Promoting Stable Families Through Postadoption Support

Postadoption support services are vitally important to sustain and strengthen adoptive families. Adoptees with histories of abuse, neglect, or lengthy institutionalization may confront significant challenges throughout their childhood. Without ongoing assistance and support for the children and their parents, many of these adoptions are at risk of disruption or dissolution. A new report issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute reviews existing postadoption programs and identifies directions for the development of effective models of postadoption practices. The report, Keeping the Promise: The Critical Need for Post-Adoption Services to ...

School Lunches for Children in Foster Care

Signed into law by the President on December 13, 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 allows the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), for the first time in over 30 years, the chance to make real reforms to the school lunch and breakfast programs by improving the critical nutrition and hunger safety net for millions of children. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 provides categorical eligibility to foster children for free meals served under the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act. A recent memo from the USDA's Director of Child Nutrition Division provides guidance to Regional Special Nutrition and State Child Nutrition ...

Supporting Higher Education for Students from Foster Care

Casey Family Programs recently updated their Supporting Success framework, a tool to help higher education organizations develop and enhance services to improve outcomes for students from foster care. In addition to the stressors faced by most new students transitioning to a college environment, youth from foster care often have unique needs related to housing, food, transportation, health care, and financial aid. The framework helps colleges improve their existing student support services and develop new programs to address these needs so students can focus on their academic success. The authors of the framework provide guidance on the six elements ...

Child Elopement from Foster Care and Residential Settings

The National Runaway Switchboard reports that between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away each year. It also reports that there has been “a significant increase in the number of crisis calls identifying abuse or neglect as a reason for the call, with abuse calls up 33 percent and neglect calls up 54 percent between 2005-2008" (National Runaway Switchboard Crisis Caller Trends, 2009, p. 2). Youth in out-of-home care often choose conduct that does not ensure their own safety. They elope from foster homes, group homes, or other residential settings at an unknown rate. When children are known risks for eloping a court may find that is the legal duty ...

CAPTA Reauthorized

The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) Reauthorization Act of 2010 (S.3817) was signed into law on December 20, 2010, as Public Law 111-320. The act leaves funding for discretionary grants (research, training, technical assistance, information collection, and program innovations) and for basic State grants at the old authorized level of $120 million in FY 2010 and at "such sums as may be necessary" for FY 2011 through 2015. A new funding section regarding allotments of the basic State grant funds for improving child protective services establishes a minimum State grant of $50,000, with additional distribution based on child ...

Six Million Children Maltreated in 2009?

In 2009, an estimated 3.3 million referrals involving the alleged maltreatment of approximately 6.0 million children were received by CPS agencies nationwide. Of these, CPS determined that at least one child was a unique victim of abuse and neglect in 702,000 cases. The rest were unsubstantiated or closed with no finding. These and other data appear in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Child Maltreatment 2009, the 20th in a series of reports designed to provide national statistics on child abuse and neglect. Most states recognize four major types of maltreatment: neglect, physical abuse, psychological maltreatment, and sexual abuse. ...

Lawyer’s Guide to Representing Very Young Children

The American Bar Association (ABA) Center on Children and the Law recently published a Practice and Policy Brief designed for attorneys and those representing very young children in dependency proceedings. The brief outlines some of the ethical dilemmas faced by these representatives, and it outlines the four types of advocacy essential to achieving the best outcomes for young children in these cases: Child-centered Research-informed Permanency-driven Holistic Ethical guidance for attorneys who represent children of any age in child abuse and neglect cases comes from the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Recognizing that ...

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