California’s Contribution to National Educational Opportunity for Foster Youth Movement

By. Daniel Heimpel

On January 1^st, the House passed the Uninterrupted Scholars Act, a bill that marks another important step on the longer road to increased educational opportunity for students in foster care.

Beyond the immediate significance to the more than 50,000 children living in foster care in California, Uninterrupted Scholars builds on a larger, national movement towards educational opportunity for foster youth largely born in the Golden State.

The act, which had passed in the Senate unanimously on Dec. 17^th, 2012, will amend the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to ease child welfare agencies’ access to foster children’s student records.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who as the most senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee was critical in getting the bill to the floor, explained the bill’s importance during a Dec. 30^th session of the house.

“Foster children are some of the most at-risk students,” Miller said. “Throughout their young lives they may change care placements multiple times…. Each move can put their educational success in jeopardy. That’s because the caseworkers who advocate for them as they move from one school to another often do so without critical information.”

As the law stands, child welfare agencies must have a court order to be granted access to student records. This legal hurdle not only slows down the transfer of records as students bounce from school to school, but also creates missed opportunities for social workers to intervene when a child struggles academically or celebrate academic success.

Jetaine Hart is a former foster youth who now works as an educational mentor for foster youth in Alameda County, Calif. California took a lead on the education of foster youth in 1981, launching Foster Youth Services, a statewide program that brought educational liaisons and mentors like Hart to county offices of education.

In California, educational mentors and liaisons are critical to making sure that records follow students in foster care, but there is no mirror program in non-county aligned school districts.

“A lot of time the social worker is the only person who keeps of track who knows the history,” Hart said.” Now social workers won’t have to wait to access this information – they will know what attendance looks like, know what’s going on with grades and disciplinary action in real time.”

Teri Kook, the child welfare director for the San Francisco-based Stuart Foundation and a national expert on education and foster care, concurs. “Ultimately, I believe this ability to share information, craft individualized academic plans and build upon the resiliency and strengths of students in foster care will improve high school graduation rates and college access and success for this vulnerable population,” Kook said.

In addition to the launch of Foster Youth Services in 1981, state legislators passed Assembly Bill 490 in 2004 to increase school stability for foster youth. The law gives students in foster care the right to stay in their school of origin even if a changed foster care placement forces them into a new school district, and ensures the rapid transfer of their records when a school move is deemed necessary.

In 2008, the federal government followed suit with strict provisions around the educational stability of foster youth in the landmark Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. In 2011, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) passed an amendment to the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) calling for the Department of Education to consider the educational stability and success of foster youth.

The bi-partisan, bi-cameral Uninterrupted Scholars Act bolsters the strength of this movement. This issue – that of leveling the educational playing field for our most vulnerable children – is one that ever more leaders are focused on solving. Their success in improving the educational achievement of foster youth could light the way for the broader education reforms this country so desperately needs.

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

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.”

Congress Rolling on Uninterrupted Scholars Act

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and RJ Sloke appearing on FOX News Live – Sept. 17, 2012.

Last week, Members of Congress converged on Washington DC for a short legislative session before the elections. In short order, the Uninterrupted Scholars Act (USA), which would amend education privacy laws to the benefit of foster children gained momentum.

Last week, Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) signed on as co-sponsors of the bill.

At the annual the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute‘s Angels in Adoption Gala on September 12th, dozens of members of congress including USA co-sponsors Sens. Roy Blunt (D-Mo.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) alongside Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Karen Bass (D-Calif.) rose to their feet when Foster Youth Intern RJ Sloke explained how the bill would have saved him from having to repeat grades because of lost educational records.

Just this Monday, Sloke and Landrieu were guests on FOX News Live, where they discussed the importance of easing the exchange of educational records for foster youth.

- Daniel Heimpel

An Open Letter Calling for Ethical Coverage of Juvenile Dependency Proceedings

An appeal to journalists across the country to gain access to juvenile dependency courts, write about their findings and end the cloak of confidentiality obstructing deeper, necessary reform to the foster care system.

