The Adoption and Safe Families Act, 1997, offers cash “bonuses” to the states for every child they adopt out of foster care. Government funding is not given to Fairbanks Office of Children's Services if the case worker tries to "help" the family... money is only given if the case worker removes the child from the home.
Uploaded on Aug 12, 2010
Short video detailing abuse of power by Child Protective Services - CPS. Highlights financial incentives to steal kids and place them on drugs. Contains multiple news clips and interviews from families that CPS stole the kids from, & includes the late (possibly murdered) Nancy Schaefer.
To the editor: In 2012, a workload study, commissioned by the current governor, recommended an increase in support staff for the Office of Children’s Services. This department, already underfunded to achieve its goal of protecting children from abuse and neglect, is set to receive serious budget cuts this year.
The governor and our elected officials have an independent workload study recommending a feasible solution to protect our most vulnerable population, our children, from abuse and neglect. I wonder what they will say when more stories of abused children end up in the news.How can it be that those we’ve elected can turn away from such information? How can they say “these are the tough choices” we have to make?
Tough choices should not include gambling with the lives of children. “Choosing Respect” is more than words. Actions demonstrate respect. Our children deserve protection from violence, abuse and neglect. Voting to cut child protection is not choosing respect.
Kim Swisher
Fairbanks
"... Master's of Social Work from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2000 with an emphasis in Children, Youth and Families. ..."
"... in the field working with severely emotionally disturbed children, providing advocacy in court for children, child welfare, and child protection. Kim has worked as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for children in foster care, and spent ten years with the Office of Children's Services, both in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Kim spent three years working for the Family and Youth Services Training Academy, through the UAA School of Social Work, traveling Alaska and training child protection workers in best practice. Kim currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Interior Center for Non-Violent Living (IAC), and the Advisory Board for the Birch Center in Fairbanks. She provides consultation to Stevie's Place, the Child Advocacy Center in Fairbanks, through the Resource Center for Parents and Children (RCPC). Kim's area of interest include direct practice with individuals, groups and communities, and she delights in inspiring students to become social workers. ..."
Last Modified: Feb 17, 2014 09:48PMGov. Pat Quinn’s new director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services pleaded guilty to stealing from clients of a West Side social service agency and later became embroiled in a child-support battle over a daughter he said he never knew he’d fathered, records show.Arthur D. Bishop, 61, had a felony theft charge pending against him when then-Gov. Jim Edgar’s administration hired him as a DCFS caseworker in 1995. He’d been accused of bilking patients of the Bobby E. Wright Comprehensive Community Mental Health Center out of more than $9,000, fighting the case for more than two years before pleading guilty to a reduced charge of misdemeanor theft.Court records also show a paternity case was filed against Bishop in 2003, when he was a DCFS deputy director. DNA tests showed he was the father of Erica Bishop, then 17.Her mother, Yolanda O’Connor, said Bishop knew Erica was his daughter from the time she was born in 1986. Bishop said in court papers he’d never met the girl and didn’t know O’Connor claimed Erica was his daughter until she served him with court papers.Bishop, who was married to another woman when Erica was born, “denies his own daughter’s existence when he knows in his heart of hearts that he visited us on numerous occasions at my parents’ house when she was a child,” O’Connor said in a December 2003 court filing. Bishop “even asked me if he could live in with me if his wife put him out after she learned the truth. . . . All I want is for [Bishop] to just be a man about the situation and take responsibility for his child.”O’Connor secured a $4,175 judgment and health insurance coverage for Erica until she turned 18, records show. But a judge denied her request for back child support after Bishop argued she’d never sought “support of any kind” from him and “in fact concealed” that he was Erica’s father.Bishop declined to be interviewed for this story.Quinn administration aides say the governor stands by his decision to make Bishop the state’s top child-welfare official.“The governor appointed Arthur Bishop because of his decades of excellent work and respected leadership at the Departments of Juvenile Justice and Children and Family Services,” Quinn press secretary Brooke Anderson said. “The governor feels he has the right experience to lead this very difficult agency.”DCFS spokeswoman Karen Hawkins said: “We believe it’s inappropriate to raise decades-old issues that have long been resolved and have nothing to do with his performance as director.”Bishop, who makes $150,000 a year, takes over DCFS at a pivotal time. The agency admitted in December to undercounting the number of child-abuse and neglect deaths in Illinois following a series of Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ reports that prompted criticism of the agency from legislators and some child advocates.The agency also has been accused of failing to keep a close eye on its finances. In December, Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued South Side businessman