raise the age

Black foster youth are caught in a nexus of incarceration which is formed by their engagement with child welfare, education and policing. Our recent brief published by UCLA’s Black Male Institute on Los Angeles County public schools serves to elucidate these grim realities.

After a prolonged effort by county district attorneys to reverse a 2018 state law, the California Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case that will determine whether children under age 16 can be prosecuted in adult court, regardless of the severity of their crime.

A federal judge has greenlighted a class-action settlement that expands the right of homeless or runaway youth in New York City to access essential programs and services, including group home beds, mental health services and a chance to appeal expulsions they consider unfair.

The child welfare system is expansive, sometimes overbearing, and complex in the outcomes it can deliver. Equally as complex are the young people who enter and exit and the lives they choose to lead. 

In 1996, about 1,000 delegates from 130 nations gathered in Stockholm to finally get serious about a global effort to curb a problem to which it had long turned a blind eye: the commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Amid a fresh wave of coronavirus infections washing over New York City — a development that has reversed the city’s halting efforts to slowly ease more students back into the classroom — comes a new report finding that thousands of students “failed to connect” at all with remote learning opportunities last spring.

As students across the country struggle to keep up with their schoolwork while sheltering from the coronavirus, tens of thousands of foster youth will now have access to one-on-one support from a free tutoring program being rolled out nationwide. 

The U.S. Children’s Bureau notified state and local child welfare leaders this week that newly funded services under the Family First Prevention Services Act can be delivered remotely for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.

Supporting radical changes to its juvenile justice system, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday endorsed a sweeping plan that would move hundreds of young people out of juvenile halls and detention camps run by the Probation Department.