Best of 2020

Congress approved legislation in 2018 that will reduce federal spending on group homes and institutions. Since that law was signed, several investigative stories in our pages and others around the country have exposed the shortcomings that prompted it. 

In 2010, California approved legislation that would extend foster care until age 21 for youth who otherwise would be forced out on their own at 18. The state, home to more than 50,000 foster youth, was among the first to offer a longer runway into adulthood. 

In March of 2016, Latonia Rolbiecki’s grandson was born at Fairview Hospital in Wyoming, Minnesota, his body riddled with the effects of his mother’s drug and alcohol abuse. The child was immediately placed into a foster home by the Chisago County Health and Human Services Department. 

The year 2020 is almost over and what a year it has been! Several issues and events sparked major outrage and discussions about how those issues affect those who have experienced foster care, homelessness and juvenile incarceration around the world.

The killing of George Floyd, and the summer of protests that followed this tragedy, spurred new conversations about the appropriate role of law enforcement. Child welfare systems, which lack the lethal force component of law enforcement but do police communities with the ability to break up families, got no amnesty from the discussion. 

Two stories The Imprint covered in 2020 reflect the growing concern over how much influence drug testing has on child welfare system involvement.  Lead Read: Texas legislators wanted to know why Taylor County’s child protective services was taking children into foster care at a rate far above the state average.

The Family First Prevention Services Act, the most consequential rewrite of federal child welfare policy in decades, was signed into law in 2018 and took effect at the end of 2019, making 2020 the first full year of effect.

California is ramping up a $140 million plan to screen many of the state’s children for adverse childhood experiences, often referred to as ACES. The idea was borne of a landmark study from the 1990s that traced several negative life outcomes in adulthood to trauma endured in childhood. But

David Anderson founded the Chicago-based Safe Families as a faith-based alternative to the child welfare system, designed to provide needed respite for parents in crisis. According to its website, Safe Families’ hosting model is “a positive alternative to the State child welfare system,” noting, “the voluntary and non-coercive nature of Safe Families is a hallmark of the program.”