George E. Smith, a friend of former DCFS director Erwin McEwen, to recover millions of dollars in state grant money Smith allegedly misspent. No criminal charges have been filed.Quinn brought in Richard H. Calica to reform the agency. But Calica died of cancer in December, and Quinn then shifted Bishop from his post heading the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice — a job he’d held since August 2010 — back to DCFS, where he previously worked from 1995 to 2010.Before his career in state government, Bishop was a substance-abuse counselor at the Bobby E. Wright center. According to his Sept. 17, 1993, arrest report, he received $9,262 from clients and failed to turn over that money to the center between May 5, 1992, and July 23, 1993.Bishop created a “bogus” program for convicted drunken drivers, said Lucy Lang-Chappell, former executive director of the center, who was his boss. He was improperly taking money from patients and providing them with forms they wrongly believed would allow them to get their driver’s licenses back, though the center wasn’t licensed by the state to provide that service at the time, Chappell said in an interview.She said the scheme was exposed when a patient came to the center in July 1993 with a currency exchange check the patient wrote to the center for his participation in the DUI program. The man said Bishop visited his home that day and insisted he replace the check with one written directly to Bishop, according to Chappell.Chappell said she confronted Bishop with what the patient told her — and fired him on the spot.The center was forced to reimburse “a stream of patients” for checks and cash they’d given Bishop, Chappell said. An insurance policy eventually covered the center’s losses, she said.Another employee of the center also pleaded guilty in the theft, records show.Bishop “really betrayed me and everybody else at the agency,” Chappell said. “The thing that really saddens me is that this is a man who is supposed to be over children and families — and this kind of thing happened. . . . He did something to the patients that was totally unethical, against the rules of the agency, and we were liable.”Bishop has maintained that, despite his guilty plea, he was innocent of the theft allegations. At a 1994 court hearing, his lawyer said Bishop turned over the money he collected to Chappell, who says that’s “totally false.” Chappell, now retired, wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing, and other current and former Bobby Wright employees backed up her recollection of events in interviews with Sun-Times and WBEZ reporters.In 2010, before Bishop was appointed director of the Department of Juvenile Justice, he gave a written statement to the Illinois Senate asserting that he was wrongly accused.“In 1993, following an increasingly strained professional relationship with the CEO, Dr. Lucy Lang-Chappell, resulting in a verbal disagreement regarding programming, I walked out of her office,” Bishop wrote. “Soon thereafter, I was informed that she had made allegations that I had stolen funds. This was a totally false accusation.”Bishop told the Senate he made an “agonizing” decision to plead guilty to the misdemeanor to end the strain on his family.Chappell was incredulous after being read Bishop’s statement. “He took the money from numerous patients,” she said.While Bishop’s felony case was pending — and after he was fired from the Bobby Wright center — he worked briefly at Maryville Academy before being hired as a DCFS caseworker in March 1995, records show.When he applied to DCFS in 1994, state officials could not consider the arrest in weighing whether to hire him, according to Hawkins, who said: “By law, under the Human Rights Act . . . DCFS is forbidden from considering arrests in making employment decisions — and this matter was still in the courts.”On Nov. 2, 1995, Bishop pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft and was sentenced to a year of conditional discharge, records show. He didn’t have to make restitution, Hawkins said.“Director Bishop has consistently disclosed the details of this guilty plea on state applications,” she said.Bishop, an ordained minister, was in the news in the late 1990s when he was a DCFS caseworker involved in a high-profile custody battle involving the boy known as “Baby T.” Ald. Edward Burke (14th) and his wife, Anne Burke, now an Illinois Supreme Court justice, ultimately won guardianship of the child.O’Connor filed the paternity case against Bishop in March 2003, with the court summons listing his Maywood home and his DCFS office. Bishop hired Marina E. Ammendola — the lawyer who represented the Burkes in the Baby T case.O’Connor, who didn’t have a lawyer, said she sued Bishop to get him to help with college expenses for Erica, who’s now a medical assistant.“He didn’t want to do anything,” O’Connor said. “He has a good heart. But my daughter wants to nail him to the cross because he’s never been there.”O’Connor said Erica’s stepfather, not Bishop, “taught her how to ride a bike, how to drive. He was there for her at prom. If [Bishop] wants to make things right, tell him to call her and talk to her. . . . Apologize.”
PORTLAND, Ore. - Four national Native American organizations on Monday asked the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation into the treatment of American Indian and Alaska Native children in the private adoption and public child welfare systems, saying civil rights violations there are "well-known and commonplace."
The groups also called for the federal government to take a stronger role in enforcing compliance of the Indian Child Welfare Act. They said in a letter to DOJ Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Jocelyn Samuels that there is "minimal federal oversight over the implementation of, and compliance with" the law.