Having studied foster care and covered it for the better part of a decade, I have come to understand that the greatest impediment to improved outcomes for foster children is our current, warped public perception of the system. A combination of the system’s overt obfuscation, coupled with the news media’s over representative coverage of child death and tragedy, have painted a picture of a broken foster care system. While this may be part of the story, it is neglects to paint the fuller, more-nuanced picture of what child welfare actually is: a system that is as much progressive as backwards, and that likely helps more than it hurts. The result is a general public, who generally accept the notion that the system is broken and too often regard foster children as tainted for their association with it.

This is dangerous to those children. It contributes to the dearth of exceptional foster and adoptive parents, leads lawmakers to make knee jerk reactions and negatively stigmatizes foster children themselves.

For years, I have worked to give the public a more accurate picture of the foster care system through my writings, that of my staff and FMC’s consistent outreach to journalists across the country.

But for all these efforts an enormous barrier still remains: the cloak of confidentiality asserted by public child welfare administrations as a protection of the best interests of children in the system. Like the public perception of foster care I already described, this is only part of the truth. Confidentiality laws often become a shield against the news media’s scrutiny of the system’s handling of particular cases or flaws in general policy. This lack of transparency invariably stymies reform and arguably impinges on systemic improvements that would better the lives of individual foster children.

If the goal is a more balanced, full and thus accurate picture of the foster care system, we must knock down one of the clearest barriers to transparency – media access to juvenile dependency court proceedings.

I will not go deep into history on the subject. Jim Newton of the Los Angeles Times, Andrea Poe of the Washington Times, Kelli Kennedy of the Associated Press, Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, Kim Hansel of Fostering Families Today, Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post and many others have contributed greatly to an already robust debate on this subject.

Instead, I offer a strategy to grant all journalists across the country access to juvenile dependency hearings, foment trust between circumspect child welfare professionals and journalists; and through these efforts create a framework for nuanced and exceptional coverage of the foster care system.

Here you will find a report on the debate over open courts that my organization, Fostering Media Connections, produced with the help of a law student at Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program as well as a draft code of ethics for journalists who are attempting to access dependency proceedings. We have been using the code of ethics to access otherwise closed juvenile dependency hearings throughout California.

On November 15^th, 2012, FMC  - alongside the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy – will hold a convening at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Law (Boalt Hall) to promote the code of ethics as a means to promote transparency in the juvenile dependency system and ethical coverage of those hearings and the foster care system more generally.

We are now asking you to take the attached code of ethics to judges, commissioners and court referees in your jurisdiction and ask for access to these proceedings. Please write about what you see; feel free use our report as background or for attribution.

If we can collectively create a swell of coverage leading into and out of the convening on the 15^th, my bet is that we will have greatly eased access to juvenile dependency courts for future journalists.

But the real opportunity here is that by living up to the ideals of our profession, we have an honest chance at improving the lives of children.

I am not so stupid to think I have I all the answers, so I am directly soliciting your help.My cell phone number is 510-334-8636; I am waiting for your call and look forward to your suggestions and guidance.

Sincerely,

Daniel Heimpel, Director Fostering Media Connections

A Court Without Judgement

Rural Siskiyou County’s Family Dependency Treatment Court is keeping families who struggle with alcohol and drug addictions from losing their children through a mix of tough love, patched-together services and help rather than punishment. 

By. Daniel Heimpel

A woman, with drawn cheeks and well into her forties, steps out of the juror’s box and takes a seat before Judge William Davis in his Siskiyou County California courtroom. She just had a relapse, another hurdle in a life-long struggle with drugs and alcohol that contributed to her son’s entrance into foster care six years ago.

“I have support,” the woman says while fidgeting, now seated at a table before the bench. “But something is missing here, and I know that.”

“It’s not a failure to say that you need something beyond what you are getting,” Judge Davis says calmly. “That actually takes courage. I don’t want to scold or berate you about using. I just want to help you.”

