By Dana Mandolesi on January 19, 2010
[from The New York Times, January 15th, 2010, By GERRY SHIH]
In the summer of 2008, a 13-year-old boy from San Francisco emerged from a government van and scanned his new surroundings. Five handsome houses, a small school and an old gymnasium stood on 11 rural acres in the Central Valley that bordered an almond orchard.
Beyond the last house was a soothing panorama of unbounded farmland, interrupted only by old Highway 99 and the big rigs that rumbled across the horizon.
For more than two decades, this has been the setting that greeted more than 2,400 wards of the state as they arrive at the Excell Center ranch, a group home for foster boys with histories of violence or mental disabilities. It is situated just outside Turlock, 40 miles southeast of Stockton.
That the Excell Center, which now houses 52 youths from ages 10 to 18, has survived the die-off of foster homes is partly a matter of real-estate economics: it costs less to house people in the heart of the Central Valley than it does in urban areas, and it costs less to pay workers to take care of them.
The other underlying economic reality, recently confirmed by a panel of federal judges, is that for 18 years, the state’s reimbursement for foster care has fallen woefully short of its minimum goals. The combination of the two means foster care in the Bay Area has been hit harder than anywhere else in the state.
In a tale all too familiar in cash-strapped California, the foster care system has been coming apart from inadequate state financing for at least 20 years, officials at the county level say. In the past two months, a succession of key court decisions in favor of care providers lifted hopes that the judicial rulings might finally turn things around, but the lawsuits have simultaneously shed light on a system that has been cut to the bone.
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Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged berkeley, budget, california, child welfare, foster care, san francisco
By Dana Mandolesi on November 19, 2009
UC fee raises go beyond reason University of California regents are about to consider raising – or, in some cases, initiating – surcharges on certain graduate programs. This plan, while inevitable in the face of shrinking
state support, is regrettable in many ways for Californians: The notion that admission to a topflight public university was a relative bargain here. In-state graduate students now pay a baseline fee of about $10,000, with higher fees on certain professional schools. Those professional fees are about to go up dramatically next fall, if the regents approve these surcharges. However, one of the increases stands out as particularly onerous – and counter to the state’s interest – because of the absence of any linkage
with the economic value of the degree: Initiation of a professional fee (of $4,000) for the social welfare program. This surcharge could deter talented students from going into social work at a time when California has been making strides in reforming its foster care system – and a blue-ribbon commission headed by Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno identified reduction of social-worker caseloads as a priority.
Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged berkeley, fee hikes, fees, foster youth, university of california
