drugs

How is justice served when people in power are involved in the same actions that are grounds for child removal?, writes Nicole Sawyer.

By The Imprint staff reports When California voters easily approved the adult recreational use of cannabis in 2016, there were what might be called high hopes for the tax revenue, then projected to one day total $1 billion annually.

Last week, the North Carolina legislature sent a bill to Gov. Roy Cooper (D) that would make it easier and faster to put babies born exposed to drugs and alcohol on a path to adoption, cutting off efforts to return them to their parents.

In the final hour of a daylong Health and Human Services committee meeting for the Texas House of Representatives last November, Sammi Jo Magee took the microphone. Magee, the chief prosecutor in the Child Protective Services division for Taylor County, Texas, which includes Abilene, had been summoned to explain why Taylor and surrounding counties were taking more kids into foster care than any other region in the state.

A popular model that supports child welfare-involved parents through addiction treatment is among 12 new candidates under review for new federal funding.  Sobriety Treatment And Recovery Teams, known as START, is a model started in Kentucky that hinges on a specially trained caseworker and rapid access to substance abuse services.

The federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment publication, released last month, showed a continuing trendline on the report’s central issue. The number of child maltreatment investigations has risen by nearly 10 percent since 2014 – the amount of documented abuse and neglect from those investigations has also increased, but only by about half of 1 percent.

Presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced legislation today that would restore long lost federal dollars to help children affected by prenatal exposure to alcohol. The Advancing FASD Research, Prevention and Services Act would amend the Public Health Service Act to include $42 million for research and services grants focused on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).

One of the many changes within the Family First Prevention Services Act is a provision allowing children to stay with their parent in a residential substance abuse treatment program. And now, a comprehensive list of those programs are available for parents, practitioners and policymakers.

Throughout the evening, the three brothers described to me the years of abuse they experienced in foster care. They were made to stand in the corner of rooms for hours. They were forced to clean every dish in the house, if one was dirty.