“I know that,” the woman says.

The jury box is almost full. Ten parents, all to children involved with this rural California county’s juvenile dependency system, come here as often as once a week as they fight the substance addictions that contributed to their children entering foster care.

In Siskiyou County these proceedings are called “Family Dependency Treatment Courts.” In other jurisdictions they are called “Family Drug Treatment Courts (FTDC),” or other variations on the same theme. The prevailing philosophy driving the nation’s 300 or more family drug courts is to offer families on the brink therapeutic support instead of the punishment and sanctions that courts typically dole out. Since the first Family Drug Treatment Court was started in 1993, the consensus among many leading family court judges is that they have been critical in positively changing the life trajectories of otherwise hurting families.

A four-site study on the effectiveness of FTDCs produced by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children stated that: “FTDC parents, compared to comparison parents, entered substance abuse treatment more quickly, stayed in treatment longer and were more likely to be re-unified with their parents.” The study revealed that: “43 percent of FTDC children were re-unified with their parents as compared to 32 percent of those children from comparison parents.”

While the report also showed that parents who didn’t comply with drug treatment programs lost custody at higher rates than comparison parents, results like these and other studies showing cost savings have fueled a national effort to expand the courts.

“Drug court is one of the most wonderful innovations we have in our court system,” says Judge Leonard Edwards, who retired as the presiding judge of Santa Clara County Juvenile Court in 2006. Edwards is widely regarded as one of the nation’s top experts on juvenile courts and has been a prolific advocate of the efficacy of family drug courts.

“There is something about a human being coming before another human being – a judge who normally dispenses justice, punishes, has harsh things to say – but in this context has positive things to say,” Edwards says of the unique judge-participant dynamic he has seen in his own Santa Clara drug court and in the years since his retirement spent working as a judge-in-residence for California’s Administrative Office of the Courts, helping improve juvenile courts in California’s 58 counties.

While there is a cost associated with running the courts and ensuring participants have access to treatment, there is evidence that FTDCs save money by shortening the time children stay in foster care and preventing recurrences of abuse and neglect at the hands of otherwise un or under treated parents.

Judge Edwards and Judge James A. Ray cite three such examples in a report they co-wrote about the Family Drug Treatment Courts in 2005 . One example, the San Diego Dependency Court Recovery Project, created “58 percent cost savings” in comparison to “traditional child welfare models,” according to the report.

On this particular Thursday in Yreka, each individual or couple is called up before Judge Davis, who talks to them about their treatment plans and the challenges they face in maintaining sobriety. At the end of each update, Judge Davis asks how many days the drug court participant has been sober. In all, the day’s 10 participants celebrated 1,017 days of sobriety, many reporting regular employment and increasing self-esteem. Today’s participants are parents to nine children involved with the foster care system. Many have additional children who are not involved in the system.

A father in his early thirties excitedly recounts what moments free from alcohol have meant for his relationship with his baby boy. “I lay him in his crib and then I lay down next to him,” the man says with a wide grin on his face. “He puts his little hand up and I put my hand up, and then he goes to sleep.”

Whether the judge deciding these cases, a service provider or parents struggling to maintain custody of their children, Siskiyou County’s treatment court touches each party in a different way. But, the consensus among all participants is clear: the weekly sessions are critical in keeping families together.

A grant report submitted to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in accordance with the requirements of a three-year $320,000 grant to the Siskiyou County Superior Court credited the court with re-unifying 15 families since the start of 2010 out of 63 total treatment court participants.

Judge Davis, who worked as a Siskiyou County District Attorney for seven years,

Judge William Davis reads a letter from one of the graduates of his Family Dependency Treatment Court, which meets every week in Siskiyou County’s Yreka Court House.

describes treatment court as a “draining” combination of “acting like a social worker, parent, disciplinarian and cheerleader.” In his spacious, book-laden chambers, on a quiet day between the weekly hearings, Judge Davis explains how difficult it can be to parse through the hard realities that have landed children and their parents in often-tragic situations.

