This short article offers a lawyer's perspective on working with immigrant youth, with three goals in mind. The first is to outline key features of the legal landscape immigrant children navigate in the United States, in order to provide contextual information of practical value in serving the young client/patient. The second goal is to use that…

Children who experience foster care, write Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman, are considerably more likely than others to have contact with the criminal justice system, both during childhood and as adults. And because children of color disproportionately experience foster care, improvements to the foster care system could reduce racial/ethnic…

Objective: This article describes the evaluation of permanency roundtables, an intervention to help youth in foster care achieve legal permanency and the challenges evaluators faced in finding and using appropriate comparison data. Method: In 2009, permanency roundtables were conducted for 496 children in Georgia, most of whom had spent extended…

Throughout the election year 2009, the Association for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) asked the question: What about the kids? This annual report discusses how ACNJ placed New Jersey's children first by: (1) Building its state-wide support base--ACNJ's Make Kids Count NJ E-Advocacy network engaged a distribution list of nearly six thousand members…

Given the extent to which our society values education, it is perplexing to learn that we continue to struggle to provide all children, especially homeless children, an adequate education. This troubling issue is the focus of this paper. Specifically, this paper will center around two basic questions; 1) what has the legal system done to ensure…

This article describes the Model Standards Project (MSP), a collaboration of Legal Services for Children and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The MSP developed a set of model professional standards governing the care of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth in out-of-home care. This article provides an overview of the…

Ten years ago I wrote an article on the Children's Order, which was coming into force in Northern Ireland in October 1996. I examined the principles behind the Children's Order and considered how these principles interacted with the practice of family mediation (at that stage I was Coordinator of the Family Mediation service). Since that date…

Discusses the "Children Can't Wait" project, aimed at improving child welfare practice through improvements in attorney-social worker relationships. Describes seminars held to facilitate the project's goals. Identifies two ways to improve such relationships: multidisciplinary training and interagency collaboration. Attributes the success…

The paper examines the surrogate parent program at Forest Haven, the District of Columbia's institution for the mentally retarded. The program provides seven major services among which are its function as an advocate for educational, court, and other personal programing and as a monitor of the educational placement of clients. Problems in the…

Denmark's child advocacy system is made up of local kommune (county) Child and Youth Welfare Committees which watch over the well-being of children. Each child and youth committee serves as an effective advocate for the children of its community in three areas: promotion, protection, and prevention. The committee's responsibility to promote…

Presents the text of a lecture that looks at the declaratory, procedural, and monitoring features of a Children Act that would encompass lessons from the past to enhance the future of Scottish children. Also discusses four major questions at the heart of child-centered legislation. (TJQ)

This second annual report of the Temporary State Commission on Child Welfare accounts for the progress made toward resolving the problems raised in the first annual report and summarizes the present status of the Commission's projects--completed, in process and proposed. Among topics briefly discussed are preventive services, the child welfare…

This preliminary report of the Temporary State Commission on Child Welfare identifies problems and offers recommendations for improvement in the system of child welfare in New York State. Information about the Commission's mandate and members is followed by a review of the child welfare system in New York. The report indicates that the entire…

New York City has for far too long tolerated a severe imbalance in the delivery of legal services in child welfare cases. Although the Administration for Children's Services (ACS), the Legal Aid Society and Lawyers for Children all are given a significant annual budget which allows these agencies to represent petitioners and children in Family…

This third annual report of The Temporary State Commission on Child Welfare deals with the origin, development and rationale of the provisions of the Child Welfare Reform Act of 1979 (chapters 610 and 611). The Child Welfare Reform Act addresses itself primarily to three discrete program areas which operationally are intended to alter radically…