Friends of KARA, if you emailed us yesterday, it did not get to us as we changed web hosts and had a 12 hour problem with emails (all correspondence was lost). Please resend your notes today as all is working now (and you will find that the pages load much faster than ever before).
The United States is one of two nations that has not signed the International Rights Of the Child Treaty. The other is Somalia (and it doesn’t have a functioning government). It is KARA’s position that the primary reason we refuse to sign the treaty is that it includes a prohibition against recruiting child soldiers (and…
Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune article supports a position I’ve held for years. By ignoring or under-serving people with mental health problems we are manufacturing state wards, preteen moms, and felons and this is making our cities dangerous and unsafe.
Our current policies of dumping the mentally ill in detention, jail, and prison places a huge burden on educators & juvenile, criminal justice workers, and especially the families (often grandparents, and foster and adoptive parents) that live with them.
Not much teaching gets done in a classroom populated with disturbed youth on Prozac. Safety and behavior management becomes the teachers primary concern at the expense of educating all the other youth. Our nations miserable graduation and drop out rates, STD rates (we lead the world), and crime rates (we also lead the world) are all tied to how we ignore and under-serve people with mental health issues.
Forcing foster/adoptive parents and service providers (educators, social workers, juvenile & criminal justice workers) to be the front line in managing mental health issues of the children and youth in their charge is an overwhelming task that rarely ends well for the children and youth. These children need professional guidance to overcome the serious issues that have triggered dangerous behaviors and the explosive increase in psychotropic medicating of five and ten year old children in our society.
Z: Senate president rejects request for more CPS funding
Your West Valley – December 02, 2013
The president of the state Senate is blasting a request for more money for Child Protective Services, saying the agency may have wasted the funds restored to it in the last two years.