Week In Review March 20th, 2023

Mar 20, 2023

 

Foster Care and Child Welfare Week in Review – March 20, 2023

Here are some news items from last week related to foster care, adoption, and child welfare that caught our eye:

  1. Texas removed six Black children from their homes. Their adoptive parents drove them off a cliff.

After a murder-suicide in 2018, a reporter spent years investigating Texas’ troubled foster care system. Too often, it prioritized terminating parental rights over keeping birth families intact.  Jennifer and Sarah Hart, two white women, both 38, adopted six Black children, ages 12 to 19, from two separate sibling groups, all from Texas. On March 26, 2018, an SUV containing the Harts and their adopted children drove off a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. State troopers working the crime scene found no skid marks where the car had left the road and concluded the crash was intentional, and the kids had been drugged with Benadryl.

  1. Texas Lawmaker’s Proposal Aims to Regulate ‘Hidden Foster Care’

For a second time in the past year, Texas lawmakers are considering placing guardrails on a common but little-discussed social work practice known as “hidden foster care” that affects thousands of state residents a year.  After a similar bill died in a special session last year, Texas Rep. Lacey Hull has reintroduced legislation to better monitor cases where parents are advised by social workers to give up their kids to friends or relatives as an alternative to a child’s formal removal into foster care. The legislation calls for an accounting of how often the practice occurs, imposes time limits on how long it can last, and requires that parents be notified of their rights to refuse the arrangements.

  1. Killeen neighborhood on edge; blame crime on ‘CPS watch home’

Residents gathered this week to discuss crime issues which they say have plagued their south Killeen neighborhood in recent months.  According to the group, cases of criminal mischief, trespassing, burglary and vandalism have risen in their neighborhood. Some have even been harassed by a few teenage residents who live in or visit a home on Verbena Loop.  The Killeen Police Department have responded to nine separate incidents at a residence in the 2700 block of Verbena Loop since August 2022. Neighbors said the specific two-story home in question is being rented by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and is called a “CPS watch home,” meaning the residents are part of the Child Protective Services program.

  1. Mother says she’s more present in her daughter’s life after accepting help from Texas CPS

A San Antonio mom said she was battling drug and alcohol addiction when Texas Child Protective Services showed up at her door and took her daughter away. Less than a year later and after a lot of work, the mom was reunited with her daughter, thanks to the Bexar County Early Childhood Court program. Now, Stephanie Bailey said she’s more present in her 4-year-old’s life than she was before CPS stepped in.

  1. The Family Who Tried to End Racism Through Adoption

Bob and Sheryl Guterl saw theirs as a new kind of “ark for the age of the nuclear bomb, of race riots, of war,” one that could change the world by example: They would raise a family of white biological children and adopted children of color—“two of every race”—and all would live in harmony behind a white-picket fence. In Skinfolk, Matthew Guterl, a professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University, assigns himself the task of reckoning with the experiment his white parents confidently embarked on.

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