Foster Children Do Better At Home

Our clients hire us to rescue their children from the foster care system. We work to reunite children with their own parents, and also with grandparents, aunts and uncles, or even family friend. If you love a child in need of care, you should take note of a new study on the long term results of foster care.

Many foster families provide excellent care. Nonetheless, a new study concludes that children on the margins of needing intervention tend to have better outcomes when they remain at home, especially for older children. Children who are removed from their homes face higher delinquency rates, teen birth rates and lower earnings.

These results add credence to recent efforts to keep children in their own families. Even when their families are marginal, their children fare better in their own home instead of in foster homes.

Over 2 million children are investigated for abuse and neglect in the United States each year. About half of those are found to have been abused. Approximately 10 percent of the abused children are removed from their families.

Currently over 500,000 children reside in foster homes. About 60 percent of those return home; 15 percent are adopted; and the remainder age out of the system when they turn 18. The average amount of time spent in foster care is about two years.

Abused children are three times more likely to die in childhood, with about 1,400 child deaths each year attributed to child abuse. Children withdrawn from their families are more likely to commit crimes, drop out of school, join welfare, abuse drugs and alcohol, and become homeless.

Nearly 20 percent of young prison inmates and 28 percent of homeless individuals spent some of their youth in the foster system. Of children who turn 18 years old while in the system, two thirds of the boys and half of the girls had a history of delinquency.

Federal and state laws encourage preserving children in their own families. Before removing a child from a family home, the state must prove that reasonable efforts to prevent the removal were tried and failed. They also must prove that leaving the child in the family's home would be contrary to the child's welfare.

However, in practice many children are removed from their family homes anyway.

The research by MIT economics professor Joseph J. Doyle studied 15,000 children who had been reported for abuse and neglect. The study did not include children who were subject to drug use or severe physical or sexual abuse. Those children would have required removal from their families regardless of its trauma. For the remainder of the children, the ones who stayed in their own families did better in their adult lives than the children placed in foster care.

We help our clients recover their children from foster care by lobbying the social service agencies before we get to court. We have found that intense out of court advocacy succeeds better than courtroom tactics alone. Combining sophisticated advocacy both in and out of court helps children avoid the long term negatives associated with the child welfare system.

We have also found success in preventing foster care in the first place by using guardianship and other private actions. For example, in Kansas we can file a private child in need of care action to keep your child with your family.

If you need to rescue a child from foster care, you need to act promptly. Start now by using the free resources available at our web site, www.yourchild1st.com.

Insurers Deny Benefits for Mental Illness

I received this post from the Mental Health Association of the Heartland, along with a request to circulate it widely:

Kansas law adopted in 2001 requires health insurance companies to cover up to 45 in-patient days and 45 outpatient visits on an annual basis for treatment of biologically-based mental illnesses. However, recent data from the top 10 health insurance providers, as reported by the Kansas Insurance Department (KID), reveal that policyholders typically receive an average of six in-patient days or outpatient visits regardless of diagnosis.

The 2006 Mental Health Parity Task Force of the Governor’s Mental Health Services Planning Council suggested that there must be a significant number of health insurance policy holders who have had one or more of the following experiences which have resulted in the denial of adequate, appropriate or timely treatment since the 2001 Mental Health Parity legislation:

• Denial of claims for treatment of mental illness
  
  
• Excessive co-pays or deductibles for mental health treatment
  
  
• Refusal to authorize an adequate number of in-patient days and/or outpatient visits
  
  
• Inability to obtain or understand the standards and rationale used to deny authorization of treatment by an insurer
  
  
• Insurers recommending that “difficult” cases be referred to law enforcement or public mental health services
  
  
• Other problems with authorization of treatment of a mental disorder

We want to hear from individual policy holders, group health care administrators and mental health providers who have experienced any of these problems. Please share with us your personal written and/or oral accounts of your experiences.


We will listen to your experiences and help you, as appropriate, to file a formal complaint with the Kansas Insurance Department. To initiate a complaint with the KID, you may click on the following link to their website: http://www.ksinsurance.org/consumers/complaint.htm.

