On Tuesday night Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WS) announced a final budget deal that wraps up appropriations for the rest of fiscal year 2016. The House approved the package in parts with approval of the appropriations, the final piece, coming on Friday. The Senate wasted no time in voting later that day to approve the combined
The Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities continued their deliberations last week with a two day discussion in Virginia just outside of Washington DC. Based on the public discussions, members continued to disagree and debate what should be included in a final package of proposals that will go to the Administration, the Congress
On Thursday, December 3, Capitol Hill was the location for a briefing on Substance Use Treatment: A Core Component of Child Welfare Reform, the briefing entitled the Elephant in the Room discussed the roll that substance abuse is and has been playing in child welfare and foster care in particular. CWLA was one of the
Appropriations decisions are likely to come to a head in the next ten days. The deadline before the government runs out of funding is December 11. While staffers and committee members continued to work on allocating funding between the 12 spending categories and various priorities within those 12 committee jurisdictions it is still unclear how
Last week Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) issued a call for emergency funding to address the heroin and opioid abuse epidemic. Senator Shaheen’s proposal would provide supplemental appropriations totaling $600 million to programs at the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services and draw the funding as emergency spending meaning that it
Appropriations staffers and committee members continued to work toward beating a December 11 deadline when the government will run out of money. Despite the ongoing work it is unclear whether or not issues around policy riders and, as of last week the issue of Syrian refugees, will prevent a deal before the government shuts down.
The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has released their annual 2015 State Child Care Assistance Report that reviews state child care services and policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This year’s report, Building Blocks: State Child Care Assistance Policies 2015, shows improvements in 32 states meaning that services were improved in
On October 21 the National Crittenton Foundation sponsored a briefing, Beyond ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences). The focus of the briefing was on the use of the ACEs or Adverse Childhood Experience evaluation tool. Ongoing research and findings document that when individuals are evaluated in terms of how many adverse experiences they have had as a
As a way to highlight the need to prevent child abuse and child maltreatment from taking place, Prevent Child Abuse America held an event on the Washington National Mall last Tuesday, October 13. Led by their Virginia and Maryland chapters the gathering was an attempt to celebrate childhood and all that communities and individuals can
On Monday, October 5 the American Youth Policy Forum sponsored a briefing that focused on how state and local child welfare programs address the challenge of converting research to inform policy and practice decisions in the child welfare field. The research was funded by the W. T. Grant Foundation in an effort to improve the