The letter follows a recent high-profile custody battle over a Cherokee girl known as Baby Veronica who eventually was adopted by a white South Carolina couple. And it comes amid lawsuits alleging violations of federal law governing foster care and adoptions in some states.
The organizations, which included the Portland-based National Indian Child Welfare Association, also alleged in their letter that some guardians appointed by the court mock Native culture; state workers put down traditional ways of parenting; and children are placed in white homes when Indian relatives and Native foster care homes are available.
"These stories highlight patterns of behavior that are, at best, unethical and, at worst, unlawful," the letter states. "Although these civil rights violations are well-known and commonplace, they continue to go unchecked and unexamined."
The federal government had no an immediate response to the investigation request.
Native children are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system nationwide, especially in foster care.
Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 after finding very high numbers of Indian children being removed from their homes by public and private agencies and placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions.
Federal law now requires that additional services be provided to Native families to prevent unwarranted removal. And it requires that Indian children who are removed be placed whenever possible with relatives or with other Native Americans, in a way that preserves their connection with their tribe, community and relatives.
While Native groups agree that the Indian Child Welfare Act has been effective in slowing the removal of Indian children from their families, major challenges remain.
The letter cites problems such as adoption agencies disregarding children's tribal affiliation and failing to provide notice to a tribe when a child is taken into custody, transporting Indian children across state lines to sidestep the law, adoption attorneys encouraging circumvention of the law, and judges denying tribes a presence during child custody proceedings, among others.
Another problem, according to Craig Dorsay, an Oregon lawyer who works on many Native child welfare cases, are inconsistencies in identifying who is an Indian child and who is not - and whether the law applies to families who are deemed not Indian enough in the eyes of a court.
In Oregon, Dorsay said, the overall relationship between tribes and counties is good when it comes to applying the law. But statistics continue to show the disproportionate removal of Native children from their families.
Native American children in Oregon are more likely to be placed in foster care than white children, according to research from Portland State University. And they're more likely to exit care by adoption. That, despite the fact that the abuse rate among Natives is the same as for white families.
Researchers found that suspected abuse or neglect involving Native American families was reported to child protective services at a higher rate than the group's representation in the general population.
Courts are violating ICWA in South DakotaFrom: http://www.indianz.com/News/2013/012072.asp
By Dana Hanna
In a recent column in the Native Sun News, Regina Brave wrote about the history and importance of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and asked about the current status of the lawsuit that was filed in federal court in which the Oglala Sioux Tribe and other plaintiffs claimed that state authorities were violating the ICWA rights of Indian families in state courts. Along with lead counsel Stephen Pevar of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Rachel Goodman of the ACLU office in New York, I am one of the attorneys representing the Indian plaintiffs in that lawsuit. I am writing to thank Regina Brave for drawing further public attention to this very important issue and to answer her question about the current status of that federal lawsuit. Earlier this year, the Oglala and Rosebud Sioux Tribes and three Indian mothers filed a lawsuit in federal court in Rapid City on behalf of all parents of minor Indian children in Pennington County. That lawsuit, Oglala Sioux Tribe v. Van Hunnik, charges that the South Dakota Department of Social Services (DSS), the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office, and the presiding judge and other judges in the Seventh Judicial Circuit routinely violate the constitutional and ICWA rights of Indian parents in child abuse and neglect cases. In a nutshell, the Indian plaintiffs charge that state court judges, assisted by DSS and state prosecutors, routinely order Indian children into long term foster care placements, based on allegations of neglect or abuse, without giving their parents any kind of fair and meaningful hearing. The Indian plaintiffs are seeking an order from the United States District Court that would prohibit state court judges, DSS and the State’s Attorney’s office from placing Indian children in foster homes unless they first give Indian children, parents and Tribes the fair hearing that is their right under ICWA. In this lawsuit, the Indian plaintiffs’ legal argument is really quite simple and straightforward: Any state system that removes Indian children from their parents and places them in long term foster care through a judicial proceeding in which only the State is allowed to present evidence, but Indian parents are not allowed to present evidence, is a system that is fundamentally unfair, fundamentally unconstitutional and fundamentally racist. The lawsuit focuses on the first judicial hearing that takes place in all child abuse and neglect cases–the 48 hour temporary custody hearing. State law requires that parents be given a hearing before a judge within 48 hours after an emergency removal of their children from their home. Under ICWA and state statutes, the purpose of that hearing is to have the judge consider evidence so that he or she can make an objective determination as to whether giving physical