“It weighs on you,” he says. “Try to compare it with being a physician who works with children. If that physician gets too emotionally involved, he or she is useless.”

While the decisions are ultimately the judge’s to make, treatment courts across the country have been established to take into account the full perspectives of all the professionals who interact with parents.

Before every treatment court session, Judge Davis sits down with social workers from the Siskiyou County Human Services and a coordinator from Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services to discuss the progress of each parent.

“Alcohol has been her demon for many, many years,” says one of the social workers in Davis’ chambers just before the session where the woman with drawn cheeks will admit to relapse.

The group works through the 14 cases on the docket quickly, but diligently. Taking time to discuss treatment options, possible obstacles in a particular client’s progress and decide who deserves praise for success in maintaining sobriety or completing a program.

Michael Noda, director of Siskiyou County Human Services, says that treatment court is invaluable in “bringing home the message that they [parents] must complete the program to successfully maintain a relationship with their children. Without the court’s close supervision, the treatment doesn’t always effectively follow,” Noda says. In a rural county with heightened need and compromised services the court’s role is crucial. Over half of Siskiyou County’s 5,000 children are eligible for free lunches, according to kidsdata.org, and the median family income in Siskiyou County was substantially lower than the state average from 2005 to 2009.

“With high poverty and high unemployment, It is not only a depressed economy, but it is a depressed environment, which feeds substance abuse issues and social problems,” Noda says.

Even if the total number of children in the foster care system is low, the prevalence of those children entering the system is higher than that of the average child in California. In Siskiyou County, 9.5 out of every 1,000 children are involved in the foster care system compared to 5.8 per 1,000 statewide, according to the Child Welfare Dynamic Report System housed at the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Social Services Research.

Noda and the county workers involved in the treatment court repeatedly point to a lack of mental health and treatment services available for the parents of the 78 children in foster care and the hundreds of others whose substance abuse issues imperil their children. The County has only one true outpatient drug clinic and no detox center, Noda says.

Despite this, workers like the treatment court coordinator sitting beside Judge Davis’ desk during the pre-hearing informational session are finding ways to patch together those services that do exist to the benefit of the parents cycling through treatment court.

“You [the parents] are only going to do what you have done if that is all you know,” says the treatment court coordinator as the  group prepares to enter the courtroom. “If you show them a different way of being, then they have a chance of actually being different.”

The man, who smiled broadly before the judge when talking about napping alongside his baby, is now out front of the courthouse smoking a cigarette with his wife, the mother of the child he is so proud of. Both have fought substance abuse issues for the majority of their adult lives.

“Drugs and alcohol become a part of you, like eating and sleeping,” says the man’s wife. “The desire to use is so strong.” “But,” she says with a smile, “getting clean and sober — getting your life back — is possible.”

The two are holding two books used in Alcoholics Anonymous – “Incentives” –given to them by Davis and the treatment court team to celebrate the couple’s combined 287 days of sobriety. They walk off down one of Yreka’s quiet streets, proud, and on their way to somewhere better than where they have been.

Daniel Heimpel is an award-winning journalist, the Executive Director of Fostering Media Connections and the Publisher of The Chronicle of Social Change.

Youth Services Insider: Time for New Numbers on Adoption Disruption

by John Kelly

Youth Services Insider was able to attend a recent roundtable discussion on prevention the disruption of adoptions involving children in foster care. The conversation started on that subject, but grew to include discussion other aspects of adoption policy.

Following are a few thoughts from the discussion, which was led by former foster youth and child welfare researchers.

How big is the problem? Who knows?
Twenty-eight years ago, University of Maryland School of Social Work Dean Richard Barth completed a study in California aimed at projecting how many adoptions of foster children are disrupted. There’s a few ways a disruption occurs, but the majority of times it entails new contact with the child welfare system or a youth running away from home.

“In California, we went to each county and asked them if they could give us a list or some information about what the disruption rates were,” Barth said in an interview the week after the roundtable. “Some counties had spreadsheets ready, and some didn’t have a clue.”

Barth and his colleagues then asked if the agencies could contact the families where disruptions occurred, and ask if they’d agree to an interview with researchers. Ultimately, he said, just over 100 families agreed to discuss their experiences.

Barth’s team found that about 14 percent of adoptions disrupted. Since then, two studies in Illinois, conducted in the 1990s, found similar rates. And while the federal government helped spur a rise in adoptions out of foster care with financial incentives in the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997, it has never required states to report on the success of those adoptions.

Illinois is generally considered to be one of the better states at handling adoptions. But even if we assume the national rate is really been steady at 14 percent since the 1980s, that means there are a whole lot more adoptions disrupting than there used to be.

The number of adoptions from foster care exploded during that time period – from 28,000 in 1996 to 50,000 in 2011. So now, it would be 14 percent of a much bigger pie.

Barth called at the roundtable for a new study to get underway this year and to be ready in time to mark the 30th anniversary of his initial venture.

How would he structure this iteration, we asked Barth on the phone a week after the discussion? He said the best approach might be to find between six and ten states that have some capacity to track children post-adoption. Massachusetts and Illinois are pretty much able to do so now, he said.

The trick would be finding a common way to follow an adopted child out of, and then back into, a system. A big challenge to that, said Barth: in most cases, “their names change” when they get adopted.

YSI mentioned that the Chronicle had, in a recent Knight Foundation grant competition about data, pitched the idea of using social security numbers to follow adopted youths. The theory being: only a youth who was adopted and then had a new child welfare case initiated afterward, would have a SSN show up twice.

“Social security numbers are not in all the [state] databases,” said Barth. “If you got adopted, say you’re 17 now and adopted at 3 in 1998, it is very unlikely that your SSN was entered” before the adoption.

Social security numbers are “much more routinely used” now by agencies, he said, but they are loath to divulge them and risk youths falling prey to identity theft.

Medicaid numbers are issued to most youths in the system, he said, so that might be a better or safer way to use data as a trace on adoptions.

Regardless of the trace identification method, Barth points out that this would only reveal the youths who made further contact with child welfare systems after an adoption. It would not include some of the youths who run away from adoptive homes or children who were placed into residential treatment directly by their adoptive parents.

Either would constitute a disruption, he said; following ID numbers would capture neither.

What is being espoused now might not be working
Barth expressed a similar dim view of the knowledge base around what works to keep adoptions from disrupting.

“Casey Family Services did a big study on its post-adoption services” in Maine, Barth said. “They couldn’t come up with any real evidence that the services had an impact.”

Residential placements are an option that adoptive parents will often pursue on their own, said Barth; indeed, he mentioned at the roundtable that he put his own adoptive daughter in a residential care facility after she threatened his wife a number of times.

Years later, he said, he commiserated with other adoptive parents about how foolish a choice it was. The data on “residential care is pretty bleak, there’s almost no evidence it works and some evidence that some kids get worse.”

Actually, the more accurate take is that the net effect of residential care is zero, Barth said in the phone interview: some adopted foster kids do thrive in the setting. So it may be worth examining what factors into successful residential programs: what are the characteristics of youths who thrive there? What type of program components have the greatest benefit?

Barth also said that efforts should be made to establish a standard, national home visitation screen. James Williams, a former foster youth from South Carolina, agreed. He discussed his experience being adopted by unstable parents that would quickly abuse him, landing Williams right back in foster care.

“Whenever youth go into adoptions, there should be more adult visits,” said Williams. “My adoptive parents had a record of domestic violence. It’s insane when you think about how badly systems want to get kids out. They’re willing to put [youth] with anyone.”

Inform Kids
Based on the experiences of the four former foster youths on the panel, systems generally listen to children’s views on adoption. The problem, according to 23-year-old Tawny Spinelli, is that very little is done to shape the view of children about the possibilities of adoption.

