When Congress returns this week it will mark the beginning of a very short congressional calendar. The President is scheduled to deliver his last State of the Union address on January12 which will unofficially begin the new budget debate for FY 2017. The official budget will come a little more than four weeks later in
According to published news reports he was removed from his home and his mother due to child abuse allegations. He was three years old at the time and he spent the next two months in foster care. He left that first foster care placement to stay with a relative. Details aren’t clear but that arrangement
This week the Senate is expected to complete action on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), more commonly referred to as the No Child Left Behind Act since the last reauthorization in 2002. The House approved the new version S. 1177, the Every Student Succeeds Act, on Tuesday with an overwhelming
On Friday, November 20 the American Youth Policy Forum sponsored a Capitol Hill briefing on the topic of How Research Evidence Informs Foster Youth Medication Policies. The panel discussion included an examination of definitions, usage and oversight of psychotropic and other medications for youth and children in foster care. The discussion reached beyond the numbers
On November 9, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report they had provided to the Senate Finance committee in October. The report: HHS Could Do More to Support States’ Efforts to Keep Children in Family-Based Care examined eight states including Washington, Kansas, New Jersey, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Connecticut and Colorado by interviewing 41 stakeholders
On November 17, Senator Tom Kane (D-VA) introduced S 2289, the Family Unification, Preservation and Modernization Act, a bill that would extend the Family Unification Program or “FUP.” The 1990, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program provides housing vouchers to families involved with the child welfare system. In 2000, Congress extended this program
Building on earlier announcements about the “TAG,” Think, Act ,Grow, HHS’s Office of Adolescent Health is continuing their efforts regarding a national call to action to improve the health and healthy development of America’s 42 million adolescents. Adolescent Health: Think, Act, Grow, or TAG, calls on youth-serving professionals, families, and youth to take action by
On Friday, September 23, New York City was the setting for an adoption symposium called “Broken Adoption Beyond Permanency: Challenges for Foster Youth.” The one-day session sponsored by the Children’s Law Center focused on strategies to address those adoptions from foster care that “fail” or as they labeled such instance, “broken adoptions.” In other words,
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
More complete data released by HHS in the awarding of the adoption and kinship incentives for the Adoption and Legal Guardianship Incentive Payments Program shows that the new structure and new rate formula benefited at least 25 of the states. The awards discussed here last week are based on a phased-in formula that awarded states