We are Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas, and we believe the care of our nation’s children is the top priority. Kansas’ problematic child welfare agency is a good place to start. On Monday, they asked lawmakers for funds to solve growing concerns with foster children sleeping in offices, kids lost in the system, and a caseload that’s hitting the roof.

Legislators and advocates voiced their indignation earlier upon hearing news that children have been sleeping in foster care contractors’ offices because there was no room in foster homes. The Department for Children and Families’ secretary Gina Meier-Hummel stated some of the desired funds would go toward keeping beds open for difficult-to-place children.

The funds, $16.5 million over 24 months, would also permit DCF to bring on more individuals to find run-aways and those who’ve otherwise disappeared from foster care placements.

Meier-Hummel’s forerunner, Phyllis Gilmore, was disparaged for being apparently unaware of three sisters missing from their foster home in Tonganoxie for several months. Meier-Hummel receives a daily report of missing children and she stated roughly 70 children are currently missing from foster care placements. She also stated that $6.55 million of the additional funds would go toward keeping children with their families safely and out of foster care.

Lieutenant Governor Jeff Colyer stated the appointment of a new DCF secretary, in addition to the legislative interest regarding a child welfare task force which was created in 2016, has given them a chance for change.

Colyer stated, “We’re at a juncture where we have legislative support, we have […] new ideas and we’re […] doing a top-to-bottom review – we want to deal with problems.” Colyer is taking the lead on child welfare in the hopes that he’ll soon replace Governor Sam Brownback. He’s also running for election in November.

Representative Linda Gallagher, a Lenexa Republican, and a member of the Child Welfare Task Force, stated the suggestion for additional funds tells her Brownback plans on making child welfare a priority this legislative session.

Gallagher stated, “All of the […] funds are needed, and they […] address problem areas that we heard about last year. Most of the legislature is aware of the problems […] and has the willingness to address it with additional funding.”

If you’ve seen a child care issue, anywhere in the foster care system, please report it on our Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR webpage. Do so now, and do your part to get your state officials to give our children fighting chance for a better life. You can contact your representatives here.

We’re Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas and we care about foster children in this country. California is looking to improve child care today.

The state is standing up to the current administration and becoming the first state to discontinue jailing poor children who can’t pay court fees and fines. The state will remove juvenile administrative fees completely as a way to protect low-income families and children from these “debtors’” prisons.

When youth are detained and cannot to pay administrative fees, they can be jailed. However, these fees enforce huge financial burdens on some of the country’s most helpless families, and create little to no income for the government.

The Justice Department is blocking repeal on a nationwide scale. Just prior to Christmas, Attorney General Sessions withdrew legal direction which advised state and local courts to minimize or eradicate juvenile fines and fees. While the federal government still stands in the way of juvenile justice reform, states can follow California’s lead and eliminate statewide fees and fines.

Currently, the majority of states still charge youth and parents administrative fees based on a variety of system expenses, such as detention, “free” and guaranteed legal representation, probation management, electronic monitoring, and drug testing. Administrative fees can be unbelievably substantial. In fact, the average probation term in Sacramento County costs families around $6,000.

Youth and families who don’t, or more accurately can’t, pay these fees can face severe penalties which, in addition to jail time, can include driver’s license suspension, civil judgments, a bar on sealing records, and lengthy stages of probation. One juvenile probation officer stated, “Most kids are living in poverty and are […] unable to pay […] fees. About 19 out of 70 kids could be off probation but […] these fees […] We are trying to get money from poor people by keeping them on probation.”

If children and families could afford these fees, they could maybe be defensible. However, several judges enforce fees on families without considering their ability to pay. A recent study exposed that a majority of states don’t have a judicial process in place to contemplate the child or family’s capability of paying supervision fees.

In fact, the only state which has hearings to determine a family’s capability of paying is Montana, but these hearings take place without the person’s right to counsel.

Children must be kept safe and out of prison, which can lead to foster placement and slew of other problems. On our Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR webpage, you can report complaints regarding foster care and department issues. Do so today and do your part to encourage your state officials to give our children better care.

