Posted by Howard Richman on April 26 2008 at 22:42:49:
In Reply to: TX takes children away from homeschooling polygamist sect puts them in foster homes where they will be homeschooled posted by Howard Richman on April 24 2008 at 08:13:40:
A few days the TX authorities announced that the FLDS children that they had kidnapped would be homeschooled by foster parents in an attempt to keep the children in their own culture as much as possible.
Then the TX authorities discovered that the many homeschooling foster parents who were planning to take the children in were "religiously minded Baptists and Presbyterians", so again they changed their mind. Instead the children are being placed in orphanages where they will be "homeschooled."
Here is a selection from an article by Kirk Johnson and Dan Frosch in today´s New York Times which tells why the children have been placed in orphanages instead of foster homes:
State officials say that their long-term goal is reunification of the families torn asunder in an investigation into the possibility that under-age girls at the ranch were forced to marry, and that extraordinary steps are being taken to minimize the shock of foster care and shelter life as the case continues to unfold. Families across Texas have raised their hands to adopt the children or to volunteer as foster parents....Howard“We could have a situation where the cure is worse than the original problem,” said Richard LaVallo, a lawyer in Austin who has represented children for 25 years. “I think that really categorizes what could happen if we don’t do this right.”
Mr. LaVallo, among other experts, is critical of the state’s decision to use large group shelters across Texas for the children, who range in age from infancy to 17. Traditional foster homes with real parental figures instead of shift workers and regimented institutional rules would be a better choice, those critics say.
State officials and some other child welfare experts say Texas was right to throw out the old best-practice playbook in this instance. Group shelters, they say, will allow the children to support and reinforce one another through the inevitable trauma of separation and transition. A traditional middle-class foster home, they say, would be even more of a shock to an F.L.D.S. child, especially because many such homes in Texas are run by religiously minded Baptists and Presbyterians....