Foster Care and Child Welfare Week in Review – May 1, 2023
Here are some news items from last week related to foster care, adoption, and child welfare that caught our eye:
Thirty-two organizations are urging the Texas Legislature to increase state funding for child care to help providers stay open and keep costs down for families. The nonprofits and early education advocates sent a letter Monday to the Budget Conference Committee, which is made up of members of the Texas Senate and House. The committee hammers out the details for the final version of the state’s next two-year budget.
Focusing on prevention and dedicating more resources to families upstream, before children are permanently removed from their families, is an effective and humane way to keep the foster care system from the continued overload that contributes to neglect and abuse. The four main tenets are (1) provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives; (2) end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; (3) prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies …; and (4) encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.
Desperate to restore order within the walls of the five youth prisons it operates, the Texas Juvenile Justice Department has been asking judges to push more of its most troubled kids into the adult prison system. Last year, a depleted workforce left children locked in cells up to 23 hours a day, using water bottles and lunch trays as toilets. Self-harm behavior skyrocketed among the almost 600 youths held in TJJD facilities, nearly half of whom spent some time on suicide watch. The agency has since scrambled to recruit and retain more officers. One approach to alleviating the chaos has been to shift more youth out of the ever-in-crisis juvenile prison system into the adult one. Lawmakers and prosecutors have promoted the idea to rid TJJD of its most disruptive and violent detainees.
It was a quintessential Washington-Hollywood moment: a designer-garbed Paris Hilton wearing sleek black sunglasses and looking glamorous as she stood next to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and other lawmakers in front of the U.S. Capitol for a news conference. But this was no mere Instagram moment. Hilton was there for a deadly serious reason: to advocate as a victim and for other victims of abuse at institutional facilities, seeking federal oversight and data collection for young people in residential treatment programs.
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