Last Sunday, November 25, the CBS news program, 60 Minutes, reported on children separated at the border. What the 60 Minutes segment revealed was what some critics had suspected; they had been separating children from their families much earlier than 2018. The story also documented through interviews with officials from within the government some of
The House of Representative continued to work on their leadership selection for the new Congress. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) came a step closer to securing the speakership when the new Congress starts on January 3, 2019. She was approved by the Democratic caucus but technically the entire House selects the next Speaker. That requires
Shaquita Ogletree On Tuesday, November 27, the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth held a congressional briefing to discuss the issue of disrupted and dissolved adoptions. The event was a part of a series of Washington National Adoption Month events this year. The discussion focused on estimated ten to twenty-five percent of adoptions disrupted before being
On November 16, the Children’s Bureau issued ACYF-CB-IM-18-05, a memorandum on primary prevention, and “to strongly encourage all child welfare agencies and Children’s Bureau (CB) grantees to work together with the courts and other appropriate public and private agencies and partners to plan, implement and maintain integrated primary prevention networks and approaches to strengthen families
Voice for Adoption (VFA), the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC) and the Center on American Progress have released a new study, Welcoming All Families that analyses discrimination against LGBTQ youth in foster care and discrimination against the recruitment of foster and adoptive parents. The report finds that although same-sex parents are not banned
Last week the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in HHS released a new study on opioid treatment and child welfare. The report, Medication-Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in the Child Welfare Context: Challenges and Opportunities, outlines some of the challenges in providing treatment to families involved with child welfare.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its annual report on Mortality in the United States and found more bad news. The United States continues to see a decline in life expectancy, something that is unusual for a developed country to experience over several years. The mortality numbers continue to show another increase
On Thursday, November 29, seven judges of the Judicial Panel for Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) heard oral arguments as to why hundreds of thousands of infants born dependent on opioids should be allowed their own representation in a separate proceeding from the nationwide opioid litigation currently proceeding against several large pharmaceutical companies. The Child Welfare League
On Tuesday, November 13, the Department of Health and Human Services used their National Adoption Month celebration to highlight a new focus for the next year on the promotion of adoption of teenagers from foster care. The annual event, which began in 1994, was held in the great hall of the Hubert H. Humphrey HHS
n Thursday, November 8, HHS released the 25th AFCARS Report indicating that foster care placements increased for the sixth straight year going from 436,551 in FY 2016 to 442,995 in FY 2017. The AFCARS reports are based on the number of children in the system as of the last day of the federal fiscal