offenses such as violation of probation or status offenses, said Malika Saar, executive director of the Human Rights Project for Girls, at the briefing.

The Georgetown report’s recommendation to eliminate the Valid Court Order exception follows recent legislative attempts to do so. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill in 2008 that would have given states three years to either end use of the exception or risk the loss of some federal money.

Companion legislation in the House of Representatives never materialized, and the Senate version was never brought to the floor.

A 2006 census of juvenile residential placements found that 1,951 females were detained, committed or diverted to a juvenile facility for a status offense. That group represented 14 percent of all females in juvenile placements; only 4 percent of males in juvenile placements were there as a result of a status offense.

For many of the girls who come into contact with the juvenile justice system, Saar said, physical and sexual abuse has preceded their involvement in crime.

“We repeatedly hear of girls who are raped in foster care, or abused in their homes,” Saar said.

Saar was followed at the briefing by Nadiyah Shereff, a 26-year-old San Francisco woman who was a young teen when she was first incarcerated for an assault conviction. By the time she was placed in a juvenile facility, she said, she had witnessed a murder at the age of nine, and started habitually smoking marijuana at 12.

She credited the Center for Young Women’s Development, where she now works, for helping to get her life on track. CYWD Executive Director Marlene Sanchez met Shereff while she was incarcerated, and brought her into CYWD’s Sister Rising program, which provides paid internships to 17 system-involved girls each year.

“I needed to heal from the trauma,” Shereff said.

Jabriera Handy, who spoke after Shereff, said no such program was made available to her in Maryland. The Baltimore teen was charged in adult court when her grandmother died of a heart attack after the two had a heated argument.

Handy was put in an adult prison while her case proceeded. During her time in the adult facility, she witnessed the stabbing death of another inmate.

When she agreed to plea to a lesser charge, the judge waived her back in juvenile court, and she was send to residential care in Pennsylvania.

“I’ll carry my trauma from the adult [prison] for the rest of my life,” Handy said.

“Improving the Juvenile Justice System for Girls” highlights efforts in Connecticut, Florida to develop girl-focused programs and procedures in the juvenile justice system. Among the highlighted reforms in those states:

Connecticut: In 1999, the state started on a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to address girls. The project resulted in development of girls-only respite care and detention centers, and the training of probation officers who would exclusively handle girl clients.

Florida: Advocacy fueled by The Children’s Campaign and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency led to 2004 legislation requiring gender-specific programming at the Department of Juvenile Justice. In 2009, an alternative detention model for girls was implemented at the Southwest Florida Regional Juvenile Detention Center.

“There are concrete steps reformers can take to make a significant difference in the lives of girls currently in, or at risk of entering, the juvenile justice system,” the report said.

-John Kelly is the editor-in-chief of The Chronicle of Social Change

Technology Grant to Give Kinship Families Additional Resources

By: Ryann Blackshere

Finding resources may become easier for California’s kinship caregivers.

Truckee, Calif.-based nonprofit iFoster, along with United Ways of California (UWC), received $2.25 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over the next three years to create a single resource portal for families of the child welfare system.

The “Kinship Navigator Grant” will fund a digital service meant to serve as the “Yelp” of California’s child welfare world. Families and providers will be able to access available county, religious and non-profit resources and programs that are local by searching their zip code. The resource portal will also provide discounts at local, regional and national retailers that can save an average household up to $4,500 per year.

The service will be available to all of the state’s child welfare providers, but the focal point of the project is kinship families. More than 2.7 million children are in kinship families across the United States, and about 333,000 of those kids in kinship are in California.

Typically these families aren’t privy to all of the resources they can access because they aren’t as involved in the child welfare system, according to iFoster co-founder Serita Cox.

“Our hope is that if we have this portal and people have this resource, they will be better off with access to these resources,” Cox said. “Those families are vastly underserved because they don’t have an official social worker.”

“This Kinship Navigator Collaborative aims to combine the power of a national online community…with rich information about local resources from 2-1-1 programs, and “Yelp”-type feedback from caregivers and youth themselves, into a one-stop resource portal,” said Peter Manzo, president and CEO of United Ways of California, in an e-mail.

United Ways of California operates the local 2-1-1 system, a network of 28 local hotlines that allows states to call and ask about assistance programs and services in their area. iFoster’s user interface, customer relationship management system and search functionalities will all be updated.

When UWC teamed up with iFoster in June  the groups found that majority of the families who call the system are kinship families. The Kinship Navigator Collaborative service will specialize in helping those families, and others in the child welfare system, be directed via telephone or online to the services that will help them the most.

