Riverside County

The families of children in Riverside County juvenile detention went to court Monday seeking reimbursement of millions of dollars in fees their lawyers say were illegally charged.  The Western Center on Law & Poverty and the National Center for Youth Law, representing the locked-up youths’ families, filed an amended complaint in their existing lawsuit against the county, charging that although Riverside stopped collecting the administrative fees in April, that was not sufficient.

California has spent about $140 million over the past three-plus years to find more foster homes for the state’s most vulnerable children, but some advocates are worried that these foster parent recruitment funds were not much more than a giveaway to county child welfare departments, with little oversight from the state and an uncertain impact.

The ACLU has filed a class-action lawsuit challenging Riverside County’s “informal” probation program for kids who commit low-level offenses and kids deemed “at risk” of future offenses. The California county’s “Youth Accountability Team” (YAT) is “astonishingly punitive and ineffective,” according to the complaint, and ensnares approximately 400 kids each year, locking them into a six-month probation term for being “defiant” or tardy, and for swearing, giving into peer pressure and exhibiting other behaviors common among children.

Voices for Children, which provides court appointed special advocates (CASAs) to foster children in San Diego and Riverside Counties, has named John Valencia as its new president and CEO. Valencia, who previously served as the vice chancellor of workforce and organizational development at Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District in at El Cajon, California, will start at Voices for Children on Feb.

According to a new poll released Wednesday by the California Endowment, a majority of California residents say they’d like to see all of the state’s juvenile incarceration facilities closed down. The survey comes at a time when counties are adapting to a significant downturn in youth crime and flagging numbers of young people incarcerated at juvenile camps, halls and ranches across the state.