HHS Awards Almost $15 Million in Adoption Bonuses
Last week HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced almost $15 million in adoption bonuses paid to 25 states and Puerto Rico for increasing the number of children adopted from state-supervised foster care in fiscal year 2002. In states that qualified for bonuses, 3,703 more children were adopted in fiscal year 2002 than in the previous year.
The highest award was Florida with an eye popping $3.5 million in bonuses. New Jersey got almost $2 million. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin each got around $1.1 million. HHS reports that around 51,000 foster children are ...
GAO Report on Title IV-B
Title IV-B of the Social Security Act is the primary source of federal funding for services to help families address problems that lead to child abuse and neglect and to prevent the unnecessary separation of children from their families. Title IV-B is divided into two parts. States can use subpart 1 funds on almost any child welfare activity.
Subpart 2 provides grants to states for similar types of child welfare services, such as family support services to enhance family stability and services to help parents reunify with a child in foster care, but is more restrictive ...
Hague Intercountry Adoption Regulations Released Today
The U.S. Department of State today issued long-awaited proposed regulations to implement legislation which was signed into law nearly three years ago to implement a global treaty that streamlines the international adoption process affecting tens of thousands of children adopted by U.S. citizens each year.
The 2000 law, known as the Intercountry Adoption Act, put in place a structure that should provide greater safety, accountability and transparency for adoptive families who seek to adopt children from other nations.
The proposed regulations are designed to implement ...
Safe Haven Laws
The battle over safe haven laws is heating up! These laws are intended to allow parents to leave their newborns at designated safe places, including hospitals and police stations, while guaranteeing those parents anonymity and freedom from prosecution. Sounds good huh? Read on. There are some serious issues.
First there was the excellent report by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute - Unintended Consequences:
Safe Haven Laws are Causing Problems, Not Solving Them - which was critical of safe haven laws. Then noted columnist (and adoptive parent) Al Hunt wrote a hard ...
Website of Interest
This is a nice site and great resource for tracking national child welfare legislation. This page, at least, is a fancy blog! I don't know Marcia but she is doing a great job. The only change I would make is to provide the legislation as a PDF instead of HTML. Check it out.
Best Interests: Legislation
When Children Take the Stand
There is undoubtedly an increase in the number of children involved in the judicial system either as victims (there are 500,000 children in foster care all of whom were in court last year), perpetrators (there were 1 million court involved delinquents and status offenders in 1999), and witnesses in divorce, domestic violence and other civil cases.
One of the best books on child witnesses remains Anne Graffam Walker's Handbook On Questioning Children: A Linguistic perspective. Another good publication is Evidence in Child Abuse and Neglect Cases by John E.B. Myers.
Both ...
The Boston Globe – TPR Series
I found this article moving and profound. The reporter clearly did an excellent job of presenting the nuances of terminating the parental rights of so-called chronically neglectful parents.
Barbara's story is, sadly, typical of the families who are all too frequently involved in the child welfare system: often impoverished, with mental disabilities, inadequate parenting skills (or is that inadequate middle class parenting skills?), unstable employment, no family support and poor decisionmaking skills. She was clearly not abusive; even the social workers acknowledged ...