Child Welfare

After 17 years of operating under a consent decree, Los Angeles County has reached an agreement to extricate itself from a long-running federal lawsuit that sought to address gaps in mental health care services for children in foster care in California.

Foster youth often feel misunderstood and marginalized by society as a whole. Within the larger foster youth community, however, certain groups must deal with even more stress. Those groups, and how to help them build fulfilling lives, are the subjects of the latest set of policy recommendations by the National Foster Care Youth and Alumni Policy Council.

‘Velmanette builds the wagons, puts them on the road, and then everybody else jumps on them’

There’s a poorly lit, windowless courtroom in lower Manhattan that rarely attracts an audience.

The COVID-19 pandemic is threatening to crush the college dreams of thousands of people who will soon be aging out of foster care, and Congress must take urgent steps to avoid these devastating outcomes, according to a report being released this week.

This weekend’s football season opener against the Alabama Crimson Tide hasn’t been the only thing on the minds of the Missouri Tigers of late.

Despite being mired in a federal lawsuit largely focused on children in group placements, the state’s child welfare agency seems likely to give up federal funds rather than meet new requirements for residential foster care. 

For many parents, it’s their worst fear: a knock on the door from a state social worker with the power to take their children. With 1 in 3 children nationwide experiencing a Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation during childhood following a report of child maltreatment, this experience is all too common for U.S.

In March, as college campuses nationwide began shutting down to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus and students fled home to their childhood bedrooms, foster youth and the homeless had potentially everything to lose if they were forced to turn in their dorm keys.

A few weeks ago, my client, a mother in a child protective case trying to regain custody of her children, informed my students she had lost her housing and was now homeless.