by Donna Ennis
The federal government began sending American Indians to off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870s, when the United States was still at war with Indians. An Army officer, Richard Pratt, founded the first of these schools.
Pratt believed that the Indian Wars weren't extinguishing the culture fast enough, so he came up with the idea of separating children from their parents. The first boarding schools were started in the late 1800s. Our elders describe trains coming into tribal communities and grabbing children from their homes and taking them to these boarding schools. The effects of boarding schools are far-reaching and have resulted in historical, intergenerational and cultural trauma to our Native people.
Those boarding schools have an echo today.
Beginning with his separation from his family at the age of 4, Andrew was shuffled 28 times from foster home to foster home. He was stripped of his identity and placed in homes outside of his culture. He grew up not knowing who he was or where he came from because he was removed at such an impressionable young age, leaving him with no sense of belonging. I believe that a child's most important need, besides food, clothing and shelter, is the need to belong. Although Andrew had many siblings, he saw only a couple of the older ones on occasion and never saw his younger siblings again.
Andrew committed suicide at the age of 17 by hanging himself from a tree on the property of what was to be his last foster home. After his death, arrangements were made to get the family together for his burial. I have worked with many youth over the years, and it never gets any easier for me to comprehend what kind of child welfare system allows these atrocities to happen.
The trauma that Andrew suffered echoed the assimilation policies set out by the government through the federal Indian boarding school program. He too was separated from his family and tribe. Dominant cultural values were forced on him through a process of forced assimilation.
The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act was created by the federal government in order to establish federal authority over adoption of Native American children. The goal of the act was to strengthen and preserve Native American families and culture.
Each year, South Dakota removes an average of 700 Native children from their homes. Of these 700 children, 90 percent are placed in non-Native homes or group care. The continuing separation of children from their heritage is a tragic and destructive aspect of these cross-cultural placements.
Despite federal law to the contrary, a boarding school mentality exists in favor of placing Native children in non-Indian settings. The identity of Native youth is devalued. Forced assimilation leads to conflict with these young people, who can become very confused about their tribal identity.
There is again a price on Indian children's heads, seen in the distribution of federal money to social services for their care. In addition, South Dakota has a record of designating Native children as having special needs -- which means they are worth more to the state financially than other children.
Social service agencies like Children's Home Society have become the new boarding schools for South Dakota. Just like in early tribal communities, children are being forcibly taken from their homes with no real basis. Families and tribes are being forced to hide their children from the state.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/11/08/ennis/
CPS corruption hurts and destroys families worldwide. Please use caution posting about CPS here or anyplace on the internet. For your protection, using your full, real name and precise location is not advised. CPS has eyes everywhere and CPS is notorious for taking what people say, twisting it, embellishing on it and then using it against them in CPS "investigations" and at court proceedings.
Showing posts with label policies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label policies. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
Race A Major Factor In Foster Care Disparities
Written by Larry Aubry, (Columnist), on 08-29-2011 13:19
In Los Angeles and across the nation, there are clear disparities in foster care and Black children are faring far worse than their white counterparts. For Los Angeles Congresswoman Karen Bass, foster care reform has long care a top priority. She has repeatedly introduced legislation to increase foster care funding and the quality of services. Bass' efforts focus attention on the need to provide adequate resources as well as on race-based disparities that harm countless children. (A poignant and distressing example of the magnitude of the foster care problem is Los Angeles' predominantly Black Crenshaw High School- almost half of its students are in foster homes.)
The following excerpts are from a paper by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, whose primary mission is fostering public policies, reforms and community support that more effectively meet the needs of vulnerable children and families.
It is time to focus on disparities faced by African American children in our country's foster care system. Contrary to post-racial society rhetoric, race still weighs heavily on unification and permanence for foster kids. Children of color, especially African American children, fare far worse than whites on measures such as placement in foster care, length of stay in foster care, number of moves in foster care and length of time to permanency.
African American children, more than any other group, are more likely to exit the foster care system without being adopted, although a permanent home is the right of every child. The president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation says, "The basic human need for a family connection that can be counted on for life must be recognized as essential for all children and families, including those who interact with a child welfare system."
According to a 2007 Government Accountability Office report, African American children stay in foster care longer because of difficulties in recruiting adoptive parents and greater reliance on relatives to provide foster care who may be unwilling to terminate the parental rights as the child's parent or who, disproportionately, may need the financial subsidy they receive while the child is in foster care.
Research shows that African American children are no more likely to experience maltreatment than white children, yet they are greatly overrepresented among the child welfare population, especially while in foster care. Child maltreatment reports for children of color are also more likely to be confirmed than reports for white children.
African American children are also more likely to languish in foster care despite research proving that there is no real difference in the overall incidents of child abuse and neglect between African American and white children within similar income groups. Even for infants, disparities face African American in foster care and they are less likely to experience unification than white infants. Further, African American children over ten-years of age are significantly less likely to return home than white youth.
