State Agencies Search For Foster Kids: Los Angeles County Departmentof Children and Family Services (DCFS), the nation's largest foster careagency, reported in August that 740 foster children were missing?

State Agencies Search For Foster Kids
By Kavan Peterson, Staff Writer

http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPa...ten tId=15013

Following the high-profile disappearance of a foster child in Florida
last spring, several states are under pressure to account for hundreds
of missing foster kids that ran away or were abducted from state care.

Since August, officials in California, Tennessee and Michigan have
disclosed that hundreds of children are missing from state and county
foster care systems, highlighting the problems states are having
managing overburdened caseloads and tracking runaway teenagers.

"Anytime a child is missing, that's a big concern for us and we make all
the efforts we can to try and locate them as quickly as possible," said
Carla Aaron, a spokesperson for Tennessee's Department of Children's
Services, who reported this month that one in 20 foster children were
missing from the state foster system.

Tennessee officials reported that 98 percent of the 496 lost children
are adolescent runaways. A few younger children have disappeared at the
same time as their parents, Aaron said, indicating they were kidnapped.

State authorities usually move quickly to report and locate missing
children by filing a report with the police and notifying the juvenile
court system that the child is no longer under state supervision.

But it is hard to keep older teens in foster homes if they don't want to
be there, Aaron said. Most of the 9,756 foster children in Tennessee
live in private homes, and it is possible for them to run away anytime
they want, she added.

When Michigan foster care officials announced in September that 300
foster kids were missing, Gov. John Engler declared that finding the
children would be a top priority for state authorities. The state Family
Independence Agency (FIA) has found 48 kids since September, when it
created a "Child Locator" Web site and posted the names and photos of
the missing children on the Internet.

Some child welfare advocates say that states aren't doing enough to
account for the missing children and fail to provide the services and
support to keep children in stable environments.

"Finding the kids is important, but not as important as figuring out why
they're running away and preventing it from happening in the future,"
said Amy Pellman, legal director for the Alliance For Children's Rights,
an advocacy group in Los Angeles that provides free legal counseling for
foster children.

Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS),
the nation's largest foster care agency, reported in August that 740
foster children were missing. According to Stewart Riskin, DCFS
spokesperson, this number is well below the national average for missing
foster children.

Nationally, about two percent of foster children are currently runaways,
but in Los Angeles County, only one percent of their 32,000 wards are
runaways, said Riskin. This average is in line with the national average
for all runaway children, which is one percent, Riskin said.

Scrutiny over missing foster children was spurred by the disappearance
of 5-year-old Rilya Wilson in Florida, who was reported missing in April
2002 after a foster care worker failed to check up on her for 16 months.
Wilson is still unaccounted for, and an initial review of the state
foster system turned up nearly 1,000 missing children.

After authorities in Florida failed to locate about 400 of the 1,000
missing foster children by August, Gov. Jeb Bush ordered the creation of
a strike-force of law enforcement and child welfare officials to track
down the children.

To date, the strike-force has found 193 runaways, but officials in the
Department of Children and Families say that some of those kids run away
again within hours of being returned to their foster families.

Florida's foster care system has been the subject of widespread
criticism from both child welfare officials and advocates. An
independent review of the state's foster system performed by an Alabama
child advocacy group earlier this year found that 75 percent of
Florida's foster cases fell below acceptable standards.

The director of the review, Paul Vincent, of the Child welfare Policy
and Practice Group, said that in Florida and 11 other states they've
investigated, the largest problem states have is providing long-term
permanency for foster children.

"The plans that are developed for (foster) kids are all made from the
same cookie-cutter, they aren't individualized, and as a result aren't
very effective," Vincent said. "Those things are causing many of the
more serious problems in states- kids are staying in foster care too
long, kids are moved when they shouldn't be, kids go home when they
shouldn't, and kids who are moved all the time are the ones most likely
to run away."

The missing foster children have highlighted concerns that the foster
care system is overburdened by the largest national caseload in history,
about 585,000 wards, coupled with a 25 percent decline in the number of
foster parents over the past decade. There are currently about142,000
foster families.

Richard Wexler, president of the National Coalition for Child Protection
Reform, said that states have been minimizing the plight of runaways and
downplaying the risk these children are in.

In August, the body of17-year-old Marissa Karp was found in Collier
county Florida, after she ran away from her foster family in April. The
Collier County Sheriff's Office told the St. Petersburg Times that she
was murdered.

The Daily News of Los Angeles reported that at least eight children have
been killed or died in accidents in the past few years after running
away or being abducted from foster care.

"If your, or my, teenage child ran away, we would move heaven and earth
to find that child," Wexler said. "And when the state is the parent, it
has the same obligation."

Contact Kavan Peterson at







CURRENTLY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES VIOLATES MORE CIVIL RIGHTS ON A
DAILY BASIS THEN ALL OTHER AGENCIES COMBINED INCLUDING THE NSA / CIA
WIRETAPPING PROGRAM....

Dr. Shirley O'Brien, of the University of Arizona, notes that it has
been estimated up to 600,000 children are used by the 'kiddie porn'
industry" in the United States every year. Isn’t it entirely possible
that the huge demand for children to be used in child porn and exploited
by pedophiles is supplied from our nations foster care system?

http://www.lovestarrecords.com/earth..._Speeches.html



BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF
REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES
TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEY
ARE "FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...