We’re Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas and we care about foster children in this country. And we could learn something from Ireland.

The Irish government’s decision to present obligatory reporting of child protection issues will be seen by several people as a breakthrough development. Following decades of assurances, today there is a legal requirement for professionals who work with, or have contact with children, to raise any concerns they might have to social services regarding a child’s welfare. This sends a message to the community that child welfare is extremely important. However, there are more and more concerns about whether the system will be able to cope with the expected outpouring of child protection complaints.

Tusla, the Irish Child and Family Agency, will require enough staff and resources to be able to respond to referrals in a timely fashion. Right now, this is not the case. Even in Ireland the department is lacking funding and political will. There is not enough right now to help prevent issues instead of simply taking care of them after the fact, after a child has been harmed typically.

The indication from other countries who’ve introduced similar procedures is that solely expanding the system doesn’t make enough of a positive effect. While it encourages a culture of reporting issues, it doesn’t really foster a shared responsibility through the community for intervening on behalf of vulnerable children. As Dr. Helen Buckley of Trinity College Dublin has pointed out, this may create a kind of “social” emergency department, like one seen in a hospital. It will be fraught with the same high thresholds, waiting lists, overworked staff, and short-term responses as the ER.

The failings of the child protection system are universal. There is a lack of early involvement, excessive focus on fire-fighting emergency cases, poor co-operation between State department, and late responses to neglect and welfare concerns. In Ireland, these issues have been reported over the past 20 years and it’s the same in America.

Mandatory reporting isn’t enough. A sustained investment and even wider reform are needed. There are real dangers young people in foster care will continue to face as they fall through the cracks. These are the most vulnerable children among us and they need more then reports, which do help, they need our departments to do better and receive better funding.

Our foster homes and systems must be held accountable, children’s lives are at stake. Silence can be a killer and so can a lack of response. On our Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR webpage, you can report complaints. Do so today and do your part to encourage your state officials to provide our foster children with better care through improved resources.

Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas here and for many foster children getting access to the health care they need is extremely difficult; a particular problem is birth control.

For the nearly quarter-million girls in foster care in the nation, access to contraception is simply chance. Without clear rules and regulations about foster children’s health-care needs, activists for foster youth care say girls, and boys too, frequently struggle for essential care.

Statistics show that girls in foster care are two times as likely to get pregnant. While rates of teen pregnancy have been going down across the nation, the same cannot be said for the rate of teen pregnancy among foster children. A study conducted by the University of Chicago of over 700 young people from three states reported that of the foster children surveyed, nearly 35% were pregnant by age of 17 or 18. This is compared to about 15% of children living with their birth families.

By 19, 46% of those children had experienced another pregnancy, compared to 34% for children outside of foster care who’d been pregnant once. Another study reported that of those surveyed nearly 50% of girls in foster care were pregnant by 19. Research shows that unwanted pregnancies and births greatly surpassed wanted pregnancies and births among foster children. While federal policies and legal precedents do exist to protect foster children’s reproductive rights, experts say that these frequently fall short of achieving the goal they intended. Instead, many create loose guidelines which are rarely followed.

Foster children are eligible for, and deserve, reproductive health-care insurance coverage, including contraception, under Medicaid. According to the National Center for Youth Law, states have to provide a program named “Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment,” that stipulates a package of benefits, like family planning services, for children enrolled in Medicaid. Plus, under section 1396d(a)(4)(C) of the Medicaid Act, states have to cover family planning services with no additional out-of-pocket cost.

But that doesn’t mean access is guaranteed, or that children can actually use those services.

Many places in the country privatize foster care, and the oversight of foster care facilities is frequently handed over by the state to specific, private organizations. Within a system which is already so exhausted of its resources, reproductive health care such as birth control becomes even more disregarded, particularly when access is managed by establishments or individuals who see it as unnecessary or purely elective, which we know isn’t true. Many girls and women use contraceptive for genuine medically issues such as endometriosis and PCOS.

