Child Welfare System Accountability

Core Values | Common Ground | Equal Justice

This project was formed in direct response to the haunting reality that the State of Nebraska’s child welfare “system” is far too often failing the thousands of low-income children and families it was meant to help - and faces little to no direct accountability for its failure to act. Modeled on Nebraska Appleseed’s highly successful “Welfare Due Process Project” (organized to protect the rights of low-income families and children in public assistance, Medicaid, and child care programs), this project is focused on enforcing constitutional, federal, and state statutory requirements for providing adequate child welfare protection services in the State of Nebraska. We will also use this legal advocacy to support and complement highly needed policy reform initiatives.

The problems in the child welfare system are numerous, as widely publicized in the media over the last year and a half, including the neglect of and tragic deaths of young children. This project will engage in advocacy that will protect the rights of low-income children and families, and in turn help produce the full policy response. Our goal will be to help to create not just a “better” system, but a model system in which children and families are well served by a system with principles.

As a non-profit law project committed to positive system-level change, Nebraska Appleseed is the only legal organization in Nebraska positioned to help in this way, with this population, on this problem.

This project is organizing its legal advocacy to move forward on the following objectives:

Require the state to provide appropriate services to children and their families to ensure that children may stay with their families or, if removed, be reunited with their families when safe and appropriate, or moved to more permanent settings where they have the benefit of a loving and nurturing family.

Require the state to address workforce and management issues so that caseworkers have the time and the resources to properly fulfill their critical roles in these children’s lives, and that the state develops an adequate number and array of safe and appropriate placements.

Ensure non-English speaking children and families are provided the same level of services and opportunities as others when involved in the Nebraska child welfare system, receive full constitutional protections, and are provided culturally sensitive services addressing the reasons for involvement with the system.

Ensure Native American children and families with rights under the Indian Child Welfare Act receive full protection and opportunities under the law.