“2-1-1 information and referral programs have a wealth of information about local resources that should be as widely available as possible,” said Lilian Coral, UWC’s director of 2-1-1 California, in an e-mail. “We are excited about the potential of this Kinship Navigator Collaborative project to show the power of combining that data with smart web-based tools that both extend our reach and allow users to seek the resources they need.”

United Ways of California and iFoster were granted the funding this month by the Children’s Bureau of the Administration on Children and Families, the agency responsible for most child welfare-related funding at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Creating support networks within our communities is essential to the health and welfare of children,” Said Will Lightbourne, director of the California Department of Social Services. “The Kinship Navigation Program is another example of public and private sectors coming together to ensure caregivers are connected with service providers who can help improve outcomes for children and strengthen families.”

The Children’s Bureau also granted the following organizations Kinship Navigator Grants this year:

Catholic Charities of Rochester, Catholic Family Center, Rochester, NY

Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, Los Angeles, Calif.

United Ways of California, South Pasadena, Calif..

North Oklahoma County Mental Health Center (NorthCare), Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Arizona Children’s Association, Tucson, Ariz.

Homes for Black Children, Detroit, Mich.

The Children’s Home, Tampa, Fla

All of the awards were made for three years, at up to $750,000 per year.

“We think this project will show that online and mobile technologies are not luxuries or simply nice features to have, but are essential strategies to connect with kinship and foster families, and engage them, through their feedback, in improving and changing the results they can achieve,” said Manzo.

Ryann Blackshere is a multimedia journalist with Fostering Media Connections.

Notes from Federal JJ Advisory Group Meeting in Washington

It has been quite awhile since Youth Services Insider (YSI) set foot in the third floor conference room of the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs building in Chinatown, the secular cathedral of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

It’s a strange little space, set below the third floor hallway, with just enough space to seat a roundtable meeting and comfortably accommodate about 50 public spectators. Rarely more than ten show up.

YSI made its triumphant return for the second in-person meeting of the newly constituted Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice  (FACJJ), a body tasked with advising the president and OJJDP on issues related to juvenile justice and delinquency prevention.

FACJJ used to be comprised of members from each of the 50 state advisory groups (SAG), and met quarterly in an effort to develop an annual report to the president and OJJDP.

The agency put that model out to pasture in December of 2011, opting for a cheaper and smaller core FACJJ that would consist of regional SAG representatives, alternates, and subcommittees that could include experts and practitioners as needed. The group met for the first time at OJJDP’s national conference last year, whichYSI dubbed Juvenile Woodstock, and it has met via web conference two times since.

The upside of this new arrangement is supposed to be that a leaner FACJJ could provide quick input to OJJDP on things as they come up, and we did see this put in motion during last week’s meeting. Officials asked the commission to read and give feedback on a yet-to-be-released OJJDP document about juvenile justice agencies and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Following are some notes we gleaned from the meeting:

New-look OJJDP?

A reorganization of OJJDP appears to be very close, which is to say some lawyers need to bless it above the OJP level before it becomes official.

Over the summer,we kept hearing the same word associated with reorganization: buckets, meaning staff would be aligned to work on one specific aspect of OJJDP.

Acting Deputy Administrator for Policy Jeff Slowikowski gave YSI some idea of what that meant during a break at the meeting, explaining that one of the biggest changes will be creating separate units for state relations/assistance and compliance monitoring.

As it is, Slowikowski explained, the same person who serves as a state’s OJJDP liaison all year is the same person monitoring its compliance. So now, apparently, there will be a bucket of help and a bucket of monitoring for states.

This reorganization will come to be just months after the agency lost significant stature with one signature off the pen of President Barack Obama. The president in August signed the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011, a bipartisan piece of legislation that stripped Senate confirmation requirements from scores of appointments that heretofore had required Senate blessing.

Among the jobs stripped of confirmation status by the bill: Administrator, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

What does it mean? For starters, it will be easier for a president to get someone into OJJDP. The confirmation process takes months for jobs at that level of government, and can be derailed or cause good candidates to grow weary of the process. Without Senate confirmation, it is a virtual certainty that the Obama administration would have had an administrator in place soon after the Senate confirmed former OJP boss Laurie Robinson.

That perhaps would have been an upside for the juvenile justice community with this administration, which advocates hoped would lead a significant charge on reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act and other juvenile justice-related issues.

But the same direct appointment ability might become a downside if some future president/attorney general resurrects some overly punitive philosophy on juvenile justice, or simply wants to gut bureaucracy and sees the agency as expendable. It would be very easy for such a president to put a hatchet man in the agency under the new order of things.

