Word: evening
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...result of blatant favoritism. Thus Grace Home was off and running, supported by county revenues. An audit alleged, however, that the agency's director had misspent hundreds of thousands of dollars on trips to Washington and Atlanta, as well as a six-week stay in Africa. The director even charged the government for his subscription to Travel & Leisure magazine. The 1995 audit found numerous safety violations in the agency's homes: untrained child watchers, unchecked criminal backgrounds, unsecured knives, broken glass, inoperable smoke detectors and toxic substances within reach of children...
...director's replacement was no improvement. Although she promised a zeal for children, she also allegedly had a zeal to spend money. Even as children in the agency's care couldn't get dental exams and foster parents couldn't get first-aid training, Grace Home was spending $250,000 in foster-care funds to defend a sexual-harassment suit and gave an additional $130,000 to a board member. The books listed $6,725 in Toys "R" Us gift certificates with no receipt. The new director gave herself nearly $10,000 for a retroactive pay raise, car payments...
...agencies have become so desperate to place children that any bed will do. Kids are being sent to foster homes with no forethought, and the states cannot guarantee their safety. Furthermore, the number of kids needing foster care is exceeding the number of families available to care for them. Even the most devoted of foster parents are dropping out of the programs, frustrated at times by a lack of support--as well as legal roadblocks to adopting the children if they so choose...
Meanwhile, the annual turnover of social workers hovers as high as 70% in some states. "You can't even run a Burger King with a 70% turnover," says Howard Talenfeld, a Florida lawyer. Social workers have always been undertrained, exhausted and second-guessed--so much so that some have turned to a negative kind of creativity. In Milwaukee, for example, social workers don't answer the phone when their caseloads are full. In other places, they simply stop visiting homes where some children are known to be abused because death doesn't seem imminent. They take advantage of recently implemented...
...family disintegrated. He very rarely sees his birth mother or his brother Frankie. His father is dead. Homer, at 20, is a father himself, of an infant girl, and he says he's worried about keeping his own family together. He hopes to get his GED and maybe even graduate from a community college. But technically, he was a ward of the state until he turned 21 last week, when he was released. With so many bad things behind him, Homer says, there is only one good thing about his long trip through foster care: "Getting...