- Michigan foster care ‘a persistent and dire problem’, By Justin A. Hinkley, July 2, 2015, Lansing State Journal: “A girl was injured during an unsupervised visit with the parents she’d been taken away from. Kids with a history of inappropriate sexual behavior were placed in homes with younger children. A child ran away and police weren’t notified for days. A decade ago, the death of Williamston 7-year-old Ricky Holland at the hands of his adoptive parents revealed fatal flaws in the state’s safeguards for foster kids. Seven years ago, a class-action lawsuit in federal court mandated improvements. Still, Michigan continues to fail hundreds of kids a year, court-appointed monitors say…”
- Foster care will not be privatized, officials say, By Justin A. Hinkley, June 29, 2015, Lansing State Journal: “Despite official statements to the contrary, state employees and some private providers suspect Michigan is working toward fully outsourcing foster care services in the state. Currently, the more than 12,000 foster care cases in Michigan are split about evenly between private providers and the more than 700 foster care workers at the state Department of Health & Human Services. The division varies by county, but state employees and others look to Kent County — where recent legislation fully privatized foster care case management and established a pilot program for a performance-based funding model — as one of several clues that 100% outsourcing is coming down the pike…”
- Arizona child-safety agency struggles with staff turnover, rising child removals, By Mary Jo Pitzl, June 28, 2015, Arizona Republic: “A year ago Arizona’s governor and a united Legislature agreed that to save the state’s troubled child-welfare agency, it had to be razed and rebuilt. They pulled the child-welfare office out of the mammoth state Department of Economic Security and made it a stand-alone agency that reports directly to the governor. They also boosted its budget by $94 million to give it the firepower to reduce a backlog of 13,000 reports of child abuse and neglect, as well as to hire more caseworkers for the increasing number of new reports. And they made transparency a key criteria to hold the agency accountable…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty