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The House Ways and Means Committee dropped a bipartisan bill today that would prevent youth from aging out of foster care during the coronavirus pandemic and provide additional federal cash to state child welfare agencies.

Less than a week after joining dozens of other prosecutors, corrections officials and probation chiefs in signing an open letter calling for the closure of all youth prisons, one California district attorney took her first official step toward doing just that in her own county.

A federal grant will allow for the completion of a major study on the effect of long-term professional mentoring on at-risk youth. 

Tehra Coles, Zainab Akbar, Emma Ketteringham, Lauren Shapiro

As thousands of Black people and their allies are protesting the systemic racism and police brutality that have been part of the fabric of this society for centuries, some white Americans appear ready to discuss the damage that oppression has done to Black and brown people.

It is safe to say that without the benefit of hindsight, no child welfare agency got it totally right in responding to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. But Michigan child welfare director, JooYeun Chang, said that an unrelated assessment of her agency, finished months before the virus hit our shores, was fortuitous in helping to shape a creative response to COVID-19. 

Last month, an inspector general report out of the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that Medicaid data can be used “to identify instances of potential child abuse or neglect.”

Statistics show that the longer kids are in foster care, the harder it is to place them permanently in a loving home.

Federal auditors recently faulted Kansas’ Department for Children and Families for allowing residents of its foster care group homes to be chronically exposed to potentially hazardous conditions, even though the state regularly inspected the facilities.