From here to eternity: I must congratulate Julie Jargon for her January 18 story, "Home for Dinner." She took a very complicated issue and made it easy to understand, focusing on one important point: Children deserve to be put in good homes, and be put there quickly. A year to an adult is not much time, but for a child to be in limbo for a year is an eternity!
Anita Rosen
Denver
Home alone: Four months ago, Westword told the real story of the child-welfare system when reporter Julie Jargon described the case of Ponciano Lazaro-Avina and his daughter, Rosa ("Baby Formula," September 7, 2000). Rosa's mother had a drug problem, but her father didn't. The father never abused or neglected his daughter. The child was taken from him solely because authorities didn't like his housing arrangements.
But in "Home for Dinner," Jargon has substituted the version that's always been more comforting to the child-welfare establishment. In this version, the system supposedly bent over backward to lavish help on ne'er-do-well parents, while forcing their children to languish in foster care or worse, then sending them back to cruel birth parents. This version is fiction. Of course there are such cases, but they are to the child-welfare system as the old "welfare queen" stereotypes were to public assistance.
The legislation Jargon praises, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, already is backfiring. While promoting adoption at all costs and encouraging slipshod, quick-and-dirty placements by paying states huge bounties for them, it also pushes states to needlessly remove far more children in the first place. As a result, the number of children in foster care continues to increase -- an increase that far outpaces the increase in adoptions under ASFA. Nationwide, there are now more children trapped in foster care than ever before. The way to fix that is not to "take the child and run," as both ASFA and Expedited Permanency Planning encourage, but to finally get serious about trying to keep families together.
As for claims that EPP will ensure real help to families, who's going to enforce that, when all the praise from politicians and the press go to taking away more children and rushing to terminate parental rights? And when the services are not provided, won't advocates of the new approach say, "Gee, that's too bad, but now the child has bonded to the foster parents, so tough luck." But most pernicious of all is the repeated claim that working to keep families together is in the interest of "parents' rights," while tearing them apart is in the interest of "children's rights." That is belied by the story's own discussion of the terrible emotional harm to children when they are taken from the only parents they have ever known.
Well, here's a news flash: That harm occurs even when those parents don't happen to be white, middle-class -- and foster. Furthermore, localities that have embraced the take-the-child-and-run approach have consistently seen more child-abuse deaths as they overwhelm their systems with children who never needed to be taken. In contrast, the few places that have embraced keeping families together have slashed their foster care caseloads and improved child safety. The approach Jargon now embraces isn't "children's rights"; it's destroying children in order to "save" them.
Last fall I said the case of Mr. Lazaro-Avina illustrated the current trend of turning the child-welfare system into the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person's child for your very own. I never thought I'd see Westword endorse that trend. But wait: I hear there's a woman getting welfare under fifteen aliases and driving around in a Cadillac. Maybe that'll be on the cover next week.
Richard Wexler, executive director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
No kidding: "Best interests of the child" -- how did 28 times more likely to be sexually abused become the best interests of the child?
"We've got to protect the children" -- how did doubling a child's chances of being murdered ever get credit for being protection?
Kids' "rights" -- how did the loss of everything that matters to a child become that kid's rights?
Westword has run so many wonderful articles on the torture of children in Denver's (and America's) "child protection system." You described reactive attachment disorder and how the loss of family causes many children to become so psychotic that they must be institutionalized for the rest of their lives.
And now you have run an article advocating faster destruction of a child's family. If this worked, it would be one thing. If we rescued only Sarahs and left the vast majority of children in their own homes (in most cases with supervision while anger-management and parenting classes and drug rehab continued), then we would do some good. But most of these homes are not abusive homes.
It's about time the actual welfare of the child counted for something. A child terrified of home should not go there; a child aching for his family (that's at least 90 percent) should. I've talked to several adults who were foster children. All said they were much more abused in their foster home than they ever were with their parents -- even when the foster parent was a relative.
The first thing we need to do is restore constitutional rights to these cases -- innocent until proven guilty, public trial, proper jurisdiction. Then we need a frame of thinking that works.
Esther M. Cook
Denver
From pennies to ponies: Regarding Megan Hall's "Mint Condition," in the January 18 issue:
Besides hassles about misbehaving supervisors, said Mint has one of those stupid rules about "No Photos," on the ridiculous pretext of "security." There's not that much to see inside on the tour -- mostly humming blue boxes holding presses stamping out coins that you view from a gallery -- but one employee down there was built like Schwarzenegger and wearing shorts in midwinter (an odd sight), and there's an interesting display of weapons and other exhibits. Unfortunately, they hurried us past this, and sneaking a photo was out of the question, because one of those little TV cameras popular with museums is watching from every corner. No doubt the dreaded Mint Police would descend. There are too many other places with No Photos or No Cameras rules, from Buckingham Palace to Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka.
I also had repeated and totally idiotic hassles about wearing shorts at another federal premises where I worked in Boulder. I work out and have great legs; evidently, nobody wants to admire them. No legalities were involved; I filed a grievance and got them allowed. Then a new director banned them again except for labor work. I complained again and finally got "mid-thigh" shorts allowed -- after the summer was over. I finally got early retirement and left this silly dog-and-pony business behind me for good.
Roger Williams
Boulder
Interiority complex: After criticizing Linda Chavez (and rightly so) in the January 11 "The Basement Tapes," Patricia Calhoun predicted that Gale Norton would make it through her Senate hearings because she didn't have any "Guatemalans in the basement."
No, just an environmental record that should frighten us all.
Norton as Secretary of the Interior? Why not bring back James Watt as head of the Department of Energy while you're at it?
Jason Palmer
via the Internet
Shades of graze: Suzanne Core's one-sided rant against Gale Norton and the grazing and extraction industries (for which Ms. Core and her buddies apparently help drive the demand), published in the January 18 issue, brings to mind an old adage: An environmentalist is someone who already has his cabin in the Wood(land Park).
Eric Wainwright
Aurora
Yours, mine and ours: I had to respond to the rantings of Ms. Suzanne Core of Woodland Park. I must ask Ms. Core: Have you driven or ridden in a car recently? Used public transportation? Is your house warmed by any appliances using fuel or electricity? If so, you support the so-called extraction industry (or mining, to us normal folks).
Do you use wood for heat? If so, Ms. Core, you are contributing to the rape of the planet by removing and burning God's (or Goddess's, if you prefer) sacred trees. Your ilk have ridden California into a very bad situation. You would do the same to Colorado and the rest of the country as well. Gale Norton and the Republicans will make sure that fuel and power, which all of us need and use, will be available.
Ms. Core, you remind me of an old bumper sticker, still seen in Wyoming and the parts of Colorado where real women and men work for a living: "Ban mining -- let the bastards freeze to death."
Pat Derosiers
Denver
Recipe for success: I just thought Juliet Wittman's "Stop, Cook and Listen," in the January 4 issue, was a great feature -- one of those stories where I learned something new in every paragraph. Now I know why I am such a mediocre cook.
Pat Wagner
Denver
If you can't stand the heat: Juliet Wittman's article about the people in culinary school was indeed refreshing to read; I hope they all succeed in their newfound careers. What I found annoying was the response in the January 11 issue from Dave McKlveen, who wrote regarding Johnson & Wales not being mentioned.
Hey, Dave, the article wasn't about your university -- it was about culinary students who just happened to be learning somewhere else. You act like it was some kind of slap in the face to you and your university because the "largest culinary educator" was not mentioned. Give me a break! It's people like you, with your shameless panhandling and whiny, smug attitude, that turns off a lot of people -- some of whom might be future culinary students.
Dwight Arney
via the Internet
