Children And Families

MARYLANDERS didn't need a whistleblower to point out critical fissures in the state's child welfare system. For the Ehrlich administration to spend all its energy protesting the actions of an erstwhile ally, whose recently released e-mail exchanges with top department staff point out glaring safety issues in Baltimore and elsewhere, while not denying the substance of her messages, misses the point. Better to spend the time attacking the problem - that way, things might improve. For example, the city's Department of Social Services and the plaintiffs in a consent decree have disagreed for more than 16 years on the actual number of caseworkers serving the city's 7,000 children in foster care each year.

WITH A show of election-year bipartisanship, the U.S. Senate last month stood up for poor families -- if only for a few moments. The senators added $6 billion for child care to their version of the law to renew the nation's welfare reform program, to ensure that the neediest children are in quality day care while their mothers work or receive training. Currently only about one in seven eligible children benefits from a child care subsidy, so this was a big step in the right direction. The vote on the child care amendment should have set the stage for passage of the full Senate welfare reform package to renew the 1996 law for five years, including the $16.5 billion-a-year Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Welfare reform lifts children from poverty The Sun's recent editorial on President Bush's plan to strengthen welfare reform stated that reform "has barely dented poverty since the 1996 legislation" ("Welfare to work," March 29). I guess that depends on your definition of "barely." The truth is that, because the 1996 welfare reform law encouraged work, millions of children and families previously dependent upon welfare have been lifted out of poverty. In fact, since 1996, the child poverty rate has fallen from 20.5 percent to 16.7 percent.

NEWS THAT there will be 50 new faces at Baltimore's Department of Social Services is welcome indeed. The agency charged with caring for the neediest families is itself in desperate need. It suffers under a debilitating two-year hiring freeze even as more families join the rolls, and continues to work with a too-small slice of the funding pie. Its failures have been well-documented, including children placed in danger in unsuitable homes or temporary shelters and families unable to get the cards that would allow them access to health care or other services.

IN EVERY corner of Maryland, there are families who struggle each day to go to work and afford quality child care. Parents want the best environment for their young children, but for many families, good child care is simply too expensive. Their child-care arrangements are often unstable and they don't know how they will go to work if those arrangements fall apart. Maryland's 12 regional Child Care Resource Centers, which operate under a state contract administered by the nonprofit Maryland Committee for Children, see families face these questions daily.

It started with a dying girl who wanted nothing more than a pair of green roller skates. Within a few years, the Grant-A-Wish Foundation was fulfilling all kinds of dreams for children with life-threatening diseases, from meetings with Cher and Hulk Hogan to a trip to Australia to study marsupials. But now, 20 years after its founding, the Catonsville-based charity has left the wish business - a field that had become expensive, crowded with competitors and, its organizers say, at odds with its evolving mission of helping sick youngsters focus on hope and survival.

Concerned about the rising number of children who are removed from their homes and placed in foster care or a correctional facility, Carroll County officials are fashioning a program that will provide a range of services to troubled youths. The program, called Families ETC. -- or Families Empowered Through Connections -- will be funded by a state grant. The Governor's Office for Children, Youth and Families has pledged $250,000 a year to the initiative for each of the next five years. Details of the program, which organizers hope to launch in January, have to be worked out between state and Carroll officials, but county leaders envision case coordinators matching families with needed services -- from individual counseling to family therapy and mediation.

After the 2-year-old stood on a bench, squiggled in his mother's arms and babbled loudly, Liz Grogan handed her son to her husband, Wayne. "Here, it's your turn," she sighed. "Why don't you walk him around?" The parents had passed an hour waiting in Anne Arundel Courthouse by trying to keep the toddler under control. "Our babysitter canceled out at the last minute," Liz Grogan explained. Their courthouse morning started with toddler Benjamin announcing his arrival on a security telephone.

WHILE improving elementary education is important, we must also concern ourselves with the preschool years to ensure the success of more of Maryland's students.Recent brain research shows that early learning experiences have a decisive impact on brain development and subsequent reading achievement.By their first birthdays, children have developed pre-language skills. By the time they turn 3, the brain has developed critical circuitry that helps determine future success.Children who are given "phoneme-awareness" training in the sounds of the English language and then taught the relationship between letters and sounds are likely to become good readers.

AMERICANS generally agree that, for societal reasons as well as humanitarian ones, children should have access to medical care. The dispute revolves around the circumstances under which taxpayers should assume responsibility for making that care possible.Gov. Parris N. Glendening's proposed Children and Families First Health Care Act reflects his belief that government should help as many as it can afford. Supported by a new federal law providing $2 for every dollar of state spending, the governor wants to extend Medicaid coverage -- $76 million in 1999 alone -- to children in families with incomes up to $35,000 for a family a four.