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Beneath mild exterior, child advocate is on a mission.



 
 
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Old July 8th 07, 03:17 AM posted to alt.support.child-protective-services,alt.support.foster-parents,alt.dads-rights.unmoderated,alt.parenting.spanking
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Default Beneath mild exterior, child advocate is on a mission.

Beneath mild exterior, child advocate is on a mission

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 8, 2007

By Steve Peoples

Journal State House Bureau

http://www.projo.com/news/content/ch...4.2fa1d1d.html

ALSTON

CRANSTON — Jametta O. Alston is at peace despite the firestorm around her.

The state child advocate works at a beat-up wooden desk in a dingy
office across from the bathroom. The walls are bare. There are boxes
everywhere. And the small window offers a view of the state prison complex.

She is used to dealing with children who have been burned by cigarettes,
abandoned by drug-addicted parents, molested by stepfathers. But the
challenges have intensified in the 10 days since she sued the governor.

There have been swarming packs of reporters. A flurry of new child-abuse
allegations. And political challenges.

The 50-year-old Philadelphia native is the face of a sweeping federal
lawsuit against Governor Carcieri and two top state officials that
alleges widespread physical and mental abuse of children in state care.
Alston has sued the man who appointed her at a time the governor didn’t
need any more bad news.

The Carcieri administration has been reeling from an investigation into
the Department of Transportation, the use of temporary staffing firms, a
battle with the General Assembly over the state budget, and criticism of
his plan to lay off 1,000 state workers.

And the bold lawsuit comes from what may seem an unlikely source — a
woman whom friends describe as so pleasant, so kind, that she is
sometimes mistaken for being weak.

Alston is a woman who offers to share her lunch with strangers. She is a
foster parent. And she is known around the office for her habit of
rescuing injured birds, feeding them worms with her bare hands.

“If you were to walk into a room, she might be the last person you would
pick out as someone who has held positions such as being the president
of the Rhode Island Bar Association, or chair of the Rhode Island Legal
Services board of directors, or the child advocate,” says Assistant
Child Advocate Shelia High King, who met Alston in 1987 when they were
the only African-American women taking the Rhode Island bar exam that
day. “She’s so unassuming. She tends to be very casual in her approach.
And she’s very approachable. So I think people probably mistake her as
being someone who is weak and timid because she is so soft-spoken.”

Alston, however, has quietly established herself as one of the more
powerful women in state politics.

She became the first black female city solicitor in Rhode Island in
2003, serving under former Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey during the
now-infamous crossing-guard fight. She became the first black president
of the state bar association in 2004. And she was appointed in 2005 by
Carcieri to serve as the state child advocate — the head of an
independent state agency with six employees charged with protecting the
thousands of children in state custody.

“She may appear to be sweet, but she’s pretty tough.” Laffey says.
“Jametta has a different reason for being on this earth other than to
please some people she might work for. She has a higher calling that she
answers to, and I love that about her.”

Alston knows she has put her career at risk.

She knows she’ll probably never become a judge, like the former child
advocate, Family Court Judge Laureen D’Ambra. She knows her every move
until her term expires in 2010 may be scrutinized.

But Alston says she had no choice but to file a sweeping civil-rights
lawsuit against the governor, Department of Children, Youth and Families
Director Patricia Martinez and Jane A. Hayward, secretary of the
Executive Office of Health and Human Services.

THE LAWSUIT alleges that the DCYF repeatedly placed children in
dangerous situations, failed to remove them promptly after abuse was
revealed, and later failed to offer proper counseling and treatment.

Alston is aiming to overhaul Rhode Island’s child-welfare system, which
the suit portrays as overburdened and mismanaged. Rhode Island was the
worst in the nation in the rate of children abused and neglected while
in state foster care in five of the six years from 2000 to 2005,
according to federal data.

Alston, raised as a Quaker, says she has faith that she will be fine no
matter what.

“If you walk with faith, you will be taken care of,” she says. “The
state made choices and policies on how they would handle children. Those
policies endanger children. So what should I do — allow them to stand?
Could I sleep at night, could I call myself a person of faith if I allow
this to continue?”

Alston says she twice told Martinez that she was contemplating filing a
lawsuit. And she says she requested several meetings with the governor
to discuss her concerns, but that her requests were largely ignored. One
meeting had been scheduled, but was later canceled by the governor’s
office, she says.

