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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
A few years ago a consortium of Latin American judges and program administrators chose to study Minnesota’s Child Protection and CASA guardian ad Litem programs.
I was a long serving volunteer and one of 3 people from the CASA guardian ad litem office that met with them to study our program.
During our presentation, my cohorts (CASAMN board member attorney and the GAL program administrator) spoke primarily of legal & administrative requirements for creating a CASA GAL program.
I spoke last and delivered a message about;
- How important community involvement and volunteers were in the lives of petrified children removed from the only home they had ever known.
- What being caught up in the mechanical business of State Wards and Court proceedings was like through the eyes of a child.
- How children feel abandoned by family and community and now all alone in homes they have never been in with people they have never seen before.
- How a stable adult in a child’s life helps ease the mental health and behavior issues that trauma and abandonment creates in a child.
- How State employees are often the only stable adults in an abandoned child’s life and that staff rotation leaves the child abandoned again.
- How paid staff have little or no spare time to spend with the child. Staff caseloads care for 100-150 or more children per month.
- That the institution of child protection is almost always overwhelmed and without adequate resources required to serve these children – and the community wants to help.
Arguments being made today by Minnesota’s guardian ad Litem program management with our Board at CASAMN demonstrate no appreciation for the arguments concerning community, volunteer, or the child/people element of the system we work in.
MN Senior Judge Lyonel Norris has stated that, “…an all employee model can create an institutionalizing effect upon a child”. I would add “an even greater” institutionalizing effect upon a child”.
The programs current Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are about checking boxes of easily measured mechanical things. Personal connections and facetime with children and their families, the concept of community awareness, and community members volunteering to be involved with traumatized children are not included in the calculus of program management today.
Concentrating on systems rather than outcomes leads to institutions creating
what they were designed to stop.
If we knew that children passing through Child Protective Services were leaving the system and living productive lives the systems argument would have merit.
But we don’t know this. There is almost no transparency in the system or useful reporting telling us any good news about children leaving the State Ward/Foster Care system.
Former MN Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz has stated that
“90% of the youth in Juvenile Justice have passed through Child Protection”
and remarked that “The difference between that poor child and a felon is about 8 years”.
KARA board member Damon Kocina states that “the difference between that poor child and a preteen mom with no parenting skills, a violent boyfriend and a drug habit, is about 8 years”.
Eliminating the community and the volunteer CASA guardian ad Litem program matters.
Less is not more in Child Protective Services.
All Adults Are the Protectors of All Children.
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