custody of the children to DSS is necessary to protect the children from abuse or neglect. Under ICWA, at any hearing in which the State seeks to place an Indian child in a temporary foster care placement, the parents of an Indian child have a right to challenge the State in an evidentiary hearing and they have the right to have an attorney in that hearing. Our lawsuit claims–and we can prove–that over the past four years, state court judges, prosecutors and social workers have routinely denied those fundamental federal rights to Indian parents in Pennington County. In the 48 hour temporary custody hearings, judges will hear no sworn testimony from any witness; only the State is allowed to present evidence, which consists of police reports and affidavits by DSS caseworkers; and the Indian parents are never given, or even informed of, their right under ICWA to be represented by a court-appointed lawyer in the 48 hour hearing. Although the State is allowed to present evidence of neglect in the form of written reports and affidavits, the Seventh Circuit courts do not allow the parents to give sworn testimony or to present any evidence in those hearings. Our lawsuit charges that for the past 4 years, the judges of the Seventh Judicial Circuit have routinely ordered Indian children into long term foster care in 48 hour hearings in which Indian parents have virtually no rights to contest the State’s petition to take their children. So where are we now? Soon after the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the other plaintiffs filed this lawsuit, the state defendants, represented by private counsel and the Attorney General of the State of South Dakota, filed motions asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that Indian parents have no rights under ICWA at the 48 hour temporary custody hearing. In our view, such an interpretation of ICWA is absurd: it defeats the very purpose of ICWA and leaves tribal children to the tender mercies of the State child welfare system. Five months ago, the Indian plaintiffs submitted briefs opposing the State defendants’ motions to dismiss. We have recently been informed that we can reasonably expect a decision by the court on the motions to dismiss in the very near future. If the federal court rules in our favor, that decision will not end the case, but we expect that it will decide many of the important questions of law that are at the heart of our case. We hope to get a decision within the next few weeks that will be a major step forward in changing the way Indian parents, children and Tribes are treated in child abuse and neglect cases in the state courts of South Dakota. Dana Hanna is an attorney with the Hanna Law Office, P.C. in Rapid City. A former Attorney General for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, his practice focuses on Indian law, federal civil rights, and criminal law.
*The posts made in this blog are of our opinion only* Without Prejudice UCC 1-207
| Child Neglect: A Guide for Prevention, Assessment and Intervention. | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect DePanfilis |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 2,163KB) |
| Year Published: | 2006 - 108 pages |
| Child Protection in Families Experiencing Domestic Violence | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect, Caliber Associates. Bragg |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 3,360KB) |
| Year Published: | 2003 - 108 pages |
| Child Protective Services: A Guide for Caseworkers. 2003 | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect DePanfilis, Salus |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 4,470KB) Order (Free) - Add to Cart |
| Year Published: | 2003 - 141 pages |
| Community Partnerships: Improving the Response to Child Maltreatment. | |
| Author(s): | Children's Bureau. Office on Child Abuse and Neglect. |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 3,388KB) |
| Year Published: | 2010 - 150 pages |
| A Coordinated Response to Child Abuse and Neglect: The Foundation for Practice | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect Goldman, Salus, Wolcott, Kennedy |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 4,110KB) Order (Free) - Add to Cart |
| Year Published: | 2003 - 114 pages |
| The Importance of Fathers in the Healthy Development of Children | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect Rosenberg, Wilcox |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 1,163KB) |
| Year Published: | 2006 - 125 pages |
| Protecting Children in Families Affected by Substance Use Disorders | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect, ICF International. |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 2,416KB) |
| Year Published: | 2009 - 114 pages |
| The Role of Educators in Preventing and Responding to Child Abuse and Neglect | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect, Caliber Associates. Crosson-Tower |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 3,890KB) |
| Year Published: | 2003 - 85 pages |
| The Role of First Responders in Child Maltreatment Cases: Disaster and Nondisaster Situations | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect Cage, Salus |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 2,205KB) |
| Year Published: | 2010 - 158 pages |
| The Role of Professional Child Care Providers in Preventing and Responding to Child Abuse and Neglect | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect Karageorge, Kendall |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 1,729KB) |
| Year Published: | 2008 - 111 pages |
| Supervising Child Protective Services Caseworkers | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect, Caliber Associates. Salus |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 4,010KB) Order (Free) - Add to Cart Order CD (Free) - Add to Cart |
| Year Published: | 2004 - 110 pages |
| Working with the Courts in Child Protection | |
| Author(s): | Office on Child Abuse and Neglect Jones |
| Availability: | View Download (PDF - 10,480KB) |
| Year Published: | 2006 - 130 pages |