Carcieri says he was not aware of any attempts to schedule a meeting,
though he says the information might not have been passed along by his
staff. Martinez acknowledges a conversation with Alston about a suit
months ago, but says she didn’t realize Alston planned to follow
through, especially after the issue didn’t come up again.

ALSTON SAYS she was pushed over the edge by the passage of the 2008
state budget, which knocked thousands of children off state-subsidized
childcare and stripped hundreds of 18- to 21-year-olds of state Family
Court protection.

She filed a federal class-action lawsuit on June 28, backed by New
York-based nonprofit Children’s Rights and the international law firm
Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which has an office in Providence. Children’s
Rights has successfully filed six lawsuits against other states for
systemic child-welfare failures.

While the suit describes alleged abuse against 10 children, it was filed
on behalf of all 3,000 children living in foster homes, group homes,
shelters and institutions. It alleges that children in state care are
being neglected, molested, beaten, burned with cigarettes and, in one
high-profile case, killed.

“This [lawsuit] is not about me. This is not about Jametta Alston or the
child advocate, so much as here’s this issue we have where children are
not safe,” she says. “We take them from their homes, where we say
they’re in danger, and we put them in worse situations.”

Alston isn’t used to dealing with the media. She doesn’t like being in
the spotlight.

After a recent State House meeting with the governor, she tried to sneak
out a back door to avoid the throng of television cameras and reporters
waiting outside.

The group caught up with her outside and she politely brushed past,
saying she had no comment. Reporters trailed toward Smith Street,
peppering her with questions to no avail until a radio reporter
accidentally stepped on her foot.

Alston’s shoe popped off.

With the cameras rolling, she was forced to stop and put it back on. She
then stayed for a few minutes and answered questions. “My mom just
drilled politeness into me. I thought it would be totally rude to walk
away once they had me stopped,” she says.

ALSTON IS THE only child of a stay-at-home mother and a welder. She came
to Rhode Island two decades ago after graduating from Howard University
School of Law.

Attracted by New England’s beaches, she fell in love with the area and
took a job at Rhode Island Legal Services in the late 1980s,
representing low-income residents on matters ranging from Family Court
issues to consumer disputes.

It was work she had always wanted to do.

“At Howard, they teach us that lawyers are social architects — what kind
of world do you want to build? The world I wanted to build was that
everyone would have equal access to justice,” she says.

She later opened her own practice and sometimes served as a guardian ad
litem — a court-appointed advocate for children in state care.

In March 1993, Alston took a job handling civil litigation for the state
attorney general’s office. In nearly 10 years, she helped create
domestic-violence protocols and trained police departments on hate-crime
prosecution. To prepare for a case involving foster children, she
voluntarily went through a training program aimed at prospective foster
parents.

After the training she was asked to temporarily serve as a foster parent.

She briefly cared for an 18-month-old whose mother had been found dead
in a trash can, an experience that convinced her that being the single
mother of a young child was not for her. But she soon got a call about a
7-year-old girl who needed a home. The girl had been living in a shelter
for nine months.

Alston fell in love with the little girl she would soon adopt. Theresa
Alston is now 13.

“Because I’ve experienced living with her, it gives me insight and an
almost heightened sensitivity of what it means to be in [foster] care,”
Alston says.

Meanwhile, Alston doesn’t know exactly what will come out of the
lawsuit. She hopes for widespread reforms that involve fewer caseloads
for caseworkers and safe permanent placements for children, but she
knows that success may take time.

In the end, she says, the decision to sue the governor was not a
difficult one.

“All along I said I would only do this as a last resort. I know what
litigation costs,” she says. “Yet there was nothing else in my mind you
could do.”








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

CPS Does not protect children...
It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even
killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.

every parent should read this .pdf from
connecticut dcf watch...

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8x11.pdf

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com

Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US
These numbers come from The National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)
Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS

*Perpetrators of Maltreatment*

Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59
Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13
Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241
Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12
Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5

Imagine that, 6.4 children die at the hands of the very agencies that
are supposed to protect them and only 1.5 at the hands of parents per
100,000 children. CPS perpetrates more abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse
and kills more children then parents in the United States. If the
citizens of this country hold CPS to the same standards that they hold
parents too. No judge should ever put another child in the hands of ANY
government agency because CPS nationwide is guilty of more harm and
death than any human being combined. CPS nationwide is guilty of more
human rights violations and deaths of children then the homes from which
they were removed. When are the judges going to wake up and see that
they are sending children to their death and a life of abuse when
children are removed from safe homes based on the mere opinion of a
bunch of social workers.

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...
 




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