Idaho

About three months after I first entered the foster care system at age 12, a foster parent uttered words that would stay with me for the rest of my life. “Gay people are sinners who have no direction in life,” she told me.

A new report from the National Center for Youth Law looks at state policies that are successful at helping older foster youth gain permanency as they transition to adulthood. For older teens, that is often difficult.

Jess Westbrook’s panic attacks began with the birth of his son three years ago. He felt overwhelmed by a lack of sleep and worried about his son’s future. His anxiety relief came in an unlikely place.

Idaho’s Office of Performance Evaluations (OPE) published an evaluation in February 2017 that points to performance gaps between policy expectations and realities in Idaho’s child welfare system. Suggesting that this is an ongoing struggle needing to be addressed with a system-wide oversight entity, the evaluation showed gaps in four major areas: out-of-home placement, workload challenges, organizational culture, and a systems approach that hinders Idaho’s child welfare system from performing at its highest potential.

That bill I wrote about earlier this month, which would further privilege the already overprivileged foster parents of Idaho, appears well on its way to passage. The bill would offer only a tiny window of opportunity for relatives to step forward to take custody of children removed from their parents by Idaho child welfare authorities. 

I have often said that there are too many people in child welfare who seem to view the system as the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person’s child for your very own.