Additionally, while agencies should be proactively having conversations about reproductive health with foster children, this is usually not the case. This means foster children who are living with an unfamiliar person or people are put in a tricky, even impossible situation, self-advocating for contraceptive care. This can be really scary for young adults.

Unfortunately, for many of these children, the best outcome in regard to accessing contraceptive care, and general health care stability, is to remain living within their biological family whenever this is doable. Taking children from their homes and moving them has the chance to sever any connection they had with a trustworthy family or community member that they would have felt comfortable discussing this with.

Our foster homes and departments must do better. On the Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR website, we encourage you to report complaints. They can save lives.

Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas here and for many foster children getting access to the health care they need is extremely difficult; a particular problem is birth control.

For the nearly quarter-million girls in foster care in the nation, access to contraception is simply chance. Without clear rules and regulations about foster children’s health-care needs, activists for foster youth care say girls, and boys too, frequently struggle for essential care.

Statistics show that girls in foster care are two times as likely to get pregnant. While rates of teen pregnancy have been going down across the nation, the same cannot be said for the rate of teen pregnancy among foster children. A study conducted by the University of Chicago of over 700 young people from three states reported that of the foster children surveyed, nearly 35% were pregnant by age of 17 or 18. This is compared to about 15% of children living with their birth families.

By 19, 46% of those children had experienced another pregnancy, compared to 34% for children outside of foster care who’d been pregnant once. Another study reported that of those surveyed nearly 50% of girls in foster care were pregnant by 19. Research shows that unwanted pregnancies and births greatly surpassed wanted pregnancies and births among foster children. While federal policies and legal precedents do exist to protect foster children’s reproductive rights, experts say that these frequently fall short of achieving the goal they intended. Instead, many create loose guidelines which are rarely followed.

Foster children are eligible for, and deserve, reproductive health-care insurance coverage, including contraception, under Medicaid. According to the National Center for Youth Law, states have to provide a program named “Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment,” that stipulates a package of benefits, like family planning services, for children enrolled in Medicaid. Plus, under section 1396d(a)(4)(C) of the Medicaid Act, states have to cover family planning services with no additional out-of-pocket cost.

But that doesn’t mean access is guaranteed, or that children can actually use those services.

Many places in the country privatize foster care, and the oversight of foster care facilities is frequently handed over by the state to specific, private organizations. Within a system which is already so exhausted of its resources, reproductive health care such as birth control becomes even more disregarded, particularly when access is managed by establishments or individuals who see it as unnecessary or purely elective, which we know isn’t true. Many girls and women use contraceptive for genuine medically issues such as endometriosis and PCOS.

Additionally, while agencies should be proactively having conversations about reproductive health with foster children, this is usually not the case. This means foster children who are living with an unfamiliar person or people are put in a tricky, even impossible situation, self-advocating for contraceptive care. This can be really scary for young adults.

Unfortunately, for many of these children, the best outcome in regard to accessing contraceptive care, and general health care stability, is to remain living within their biological family whenever this is doable. Taking children from their homes and moving them has the chance to sever any connection they had with a trustworthy family or community member that they would have felt comfortable discussing this with.

Our foster homes and departments must do better. On the Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR website, we encourage you to report complaints. They can save lives.

Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas here and unfortunately many times a child runs away when they’re in foster care, and worse, when we look for solutions from the foster placement agencies we get none. One such situation occurred with Shantel French.

French is a foster mom whose 15-year-old daughter had been missing for over a week. After living in French’s home for nearly a year, the girl was suddenly told, not by French, that she’d be moving to a home in the suburbs the day before Thanksgiving. She was going to live with a woman she’d only met two times. French’s daughter didn’t want to go.

The girl said that if she was forced to move, she’d run away. French told that to the girl’s caseworker at Bethanna, a community agency tasked with managing children under the city’s care. The plan was not changed. So, the girl ran. French knew she was on social media, so she checked there. Apparently, the girl looked tired. French was destressed at what appeared to be a lack of urgency from the agencies charged with caring about foster children. She’d reported the problem immediately to Bethanna and to police. But a caseworker texted a response for a photo of the girl an entire week after she had been gone.

