Blogs by Deborah K. Frontiera
Fighting CPS
2/24/2016 6:43:59 AM
Feb. 24, 2016
The purpose of this blog has been to provide updates on some of the cases I reported in my book (Fighting CPS: Guilty Until Proven Innocent of Child Protective Services Charges ISBN 9-780-9800061-6-2) that had not been resolved when the book went to press, and to report other cases where CPS is not working up to par. I’d also like to hear about cases in which Child Protective Services did the right thing so those cases can serve as examples of what should be done. Occasionally, I will report helpful tips and web sites with advice on fighting CPS. To comment on this blog, or to tell your story, email Deborah Frontiera at frontiera.fightingcps.deborah.gmail.com
A Big AMEN to this editorial:
I’ve never posted something the same day I read it, but I’m making an exception today. These are excerpts from an editorial in the Houston Chronicle, sec, B 7, Feb. 24, 2016. The piece is by Johana Scot (Director of Parent Guidance Center in Austin, TX) and Richard Wexler (executive director of National Coalition for Child Protection and Reform in Alexandria, VG). Their view state what I’ve felt for years:
“Pity the vulnerable children of Texas—trapped between a foster care system so horrible it amounts to institutionalized child abuse, and solutions promulgated by a federal judge that will do little to fix it. Her 200-page decision in a class-action lawsuit leaves no doube that the U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack is right about the horrors of the system. But the solutions she is ordering nibble around the edges of the problem. In the long run, those ‘solutions’ could make things worse, and undermine smart, sensible reforms just getting underway in two large Texas cities. That’s because the solutions ignore the elephant in the room: needless removal of children from homes that are safe or could be made safe if the families GOT THE RIGHT KINDS OF HELP. [Capital letters mine.] . . .
“Most parents who lose children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. For more common are cases in which family poverty has been confused with ‘neglect.’ Other cases fall between the extremes. . . .
“But it’s not just the children who are needlessly removed that are hurt. All the time spent of false allegations, trivial cases and needless removal is, in effect, stolen form children in real danger who really do need to be taken from their homes.
“The court decision demands that Texas address issues like placing children in unsafe group homes, mixing the wrong kinds of children together in residential treatment centers and lowering caseloads for workers. All are important issues.
“But it is the NEEDLESS REMOVAL that causes the placement of children in unsafe group homes. . . . [capital letters mine] It is the NEEDLESS REMOVAL that causes children to be thrown together in residential treatment. And it is the NEEDLESS REMOVAL that overloads caseworkers. . . .
“But the biggest risk comes when the bill comes due for reform. Texas needs to spend more on child welfare—but it also needs to spend smarter.
“That means new money should go into things like rent subsidies, so children aren’t taken because their families lack decent housing, and help with child care, so children arenot taken on charges of ‘neglectful supervision’—the single largest category of ‘substantiated’ child maltreatment in Texas. . . .
“So Judge Jack also should order the legislature NOT [capital letters mine] to divert that money from better options—the safe, proven prevention and family preservation programs that have worked in other states. Without such a requirement, the Texas court ruling could put at risk innovative efforts to curb the needless removal of children now underway in Houston and San Antonio. . . . it should be modeled on the innovative settlement won by Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law when it sued the child welfare system in Alabama . . . [where] independent court-appointed monitors found that child safety improved.
“It Alabama can do it, so can Texas.”
I hope a lot of people with the real power to change things are listening to these two people!
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