Minnesota faces penalties for failed placements of foster children, By Chris Serres, February 10, 2014, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: “Inside the mice-infested house where Thomas Stone spent much of his childhood, there was a closet just big enough to hold a small boy and his pet cat. On many nights, Stone would crawl there to hide from the sounds of his father’s violent rampages. Stone recalls pleading with county social workers to move him to a different home. But each time he was removed to a nurturing foster-care family, he soon would be sent right back to his father’s house in north Minneapolis. ‘If you’ve got lions fighting and biting each other in a cage, you don’t put them back in that cage like there’s no problem,’ says Stone, now 19. ‘Kids need love, and they can’t always find that in their own homes.’ For years, Minnesota officials have boasted of their success at reducing the population of children living in government-funded foster care; among states, Minnesota ranks No. 1 for the share of foster children returned to their biological parents within a year. But some child advocates warn that Minnesota’s aggressive focus on family unification sometimes puts children in harm’s way by returning them to parents with histories of abuse or neglect…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty