After federal reviewers flunked California’s child-protection system on several counts last year, focusing especially on problems with its foster-care programs, the state agreed to make improvements or pay tens of millions of dollars in penalties.
Now, the state’s fiscal troubles and the arrival of a new governor could affect efforts to overhaul services for the roughly 175,000 abused and neglected children under state protection — 91,000 of them in foster care.
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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration intends to continue with the centerpiece of the improvement efforts, a program that will regularly give each county extensive data on how well the children in its care are faring, said Larry Bolton, acting head of the Department of Social Services.
Hmmm.
But at the invitation of the federal government, the state may soon scale back its effort in order to save money.
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Bolton said officials also are reviewing the Davis administration’s proposal for an overhaul of the entire child-welfare system and will decide for themselves which parts of it make sense.
The new GOP governor wants to spend $10 million this year and next to help counties come up with their strategies for improving child welfare.
I see.
But at the same time, he is not allocating new money for programs that would help them fix their problems once they figure out what they need to do. And he wants to repeal some new programs that would help the state meet the federal standards for foster care, on the grounds that they would pass along costs to counties without providing funds to implement them.
Here we go.
One program would try to move foster children into permanent homes more quickly by ensuring that social workers ask them if they have any friends or family members who could adopt them. Often, the child welfare system overlooks people who could step in to help.
The governor also has proposed getting rid of a program that would help foster children go to college or vocational school. The stance has puzzled some child advocates, who say such measures will help the state meet federal standards for moving children out of foster care more quickly — and avoid paying federal penalties. In any case, Democratic lawmakers say they are not likely to change the laws, which passed recently with bipartisan support.
"It is one key part of the strategy," said Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, who wrote the bill requiring children to be asked about potential adoptive parents, and who also wrote the new strategy for improvements at the county level. "It is also a cost-saver."
Governor Schwartzie’s plan to "take a tougher approach" to welfare recipients who do not find work within two months of receiving cash payments by cutting welfare benefits not only to the parents but to the children of the non-working parents just gives us a broader view of what a compassionate advocate for the children of California he really is.
A nice quote from that second article:
"There is a group within the welfare-to-work population that has severe barriers to employment, and to expect that they will be placed in a job within 60 days is unrealistic," said Jean Stover, vocational assessment supervisor for Sacramento County. "There’s discretion that needs to be made. These are human beings. They are not robots."
Close readers of the article will note that volunteer work meets the work requirement. That’s helpful, in terms of meeting that requirement, but it’s not as helpful as you might think in putting folks on the path to self-sufficiency. Unskilled/low-skilled volunteer work, though useful as an introduction to the world of work, is – in my experience – rarely a stable supplier of job training that leads to a well-paying position. It’s nice. It’s better than nothing at all. But it’s also a sure indicator of what kind of pay the CalWorks employee can expect from the private sector – which is to say, as close to nothing as you can get. Stuffing envelopes and answering phones (work I’ve done myself, so I know whereof I speak) are not job skills upon which one can build a high-wage career.
Not that ALL volunteer work is low-skilled (my agency relies almost exclusively on volunteers to even keep us in business, so I consider volunteerism a high calling), but I think most of us can agree that the majority of volunteer jobs unskilled workers will be low skill jobs, which will only perpetuate the unmarketability of the worker.
I say all this as someone who used volunteer work as an introduction to a new career path. But I already had years of work experience, and good job skills, and that’s what got me hired. I wouldn’t have been there if I wasn’t interested in the field, but interest plus no skills would have left me unemployed.