“When I was approached about adoption, I was 13,” Spinelli said at the roundtable.  “I had already had seven different placements with seven different families, some relatives some others. If I don’t belong with other families, why would an adoptive family work?”

But nobody helped her think through that quandary, and her initial reaction was to say no. And nobody brought up adoption with her again until her foster parent mentioned the prospect casually when she was already 17.

Connection to birth family: option, not mandate
Marchelle Roberts, one of the foster care alumni who spoke at the roundtable, said  that little effort was made to keep her connected to relatives when she was still in foster care, and then after her adoption was finalized.

“My adoptive family made me who I am today,” Roberts said, “but I want relationships with any fellow siblings or uncles, etcetera, that I can.”

Ashley Lepse, also a former foster youth, said she was forced to visit with her biological mother even though she did not want to and was on a path from foster care to adoption. Lepse said the mandate was what she disliked, and agreed with Roberts that every foster and adoptive youth should be able to find and seek out their biological family members if they choose to do so.

John Kelly is the editor of The Chronicle of Social Change

Bachmann on Being a Foster Mom, the Foster Youth Caucus and Uninterrupted Scholars

The day before Congress went into summer recess on August 3rd, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) sat down with FMC’s Daniel Heimpel to discuss her experience as a foster mother, the formation of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth as well as the Uninterrupted Scholars Act.

The bill, which would ease access to foster kids educational records, had been introduced by Bachmann, and Caucus co-founders Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif), Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) on March 31st. The Senate followed suit on August 2nd.

- Daniel Heimpel

Juvenile Dependency Courts 101

What it’s like to be a parent involved in the dependency court system.

- by Stephanie Ludwig

Imagine, you need to rush your child to the hospital and you don’t have a car seat. You make a split second decision to hold your child on your lap. On the way to the hospital, another driver runs a red light and hits your car, killing your child.

This was the scenario that landed a Los Angeles father of three in Los Angeles County Juvenile Dependency Court in 2009. The court ruled that the two surviving children could be removed from their father’s care and placed in the foster care system. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, the California State Supreme Court recently upheld this ruling, citing a “breach of ordinary care” that was substantial enough to trigger child welfare intervention.

The reality is, in the blink of an eye, parents can find themselves embroiled in a confusing court system, fighting to keep their children. According to the National Center for Substance Abuse and Child Welfare, 1.81 million juvenile court cases were filed in the United States in 2002 alone.

One of the first steps in entering the dependency court system is a call from the social worker who interviews parents and notifies them of court date. Deborah Levine, a private practice attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area who spent 20 years working for the Contra Costa County public defender’s office, says many parents become overwhelmed early in this process.

“There’s a difference between what the social worker says and what happens,” says Levine. “The judge makes the decision. Social workers can take a very heavy-handed approach and tell people what’s going to happen. I think that’s frightening for parents because they feel powerless, and it’s not in reality what happens.”

Usually, each participant, the county, the child and each parent have their own attorneys. Parents may hire a private attorney or have one appointed to them by the court.

“Basically, my job is to discuss with the parents what their goals are, explain the procedure of the courts and the likelihood of achieving their goals,” says Levine. “If the evidence is insurmountable, the best thing is to determine an alternative for the child and assist parents to get necessary services.”

Levine says that with county budget cuts, she has increasingly encountered lawyers who are not adequately compensated by the county and thus do not have the time to appropriately represent complex cases.

“There’s such a volume, and the judges are looking at huge volumes of people coming through it’s not easy to determine if the attorney isn’t doing the work,” says Levine.

Children are represented by a court appointed attorney. The Children’s Law Center based in Washington D.C. provides free legal services for over 2,000 children per year. Executive Director Judith Sandalow says the first step in her attorney’s process is gathering information.

“We try to talk with the child’s parents and anybody who has been very active in the child’s life and look at school records and medical records so we can learn about all the different things going on in a child’s life including whether they are abused or neglected,” says Sandalow. “Just because the government says there’s been an allegation doesn’t mean it’s true.”

