Child welfare forty years out of date

It has been almost forty years since the last White House Conference on Children and Youth was held in 1970, according to the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA). A panel was held to discuss the re-establishment of this in 2010 and the experiences of former foster care youth.

Christine James-Brown, president and chief executive officer of CWLA, said that if the upcoming conference was as successful as ones before, as many as 1000 local gatherings of people throughout the U.S. would take place to identify problems and solutions for children who have been abused and neglected. James-Brown emphasized that the critical component of child welfare is community involvement.

Bob Blancato, president of Matz, Blancato and Associates Inc. and executive director of the 1995 White House Conference on Aging, agreed with James-Brown and said it was very important to involve grassroots organizations from the very beginning. In addition, Blancato stressed incorporating the local media to shed light on the child welfare situation. Reverend Kenneth Fellenbaum, chief executive officer of the Boys and Girls Village Inc., pointed out that over the past 20 years foster children are more mentally fragile due to the extent of abuse. Fellenbaum said these children need clinical services and not just social services.

Mikelle Wortman and Asia Moore, both former foster care youth, shared the struggles they faced after they aged out of the foster system. Wortman said that free post secondary education and medical insurance was crucial for foster youth. She described her bouts of pneumonia and shingles which almost forced her to drop out of school while she was also working full time. Moore, one of the founders of Youth In Progress (YIP), highlighted the fact that around 50 percent of the homeless in the state of New York were from foster care. Moore said it was very important that foster agencies took steps to ensure foster youth have a strong support system once they aged out of the system.

Tennesee Democrat: Child welfare a 'national nightmare'

‘Every state is failing.’ Representative Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) expressed that heated sentiment at an urban caucus and rural working group joint symposium on child welfare reform. Cooper wished America could do more to help the 520,000 children who remain in the welfare system and wanted to resolve ‘this national nightmare.’

Secretary Deb Bowman from the South Dakota Department of Social Services described the lack of mental health services and professionals which posed a unique problem to rural areas. Bowman added that social workers in rural areas are on-call for one third of the year and there was a great difficulty in recruiting a quality child welfare workforce as no university in South Dakota offers a Masters of Social Work degree.

Professor Gary Nelson from the University of North Carolina School of Social Work said that rural communities in North Carolina demonstrated equal, if not more superior, child welfare outcomes compared to their urban counterparts. According to Nelson, rural communities had 165 fewer days in foster care than urban counties and he attributed it to a greater sense of community, self-reliance and accountability found in the rural setting. Nelson felt that if a social worker was not familiar with the child, they were more likely to make mistakes and so he deemed it important to develop a more personal attitude toward social work.