60 Minutes is beating the bushes for stories from parents who have lost their children because they are poor.
In the meantime, Herr. Heiligenstein says that Texas isn’t cashing in on the baby selling industry just because the parents can’t afford to send their kids to Harvard.
Let’s look at some current facts:
MIDLAND – A local foster care business is actively recruiting new foster parents. Officials with Pathways Foster Care Industries in Midland says they have qualified parents, but they don’t have enough to meet the demand of children in the Permian Basin.
"We’re having to send them (children) out of the area, out of the region, because we don’t have enough to meet the needs of the children in Region 9," Julie Walts, an employee with Pathways Foster Care Industries, said.
In order to become foster parents, applicants must go through a background check and specialized training.
"We want people that are willing to open their homes and their hearts to other children and provide them with a safe home," Walts said.
Holli and Eric Kounce are foster parents with Pathways. They have seen more than 25 children go through their home in the past 11 years.
"We’re just a mom and dad, we do the same things every day. We just provide structure, safety and peace for some of these kids who just need a safe place to land for a little bit. We have the privilege of being part of their story," Holli said.
Over the years, the Kounces have seen children who have come from difficult backgrounds but they say anyone can chance a child’s life.
"It doesn’t take rocket science, it doesn’t take a degree in social work, it doesn’t take a lot of money. We’re not extraordinary, we are a normal, average, every day family," Eric said.
Together, the couple said they encourage other families to open up their homes.
"You do not need to be an extraordinary person. You need to be an ordinary person, just like us," Eric said. "Open your home, open your heart, and when you do that, and become a foster parent, you’re going to find out you’re on the receiving end. You’ll see a kids life change." You also get paid to keep other people’s kids, and don’t have to worry about paying your bills.
To learn more about Pathway’s organization, visit www.flds.ws.
As for job security in the booming business of selling children for fun and profit, we came across this in the Dallas Morning news.
Now ask yourself, if they can predict a rise based upon the economy, what is driving the taking of these children?:
Rise expected in number of Texas children in foster care this year
12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 1, 2010
AUSTIN – Although Texas has followed the national trend in putting fewer children in foster care in the past few years, the numbers apparently are about to go back up.
This propaganda is false.
In Texas, 26,686 children and young adults were in the care of the Department of Family and Protective Services as of Sept. 30, the last day of the federal fiscal year. That was a 5 percent decrease from a year earlier, according to federal statistics.
Jane Burstain, senior policy analyst at the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income Texans, said removals of Texas children from their homes declined from 2005 to 2009 after the Legislature added more child abuse investigators and required them to work harder to keep children in their homes.
We all remember Jane; she’s the same system suck who thought that Texas SB 1550 was a peachy keen idea. That’s the same bill that the hair ball had to kill when the Legislature found out they had voted for a "Grab the kids and run" piece of shit.
"It was not that there were fewer cases coming in the door – there were actually more – but a smaller percentage of cases would result in removal," she said.
Especially when the Supreme Court was telling you they had been kidnapped, and Ordered to be returned.
This year, "removals have spiked," Burstain said. So has the removal rate, she said. Of the new cases opened so that mistreated children and their families could receive services, 23 percent between September and June resulted in removals, up from 19 percent the previous year.
Last spring, department chief Anne Heiligenstein told lawmakers that the number of children in paid foster care is rising after several years of decreases.
Officials attributed the increase partly to economic stresses on families.
Robert T. Garrett,
Bob reports the "News" as he is told it. Now, what does Richard Wexler have to say about it?
Either Blaustein got her facts wrong or Garrett misunderstood her comments – either way Garrett failed to check his facts.
The number of children torn from their families shot up in 2005, and increased again in 2006. A reporter who felt like checking could do so with the click of a mouse – the federal government posts the data here: http://bit.ly/daXVMS In fact, entries increased every year from 1999 through 2006. (The older data are here: http://bit.ly/97XkoL)
And it was only in 2009 that the number fell below where it was before all those new workers were hired. The new workers did just what we predicted they would do in our 2005 report on Texas child welfare, available here http://bit.ly/aDaX38 : They gave Texas the same lousy system, only bigger.
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
http://www.nccpr.org
Strong words. What do the baby sellers respond?
Mr. Garrett understood me and I got the facts right. To see the effect of policies and practices you have to look at rates, not raw numbers. A removal rate tells you what percentage of the time CPS removes a child out of all the cases it opens for services. When the percentage goes up, it tells you that DFPS is more likely to remove children. When this percentage goes down, it tells you that DFPS is less likely to remove children. And, in fact, this rate has declined every year since the CPS reforms started from 34% in 2005 to 33% in 2006 to 29% in 2007 to 24% in 2008 and 19% in 2009. In 2010 it is 23%, which is an increase compared to 2009 but is still much lower than where it started in 2005. Another way to calculate the removal rate is to look at what percentage of all children who live in Texas are removed. Using this measure, removals went from 0.28% in 2005 to 0.19% in 2009, a decrease in the rate of almost a third. And using either measure, Texas has a much lower removal rate compared to other states.
Jane Burstain, Ph.D.
Egg heads love those slide rules, it helps them to forget they deal with people, and it makes it so much more palatable to them.
Anyhow, who thinks Richard planted his tail between his legs and gave the book learner the match?
First of all, what you say in this comment, talking about “rates” of removal is different from what you told Garrett who writes about “removals” (or maybe it is what you told him and he simply got it wrong).
More important, your comparisons are selective, out of context and invalid.
Every decision in the child welfare process is highly subjective. In 2005, there was a huge foster-care panic in Texas because of publicity over high-profile deaths. So citizens made the subjective decision to phone the hotline more often, hotline operators made the subjective decision to screen in more cases, and workers made the subjective decisions to open more cases – and take more children.
Suppose workers decided to open a case on every child in Texas – then the removal “rate” would look even tinier. So comparing removals to the number of cases opened is ludicrous.
It makes more sense to compare removals to either total child population or impoverished child population – but that’s where you get extremely selective.
2005 is the wrong base year. There was a huge increase in entries in 2005 compared with 2004, and then another increase in 2006. By using the year the panic took place as your baseline, you artificially inflate the rate of removal in your “base year” The number of children removed was almost identical in 2006. Had you started your comparison in 2004, *before* the legislature acted and before the panic and then looked year by year, you’d see that the *rate* of removal also went up in 2005 – and when compared to the impoverished child population, the rate went up again in 2006. The tables are on our website here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/statsupdate.pdf
Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
http://www.nccpr.org
Now if I were Mr. Garrett, I would want to know if someone handed me a load of manure to spread out there to the unwashed masses.
Was I being used? Was I being fed bogus figures and contributing my reputation and credibility with my readers to further anothers agenda?
Would it be all that difficult to actually find out?
What say you Robert, is Jane full of shit, or is Richard?
Are children being pushed into foster care because it avoids the necessity of Child care "Professionals" from becoming burger flippers, or does being poor automatically mean you start beating your kids faces in?
























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