Here’s the thing about child safety – it’s mostly about adults. When I first began working on child welfare policy, that sentence struck me as a bit odd. I was working for a child advocacy organization – why should I care about adults? It all boils down to a…...
Early trauma can last a lifetime
When looking at the numbers of kids who are experiencing maltreatment of some kind, we might feel pain on their behalf or outrage at what they’re going through. It’s certainly an appropriate response. Kids don’t deserve to be treated badly, and that’s something that most adults know because we feel…...
Racial Disparities in Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice
You probably already know this, but we here at Voices for Children in Nebraska are passionate about justice and fairness for all of Nebraska’s kids. This passion drives us to examine troubling trends in the hopes that solutions can be found for even the most complicated and longstanding of challenges…...
Slow descent in out-of-home care numbers
On Tuesday, Sarah did a great job articulating the notion of “flipping the pyramid” of child welfare. In her blog post, she spoke about Nebraska’s effort to lower its rate of children served in out-of-home care. So we got to thinking: What do the data tell us, historically-speaking, about how many…...
Unnecessary Costs: Juvenile Incarceration in Nebraska
In light of the release of the No Place for Kids Report earlier today, we’re looking at some of the Nebraska-specific numbers. During the 2009-2010 state fiscal year (SFY), Nebraska spent over $17 million dollars on its two centers for juvenile incarceration – the youth residential treatment centers (YRTC) in…...
To privatize, or not to privatize
To privatize, or not to privatize – that isn’t the question. Hopefully Shakespeare will forgive us for misusing his famous soliloquy, but we couldn’t come up with a better way to summarize our reaction to recent coverage of the ongoing controversy surrounding Nebraska’s child welfare and juvenile services reform…...