You may also put your concerns in writing and address them to the KID using the following contact information:

Kansas Insurance Department
Attn: Consumer Assistance
420 SW 9th Street
Topeka, Kansas 66612-1678
Phone: (785) 296-3071
Toll-Free: 1-800-432-2484
TTY/TDD: 1-877-235-3151
www.ksinsurance.org

Please let us hear from you if decide to file a complaint with the KID. We are collecting this information to better understand how to help Kansans get the care and treatment they need.

Senate Bill 380 was introduced during the 2007 session of the Kansas Legislature to provide health insurance coverage for the treatment of mental illnesses that is equivalent to coverage for other illnesses. Equal coverage is known as parity. We are hopeful that the bill will be considered in the 2008 session.

The lack of parity in coverage for the treatment of mental illnesses is a major factor in the perpetuation of the stigma associated with mental illness and a clear barrier to accessing treatment and moving toward recovery.

Thank you for your assistance with this effort.

Rick Cagan
For the Kansas Mental Health Coalition

Rick Cagan, Executive Director
National Alliance on Mental Illness - NAMI Kansas
112 SW 6th Avenue
PO Box 675
Topeka, Kansas 66601
785-233-0755
785-233-4804 FAX
800-539-2660
rcagan@nami.org
www.namikansas.org

Mentally Ill Juvenile Sentenced To 50 Years In Prison

A Johnson County, Kansas court yesterday sentenced Andrew Ellmaker to life in prison for the murder of his mental health worker, Terri Zenner. He won’t be eligible for parole for 50 years.

The defendant was 17 years old when he killed the victim. Because he was a juvenile at the time of the incident he was not eligible for the death penalty.

Sue Ellmaker, the defendant’s mother, pleaded for mercy because of her son’s mental illness. The victim’s husband, Matt Zenner, would have nothing of it.

“I’m sick and tired of hearing about mental illness,” he said at the sentencing hearing. “Stand up and be a man. You sit there and stare at the floor.... It’s beyond my comprehension that you were able to do this.”

As the husband of the victim, Matt Zenner is entitled to his feelings of loss, anger and bereavement. The family of Terri Zenner deserves all our compassion.

However, as a society we must overcome our prejudice that mental illness is both incomprehensible and inexcusable. Otherwise, we could face even more tragedies like Teri Zenner's.

More than seventy percent of youth in the juvenile justice system suffer from at least one mental health disorder, according to the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice. For many of their families, juvenile justice provides their first and only access to mental health services.

Families raising a child with mental illness feel frustrated, overwhelmed and exhausted. In my law practice, we help these families by coordinating special education, juvenile justice and mental health services.

Andrew Ellmaker deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. The rest of us must work even harder to prevent future tragedies from happening.

Scott Wasserman is a graduate of Harvard Law School. He practices special education, juvenile law and child custody litigation in Kansas and Missouri. His web site is www.yourchild1st.com .

Web Software Helps Coordinate Joint Custody

Parents in separate households with joint custody of their children face a daunting task to coordinate schedules. It's hard enough tracking who gets the children on which day. When activities for the children or the parents cause adjustments, the communication and cooperating gets even harder.

Several companies have created software to help parents communicate and coordinate their joint custody and parenting time. Some of the software installs on your own computer, but I recommend the software that runs over the web. With web software, both parents can access the data and hopefully avoid conflicts.

Here are a few links. If you have any experience with these or can suggest any others, please post a comment to this post.

• Jointparents.com Raising a child after a divorce or separation is challenging for parents. JointParents.com provides the tools to keep parents well organized and communicating effectively.
  
  
• Parentingtime.net (Optimal) OPTIMAL is an online custody calendar that allows you to easily schedule and track parenting time as well as monitor compliance with your custody arrangement. OPTIMAL reduces conflict between you and your child's other parent by providing a shared tool for scheduling parenting time, and by providing an unbiased, easily accessed record of scheduled time versus actual time.
  
  
• Google calendar Though not specifically targeted to managing joint custody, Google's on line calendar hosts enough tools to make it useful for any situation. Best of all, it's free.
  
  
• Custody Toolbox Custody Toolbox features a calendar, a journal, a child information database, an address book, and a to-do list.
  