She says that the law leans toward reunifying children with their parents or another adult they are already attached to, but that the child’s physical and emotional safety must be guaranteed.

“For us, we know it’s in a child’s best interest to be safely with a person they are deeply attached to,” she says. “It may be in the best interest of the child to get that parent some services.”

Sandalow adds that going to court may be difficult for children, and attorneys must evaluate the appropriateness of a child’s presence in the courtroom on a case by case basis. She says many children struggle to understand the role of social workers, judges, lawyers and other unfamiliar adults after they are removed from their homes.

“I think understanding the notion that the judge gets to make such an important decision about their life is hard,” she says. “It is really hard as a teen to accept that adults make decisions for you, it’s even harder for it to be adults that haven’t been in your life.”

Attorneys must do their best to balance the child’s preferences and needs, the facts of the case, and their own impressions. They spend time discussing their own cultural and personal biases.

“I don’t think it’s possible not to bring your own personal experience and educated experience to bear,” says Sandalow. “Just like the adversarial court system isn’t perfect, I think we feel that way about being best interest lawyers. As a society we don’t have a better solution. Someone has to advocate in the courtroom.”

Despite the imperfect court system, attorneys and advocates like Sandalow say it’s the best shot many parents, like the Los Angeles father of three, and children have to determine the best interest for children that have experienced abuse.

“There’s a reason why dependency court is in a court, which is due process,” says Sandalow. “We’re making a very big decision which is taking away parental rights. It is not something we should do lightly.”

This is part of a series of stories that will describe the juvenile dependency court system as seen by Chronicle of Social Change reporters.

Sen. Mary Landrieu on Foster Care, Education and a Growing Movement

On August 2nd, Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Mark Begich (D-Ala.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced  the Uninterrupted Scholars Act.

The bill would amend education policy that currently precludes many adults and institutions from access to an individual student’s records. This makes sense in most contexts , but for foster children, who do not live with their biological parents, not having access to school records can create major hurdles in their educational success.

In this interview Sen. Landrieu discusses the importance of the law and the increased attention on foster care and children’s issues in Washington D.C. and around the country.

- Daniel Heimpel

Post-Partisan; the Power of Foster Care Politics

While the nation bemoans a “gridlocked” Congress and Comedy Central’s Messrs. Stewart and Colbert aptly ridicule both Presidential candidates for a disregard of specificity on one hand and hubris on the other, I have borne witness to a very different vision of our elected leadership.

2012 Foster Youth Intern R.J. Sloke with Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.). Sloke played a key role in a collective effort to maintain momentum behind the Uninterrupted Scholar’s Act.

Instead of obstruction and partisanship, at least around one issue – foster care – I have seen members of Congress from both houses and sides of the aisle move at notable speed to introduce important, thoughtful legislation; respectfulness between ideologically disparate leaders; and an ability to transform the recommendations of experts in child welfare and foster youth themselves into cogent policy.

This story begins in Miami on March 31, during the second stop of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth’s National Listening Tour. Caucus co-founder Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) sits aside Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) and Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) at an enormous rectangle of tables peopled with Florida’s child welfare leaders. Mary Cagle, Director of Children’s Legal Services for Florida’s Department of Children and Family Services, describes how the Family Educational Records and Privacy Act (FERPA) – intended to protect against disclosure of student records to parties other than school officials or biological parents – creates difficulties for foster children, who are no longer in the custody of their biological parents.

Amending FERPA would allow social workers access to student records, she says, helping them make critical decisions in how to best mitigate foster children’s educational challenges and celebrate their successes.

“Education is one of the biggest indicators for the happiness of our kids, so we really want the federal government to take a look at the tension in this law,” Cagle says to the assembled members of Congress.

Two short months later, on the last day of May, National Foster Care Awareness Month, Rep. Bass and Foster Youth Caucus Co-Founders Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) and Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) introduced a bill that would eliminate that tension by allowing child welfare agencies direct access to the records of students in foster care, and allow for aggregate data to be used in studies intended on improving educational outcomes for students in foster care.