Practice and policy recommendations: Change federal fiscal policy to better promote permanence and well-being. To make a difference in child welfare outcomes, the federal government should have to right the balance between funds dedicated solely to out-of-home care and those that can be used more flexibly to keep families together.
Promising proposals include: Giving states the option of receiving funds solely for out-of-home care in exchange for more flexible and innovative funding that can be used to prevent out-of-home placement, while limiting states' financial risks if child welfare caseloads increase. The federal government must also take a leadership role in reducing pervasive racial disparities found throughout the child welfare system. Children of color are more likely than white children to be placed in foster care, less likely to receive the services they need and more likely to remain in care for a long time, even when the effects of poverty and thy type of maltreatment alleged are taken into account.
Child welfare information systems remain a generation behind the times, hampering efforts at all levels to track and improve performance. The federal government must support the development and dissemination of new information technologies for child welfare, combining mobile computer capability with worker-level decision support tools and proven practice guides.
Concerned citizens, African Americans especially, should urge their congressional delegations to vote for Bass's pending foster care bill- it represents an important step toward actual reform. And broad dissemination of the kind of information presented here, pressure on public administrators and elected officials and collaborating with families and interested others, are indispensable for sustainable foster-care reform.
Source http://www.lasentinel.net/RACE-A-MAJOR-FACTOR-IN-FOSTER-CARE-DISPARITIES.html
In Los Angeles and across the nation, there are clear disparities in foster care and Black children are faring far worse than their white counterparts. For Los Angeles Congresswoman Karen Bass, foster care reform has long care a top priority. She has repeatedly introduced legislation to increase foster care funding and the quality of services. Bass' efforts focus attention on the need to provide adequate resources as well as on race-based disparities that harm countless children. (A poignant and distressing example of the magnitude of the foster care problem is Los Angeles' predominantly Black Crenshaw High School- almost half of its students are in foster homes.)
The following excerpts are from a paper by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, whose primary mission is fostering public policies, reforms and community support that more effectively meet the needs of vulnerable children and families.
It is time to focus on disparities faced by African American children in our country's foster care system. Contrary to post-racial society rhetoric, race still weighs heavily on unification and permanence for foster kids. Children of color, especially African American children, fare far worse than whites on measures such as placement in foster care, length of stay in foster care, number of moves in foster care and length of time to permanency.
African American children, more than any other group, are more likely to exit the foster care system without being adopted, although a permanent home is the right of every child. The president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation says, "The basic human need for a family connection that can be counted on for life must be recognized as essential for all children and families, including those who interact with a child welfare system."
According to a 2007 Government Accountability Office report, African American children stay in foster care longer because of difficulties in recruiting adoptive parents and greater reliance on relatives to provide foster care who may be unwilling to terminate the parental rights as the child's parent or who, disproportionately, may need the financial subsidy they receive while the child is in foster care.
Research shows that African American children are no more likely to experience maltreatment than white children, yet they are greatly overrepresented among the child welfare population, especially while in foster care. Child maltreatment reports for children of color are also more likely to be confirmed than reports for white children.
African American children are also more likely to languish in foster care despite research proving that there is no real difference in the overall incidents of child abuse and neglect between African American and white children within similar income groups. Even for infants, disparities face African American in foster care and they are less likely to experience unification than white infants. Further, African American children over ten-years of age are significantly less likely to return home than white youth.
Practice and policy recommendations: Change federal fiscal policy to better promote permanence and well-being. To make a difference in child welfare outcomes, the federal government should have to right the balance between funds dedicated solely to out-of-home care and those that can be used more flexibly to keep families together.
Promising proposals include: Giving states the option of receiving funds solely for out-of-home care in exchange for more flexible and innovative funding that can be used to prevent out-of-home placement, while limiting states' financial risks if child welfare caseloads increase. The federal government must also take a leadership role in reducing pervasive racial disparities found throughout the child welfare system. Children of color are more likely than white children to be placed in foster care, less likely to receive the services they need and more likely to remain in care for a long time, even when the effects of poverty and thy type of maltreatment alleged are taken into account.
Child welfare information systems remain a generation behind the times, hampering efforts at all levels to track and improve performance. The federal government must support the development and dissemination of new information technologies for child welfare, combining mobile computer capability with worker-level decision support tools and proven practice guides.
Concerned citizens, African Americans especially, should urge their congressional delegations to vote for Bass's pending foster care bill- it represents an important step toward actual reform. And broad dissemination of the kind of information presented here, pressure on public administrators and elected officials and collaborating with families and interested others, are indispensable for sustainable foster-care reform.
Source http://www.lasentinel.net/RACE-A-MAJOR-FACTOR-IN-FOSTER-CARE-DISPARITIES.html
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