  
• Shared Ground Unlike the web calendars, this software runs on your own computer. So, you can use it to keep yourself organized, but not to coordinate with your co-parent.
  
  
• Kidmate Another program that runs on your own computer instead of the web. Helps you visually display parenting schedules and calculate percentages.
  

Children See, Children Do

I found this one and a half minute video by NAPCAN, Australia's National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. Let your influence on children be positive.

Are Our Children Better Than Last Year?

I work with a team of lawyers who try hard every day to improve the lives of children. Through legal representation of families who care about children, we hope to help those specific children while also effecting systemic change.

The government today released its biannual full report on the status of children and families in the United States. I'll mine the data over the next few weeks in this blog. Here are some initial highlights of indicators which increased over the past year:

• the percentage of children served by community water systems that did not meet all applicable standards for healthy drinking water;
  
  
• the percentage of children living in physically inadequate or crowded housing or housing that cost more than 30 percent of household income;
  
  
• the percentage of low birth weight infants;
  
  
• the percentage of births to unmarried women;
  
  
• the rate at which youth were perpetrators of serious violent crime;
  
  
• the number of young people finishing high school;
  
  
• the number of little children being read to.
  
  

The report was released by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, a consortium of federal agencies that includes the National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development, the Census Bureau and the Administration for Children and Families.

Audit Urges Coordination Of Programs For Young Children

In my law practice I see the delayed results of problems which could have been prevented by early intervention in a child's first years. Early childhood intervention could prevent later issues involving special education, school discipline, and juvenile delinquency.

A Kansas audit released yesterday found that state agencies could better coordinate programs for such young children. The study found multiple agencies offered similar programs for the same population. However, the auditors found no indications of wasted tax dollars or failed programs.

The programs serve 40 percent of Kansas children under the age of 5. The 23 programs provide immunizations, therapy for special-needs toddlers, abuse prevention efforts, parenting training and assistance to poor mothers. The services cost $310 million last year.

Legislation passed in Kansas this year will create an Office of Early Childhood Education by 2009. The new agency could have a role in coordinating services; however, the specific authority of that agency has not yet been clarified.

I support any effort to ensure services reach the children who need them. At the same time, Kansans should feel assured from this audit that these essential services already work mostly as intended.

Your Child or Your Grandchild?

An ever increasing phenomenon that I have come across in my law practice is grandparents wanting to provide for their grandchildren. Grandparents come to me frustrated, confused, and broken because their grandchildren are in state custody and they are being forced to choose between their grandchild and their own child.

Unfortunately, many grandparents that I have encountered in my practice have faced resistance from state agencies when they have tried to take on the responsibility of raising their grandchildren because of a parents inability to do so. The reality is grandparents are often forced to choose between supporting their own child or caring for their grandchild. A choice that is far too often minimized by professionals in the child in need of care system.

If grandparents choose to support their own child they are accused of enabling. Grandparents are very often faulted for their own child's poor choices. Faced with these obstacles despite Kansas state law and family service policy and procedure manuals requiring state agencies and their contractors to turn to family first, grandparents wishing to be considered as a resource option are far too often snubbed. Social workers tend to rationalize that a grandparents alleged enabling behavior will continue in their rearing of their grandchild and the "mistakes" the grandparents made in raising their own child will be made again this time around.

If grandparents decide to support their own child in hopes of helping him/her recover from his/her own current plight and get him/her into a position where he/she is able to raise his/her own child, grandparents are often condemned. The best chance that these parents have at recovery is when they turn to their support network for help, their family. Social workers assigned to these parents are often overworked and underpaid and do not have the time, energy, or commitment to offer these parents the support they need to fully recover. But if grandparents offer their child support and that parent subsequently fails and does not successfully recover or does not recover quick enough and the court system finds the parent to be "unfit" the grandparents loose their grandchild to the state.

If a grandparent cuts their own child off they are heartless, and they risk losing him or her. If they support their child they are "unfit" to raise their own grandchild. This phenomenon that grandparents face is far too often minimized and most be more thoughtfully considered by social workers when making placement decisions.