“This was an issue waiting to be resolved,” Rep. Bass said in an interview on the eve of the bill’s introduction, which would eventually take the name of the Uninterrupted Scholars Act. “The thought had already been put in, all we did was take advantage of the thinking and the work that was in place.”

Through the summer, foster care advocates and hill staff worked behind the scenes to elevate the issue and make sure it carried momentum through an increasingly static legislative season. As is so often the case with child welfare issues, it was a combination of expert analysis and foster youth perspective that moved the Uninterrupted Scholars Act into the Senate, increasing the likelihood it will become law before the end of this Congress.

On July 20, R.J. Sloke sat down with Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) to tell the lawmaker his story of growing up in foster care. It was the last day of Sloke’s internship through the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s Foster Youth Internship (FYI) Program, which places foster youth in the offices of Members of Congress.

The 2012 Foster Youth Interns immediately following their briefing on July 31, 2012.

“It felt really good,” Sloke said after a briefing in the Senate Visitor’s Center where he and 12 other of this year’s Foster Youth Interns released a report entitled “Hear Me Now” filled with their policy recommendations. “I told him about my high school situation and how the bill [Uninterrupted Scholars] would have helped me.”

According to the report he contributed to “Hear Me Now,” Sloke lived in 25 foster care placements in the five years he was care before his 18^th birthday. All the bouncing through foster homes and group homes resulted in his attending a dozen different high schools.

“My caseworkers and schools failed to communicate with each other as I would transfer schools resulting in my not receiving credits to go on to the next grade,” he wrote in the report. Despite taking ninth grade three times, Sloke managed to graduate at 19.

Sloke’s story touched Blunt, who signed on as a co-sponsor of the Uninterrupted Scholars Act. On August 2nd, Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Mark Begich (D-Ala.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced the law into the Senate.

In an interview just minutes before the bill was run to the Senate floor, Sen. Landrieu, Co-Founder of the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth, described just how important hearing from youth like Sloke is to legislators.

“This kid, even after having to go through ninth grade three times, not because he couldn’t do the work but because the system had lost his records, now he’s gone on to graduate…. He will be a phenomenal leader in our nation but you know this is just way beyond what should be required. That is R.J.’s situation and there are thousands of other cases like it.”

Much like the House bill, Uninterrupted Scholars will: give child welfare agencies access to foster student records; allow for the use of educational records in studies related to promoting the educational success and stability of foster youth; and eliminate the need for duplicative, time-consuming notice when transferring records.

On August 3^rd, the day before Congress took its summer recess, I had a chance to sit with Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth co-chair Michele Bachmann. After explaining her experience as a foster mother to 23 foster children and five “biologicals,” Bachmann took a moment to explain the significance of having caucuses on Foster Youth in both houses.

“A lot of people think we can never talk about anything in Congress, that everything is gridlock and everything is partisan, and it isn’t at all. So both Congresswoman Bass and myself have come together. We created the Foster Youth Caucus, a bi-partisan caucus to elevate the issue of the problems and challenges that families deal with, with foster care, because we want solutions. That’s what we are about. Positive solutions to actually help the life situations for families in challenging situations.”

While Bachmann — like Landrieu had the day before — repeatedly referenced the goal of finding “forever families,” she noted the importance of Uninterrupted Scholars.

“We filed our bill in the House, now we see the Senate’s followed suit. We do have time yet in the remainder of this year to advance the cause of children in challenging circumstances that is what we are here to be about…. Our goal is to place children in forever families, but along the way, along the path of that journey we want them to have the best possible educational [opportunities], because if there is anything I learned personally as a foster mother its that our foster children needed a leg up.”

Congress will reconvene in early September, just as hundreds of thousands of American students start a new school year. If momentum carries Uninterrupted Scholars through, students in foster care may have that much needed leg up on the road to educational success.

Daniel Heimpel is the Executive Director of Fostering Media Connections and the Publisher of the Chronicle of Social Change.