French was worried why they wouldn’t have a photo and why they didn’t ask for one sooner. It looked like they weren’t trying hard to find her daughter and she was receiving little information. At one point, a caseworker told French that the girl’s case had been transferred to the new home. This meant French didn’t have rights to any information about her. Understandably, French was panicked.

When French contacted the media in an attempt to get answers, all she received was vague answers and a general feeling of “Don’t worry. We’re handling it.”

The department told the media that they work aggressively with police when a foster child goes missing. However, they couldn’t say how many foster kids go missing in a year since they aren’t required to keep track of that information. The reporter who worked with French was surprised by the lack of information provided to biological or foster parents when these situations arose.

Because of confidentiality, the reporter couldn’t get much information and went she asked about another incident the comments were the same. The reporter went on to discover that the other child, a 15-year-old foster boy who ended up on top of a train and was killed, was reported missing several times this year. But, the police had no record of a missing-person report for the final time he ran away.

Perhaps a report was filed and maybe the authorities are doing exactly what needs to be done. However, keeping these families in the dark doesn’t provoke trust, particularly when those kept in the dark are frequently worried parents.

French’s foster daughter did return, and she even told workers herself that she’d like to stay in French’s home. She also wrote a Family Court judge saying the same thing. Unfortunately, about a week after she came back, she was moved. French has no clue know why. There could be a good reason, but if there is, no one is telling French, her daughter, or the media. French remains committed to helping despite this troubling situation.

“I was a teen mom,” French stated. “I had my mom, but it was still hard. I always knew I wanted to give back if I could. That hasn’t changed.”

Corruption and this lack of communication must be stopped. On the Kathey and Rob Raskin Stop DHR website, you can report complaints which can save lives.

Hello, we’re Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas and we know that according to the Department of Health and Human Services there are almost 13,000 children in foster care in Michigan. Nationally, there are about 400,000 children in foster care on any given day. What we don’t know is how many get “lost” in foster care.

One Traverse City-based author and advocate knows how easily that can happen. Shenandoah Chefalo put herself into foster care when she was 13 to escape her abusive parents. Before too long she realized that if she disappeared, no one would care or come looking. Now, she’s leading a grassroots project called #4600AndCounting, to help find those lost children. Chefalo spoke with Stateside about the “lost” children of foster care.

Growing up, Chefalo lived with her mother and had moved over 50 times before she graduated from high school. She remembers a lot of mental illness, drug abuse and addiction, and a great deal of men entering and exiting foster her lives. She assumed foster parents would be the best the state had to offer. She realized that foster care presented several of the same issues she had experienced before.

When she turned 18, she was removed from the system, but paid her foster parents to house her until she graduated. Chefalo was accepted to Michigan State University but realized that, if she went missing, she still had no one in her life who would come looking.

#4600AndCounting, a petition on Change.org she created, is designed to help the 1.1% of the child welfare system who go missing annually. An article she read about three girls in Kansas who had gone missing and state senators leading a hearing into their disappearance disturbed Chefalo because it seemed to her that politicians didn’t care. She contacted a Toronto-based homeless youth advocate and they talked about the lack of response.

The petition is about changing the response process. She wants to put create a safety kit for children going into foster care which would include a current photograph, a DNA swab, and medical and dental information. The issue is extremely serious to Chefalo. She’s quoted with saying, “It’s a proven statistic. We know that a lot of the kids that disappear from foster care wind up in human trafficking and human sex trafficking rings and organizations.”

It’s programs like this and people like her, and us, who can keep our children safe from these horrible outcomes. We, Kathey and Rob Raskin, aim to stop DHR corruption throughout the nation. If you have a complaint, please log it on our main page now.

