Upon receipt of an email from a MN state legislator directing my attention to the cost of Governor Dayton’s trying to improve conditions for Minnesota's at-risk youth, I penned this response and would ask you to write something like it and send it to your state representative (I have altered it slightly for this post).
We should all send at least a few notes to our state representatives each year – and this is a worthy cause). If you get the chance, drop by and get to know them. Most legislators have offices in your community as well as at the State House.
Dear Representative Lohmer,
Responding to your note to me below (decrying the cost of early childhood programs being recommended by Governor Mark Dayton), I’ve been a volunteer CASA guardian ad-Litem for almost 20 years and watched what short changing MN children does to our schools, city streets, and state budget.
One of (I have 50 stories) my case-load boys cost the county between $2 and 3 million and that does not include the people he has stabbed, the teacher he beat up, or hundreds of others he has caused great suffering to in his young life.
He’s in his early 20’s today and recently aged out of foster care (I met him in 1996 when he was 7). Today, he has AIDS, is on the most expensive medicines in the nation, has always been a state ward, and I expect will always be a state ward.
To not support programs that could have helped him lead a normal life is fiscally irresponsible and morally reprehensible.
If I were to describe to you the costs some of the other 50 children I have worked with as a volunteer in child protection, you would make better decisions concerning early childhood programs.
We launch a new generation of abused and neglected children with or without coping skills every five years (by five a child is able to cope with his or her environment, go on to school and succeed or not).
It hurts me to meet smart powerful people that don’t understand this. Quit thinking of a generation as 20 years. It is not. It is five years for the children we are talking about and it determines success or failure in life (all of life for that child).
If you are not aware of Federal Reserve Board Director Art Rolnick’s 2003 study on early childhood investment returns, you are short-changing yourself, thousands of Minnesota children, and your constituents.
Knowledge is power and our bad legislative decisions last these children and our communities a lifetime.
Please consider talking to me about the 50 children I have lobbied to remove from toxic homes, and their financial costs, the problems visited on educators, foster parents, the justice system and the impact on quality of life in our community.
From the age of four through seven, the boy I mentioned above was sexually abused, beaten bloody, left alone for days in an apartment tied to a bed without food or water, all because the county did not have the resources to protect him. My first visit to one four-year-old girl, a CASA case, was at the suicide ward of Fairview Hospital.
I’ve written about the seven-year-old foster boy who hung himself and left a note about how he hated Prozac. Two weeks ago, I wrote about six-year-old Kendrea Johnson who hung herself with her jump rope (Kendrea’s social worker was unaware that the child’s therapist knew the girl to be suicidal).
Please don’t blame the people doing the work. It ain’t them, it’s us for not having systems, training, and resources to deal with the inadequate state of child protection in Minnesota today. Social work, teaching, and foster/adoption parenting could not be any more difficult. Let’s help them get better results and make our communities happier and safer at the same time.
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