A New Fiscal Reality

Overall funding for the agency has dropped from 41 percent since 2009, from $461.5 million to $277 million in 2012. Its juvenile justice-specific funding to the states dropped from $130 million in fiscal 2009 to $70 million in 2012, and the likelihood is that it will be level or lower in 2013.

“We are not likely to see the appropriations of the last era again,” said Nancy Gannon-Hornberger, executive director of the Coalition on Juvenile Justice.

OJJDP leadership seems to embrace the agency’s new reality with almost indignation to its past. Hanes, addressing the FACJJ on Thursday morning, touted the agency’s role as a leader on research, dissemination and philanthropic leverage. No longer, she told the FACJJ, is OJJDP “just an ATM machine.”

State agencies still tasked with complying with federal standards might like a bit more withdrawal capability, but it is probably the right attitude to take if you’re heading the agency at the moment.

Emerging Focal Points

Here is a list of a few things OJJDP is running point on:

Defending Childhood: Attorney General Eric Holder came to the Justice Department with three youth-related issues in mind: legal representation in juvenile proceedings, community violence prevention, and the interplay between childhood trauma and delinquency.

The administration includes a request for $25 million for a community-based violence prevention fund in its budget request every year, and the past three years it has received between $8 million and $10 million. OJJDP has used foundation support from Target and the Skillman Foundation to fund a National Forum on Youth Violence, a technical assistance venture that has worked with six cities and is set to include four more this year.

Improving public defense for juvenile offenders is a plank on the platform of Access to Justice, a pet project of Holder managed outside of OJJDP. Aside from a national conference on indigent defense two years ago, little has come from the office.

When a FACJJ member asked about it, OJJDP’s coordinator of federal efforts Robin Delaney-Shabazz offered that it was elsewhere at DOJ and “they still have staff there.”

Huzzah!

Holder’s interest in childhood trauma – borne of experiencing or witnessing violence and abuse – begat the Defending Childhood project. OJJDP has managed the project, which has put about $17 million in play over the past three years to both research the impact of trauma on juvenile behavior and develop pilot projects that work with trauma-inflicted offenders.

A similar interest in the consequences of childhood trauma was expressed this month at the national conference of the Alliance for Children and Families, an organization that represents 360 private providers in the child welfare, juvenile justice and family services fields. A pre-conference session focused entirely on discussing Center on Disease Control and Prevention research on childhood trauma and adult outcomes, and how to put that research into programming (click here for our roundup of that conference).

Expect the recommendations of OJJDP’s Defending Childhood Task Force to be out sometime in December, probably timed up to be released at the quarterly meeting of the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Juvenile and Delinquency Prevention. Depending on the outcome of the election, the recommendations might be the last official offering of the Obama OJJDP.

-Foundation partnerships: OJJDP has scraped together some federal support in the past two fiscal years to help expand upon two of the big three foundation-led juvenile justice reforms: the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Models for Change Initiative of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

JDAI supports the efforts of states to lower reliance on pre-adjudication detention, although Casey has recently begun to expand the scope to include reform of post-adjudication practices. Models for Change, now in its waning stage, sought to build macro-level reform efforts in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Illinois and Washington, and then build more targeted reform efforts in a handful of other states.

OJJDP has worked with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration in previous fiscal cycles to support the other foundation-led reform brand, Reclaiming Futures, an effort by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to grow and improve the field of juvenile drug courts.

Beware Evidence-Based Fever

Gannon-Hornberger, in her presentation, expressed a concern that over-reliance on evidence-based practice by OJJDP and other key juvenile justice funders would “edge out” innovation in the field. There is good work being done to highlight proven juvenile justice interventions, she argued, but there not enough of them out there to stop supporting new ideas.

YSI couldn’t help but think that Congress has to shoulder some blame for the dearth of an evidence base when it comes to juvenile justice.

The 1992 reauthorization of the JJPDA added a Part E to the law that “permits the administrator to award grants for developing, testing, and demonstrating new initiatives and programs for the prevention, control or reduction of juvenile delinquency.”

But starting in the early 2000s, Congress used Part E appropriations as an earmark trough for more than a decade, steering 99 percent of the funds to youth programs of their choosing.

Did the earmarks go to “bad” programs? Certainly not in most cases. But earmarks were simply managed and monitored by OJJDP staff. Once earmarking took hold with that pot of money, it was never again a source for coherent tests of strategy or practice that could have yielded a base of evidence.

-John Kelly is the editor-in-chief of The Chronicle of Social Change