This is Rob and Kathey Raskin of Las Vegas, and today we’d like to bring you the backstory behind the funds that are available to help families. “Norman money” is what some people call the family preservation funds that are provided for families who are in danger of losing their children to legal kidnapping at the hands of the foster care system. These funds were made available after a class-action lawsuit that was filed after one Mr. James Norman died while forcibly separated from his children by the state simply because he was impoverished. Sadly, some families years later became too afraid to take advantage of these funds later when Chicago’s Foster Care Panic resulted in the removal of unprecedented numbers of children from homes.

A Death Sentence

James Norman was a 37-year-old man who had a serious heart condition. He was also a recent widower and now-single father of three who was struggling to make ends meet after quitting his job to care for his cancer-stricken wife. Rather than intervene to help the struggling, grief-stricken family, child protective services removed the children from the home after a visit in which the family was found to be without electricity and living in a dirty house.

On top of losing his wife and his children, whom he doted on, Norman lost his car because he was too sick to return to work. Child protective services made no effort to help the man to get his children back or even to see them. A lack of access to public transportation meant the sick man would need to take three buses and walk a mile each way every time he wanted to see his children. By the time lawyers intervened to get Norman financial assistance, it was too late. James Norman died at age 38, and his children were left orphaned by a system that literally walked their father to death as punishment for falling on hard times. We, Rob and Kathey Raskin, think this is unconscionable, and it is time for us all to take a stand to put a stop to these flagrant abuses of the system.

We are Kathleen and Robert Raskin of Las Vegas, and our family’s personal story of DHR corruption has compelled us to raise awareness of the shortcomings of the foster care and justice systems. The average young adult will need to rely upon their families for financial and emotional support until they are 26 years of age. Imagine turning eighteen and being left on your own, with no one to turn to for help if you needed it and no family to visit on holidays? For the 23,000 young adults who age out of the system each year, this is their reality, but all of us can do our parts to help.

Assistance Is Available

Being removed from the home of a loving family is just the first of many tragedies that potentially await foster children. For many, they will never return to their families, instead being left to age out of the system with little community support. Studies have shown that adults who aged out of the foster care system are more at risk for arrest, incarceration, and homelessness, and most do not graduate college.

Most communities have organizations that are committed to helping former foster children who have aged out of the system, either by providing financial assistance, shelter, mentoring, mental health care, career coaching, resource tool kits,  care packages, academic guidance, job training, and even birthday and holiday cards. There are also national organizations that are dedicated to this cause. We, Kathleen and Robert Raskin, want to remind you that a simple online search will tell you which organizations are available and in-need of donations in your area, and many have regular monthly donation options available that you can just set and forget.

We are Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas, and today we’d like to discuss the surprising facts behind how children end up in foster care, and why. The system is overwhelmed, and without any checks and balances in place to prevent corruption, it can be easy for children who are in true need to slip through the cracks while precious resources are directed toward the unnecessary harassment of families. Studies have found that up to one-third of foster homes are abusive, with rates even higher for group homes and other institutional settings. With so many children being removed from homes for no good reason and abuse so rampant in foster care, it is clear that we need to take a closer look at how workers are determining which children to target.

Families in Need

Homicide is one of the leading causes of death for US children between the ages of one and 18, and all too often these deaths are at the hands of the parents. However, out of every 100 children who child protective services organizations investigate as potential victims of abuse, just six of these claims are substantiated with any evidence other than the claims of workers who may have financial incentives to remove children from the home and other “witnesses” who often turn out to be making false claims for ulterior motives. As for the rest, oftentimes the only real problem in the home is not abuse or neglect but rather poverty.

Children who are left in their own homes have been shown to fare better than children who have been placed in the foster system. It is common for children to be taken into care because they and their parents are living in conditions of poverty, and assistance with resources like child care, housing, and food can help families to stay together. Studies have shown that 30% of foster kids in this country could be safely with their families today if only they had housing that is safe and affordable. We, Kathey and Rob Raskin, believe we as a country need to take a closer look at how the financial incentives for removing kids can be redirected so they help families in need instead, where they will clearly do more good.