Last week, Toia Potts presented the final proposal for transforming foster care and the abuse/neglect/dependency courtroom to the Durham Safety and Wellness Taskforce. The proposal is designed to ensure Durham County’s A/N/D courtroom and child welfare system respect family integrity, end unnecessary family separation, and increase the opportunities for Durham’s families to thrive. The proposal passed and it will be part of the full package that the Taskforce presents to the residents of Durham as part of a holistic vision of increasing authentic safety and wellness for our community.
You can read the final Safety and Wellness Task Force proposal on these issues here.
Also last week, the Raleigh News Observer and Charlotte Observer printed an Op Ed about the foster care system written by Elizabeth Simpson.
Adoption stories are supposed to be feel-good stories. A headline might read: “Neglected Child Longing For Forever Home Finally Finds Loving Family.” That’s the mythology invoked by N.C. House Bill 647. The “Expedite Child Permanency” bill proposes to encourage quicker “permanency” for children by streamlining the foster care-to-adoption process and giving foster caregivers more rights. But what if there aren’t nearly as many children “waiting” for forever homes as we’ve been led to believe?
It’s hard to see the reality of this system because it happens out of the public eye and behind the shield of confidentiality. But as an attorney who works in this system, I can tell you that a peek into the inner workings of North Carolina’s abuse/neglect/dependency courtrooms would reveal what the families caught there have in common: they are poor, disproportionately Black and they share the happenstance of having been noticed and reported to DSS by a teacher, medical worker or police. That doesn’t make them the worst of the worst; it makes them the unluckiest of the unlucky.