From State Rep. Steve Reick:
Protecting & Sustaining At-Risk Children Working Group
At the beginning of this legislative session, the Illinois House Republican Caucus formed working groups to find solutions to some of the biggest problems facing our state. I serve on the working group tasked with finding solutions for our broken child welfare system. Thursday, our working group held a press conference to give an update on our work. I have included a video of the press conference below:
As I mentioned in the press conference, too often we tell you what is wrong with DCFS. We don’t need to go through that again; everyone knows the problems. I want to offer solutions.
This year Republican proposals have focused upon doing just that. We are taking a hard look at what the agency is doing and what might be better done somewhere else. Among our proposals are the following:
- Requires DCFS caseload tracking system, with yearly DCFS report on ongoing case files, operation of the caseload tracking system, ratio of active files to personnel, and how appropriations can be structured to incentivize caseload management.
- Move the background check function to the Illinois State Police
- Initialize the movement of services provided under the Family First Prevention Services Act from DCFS to other agencies which will avoid the necessity of involvement by the child welfare system
- Mandatory intact family services for at-risk families
- Law enforcement concurrent child abuse or neglect investigation with DCFS
- State’s Attorney can see completed investigative report
- Creates a DCFS Ombudsperson
These problems aren’t going to be solved anytime soon and can’t be solved without collaborative effort. We believe that the proposals we’ve described above are a good start.
I suggest an improvement for Reick:
Stop driving drunk!
Anything the government touches becomes an expensive non functional mess.
The job of any American government is to offer guardrails via law and regulation along, perhaps, with funding the public good.
It is right and just to have the impulse to protect children.
Illinois government publicly funds the murder of children and directly employs people who promote the murder of children so their credibility in the protection of children arena is non existent.
Close all government agencies currently working on foster and adoptive care of children after transferring all files back to religious organizations who ran these programs for over a hundred years more successfully than any government bureaucracy ever has.
IF there is an impulse to try to have government run such a program it must be rebuilt from the ground up with careful attention paid to never allowing those who have been involved in the murder of children while ignoring their DCFS duties in favor of pretending to be a County Board representative anywhere near the new organization.
As long as any organization uses taxpayer dollars to murder innocents under color of law it is illegitimate and worthy of The Citizen actively destroying its ability to harm anyone else.
Actively.
Priest:
Right on!
I like your sermon…
Yeah because we all know how priests “love” our children.
Stephen,
I tolerate your idiocy because the personal attacks and name calling against you are just as idiotic so your responses are somewhat appropriate.
Not that twice the stupid on the blog comments is good but it illustrates just how futile it is to argue with morons so it ultimately is a public good.
This said, unless you have something substantive to offer keep your idiotic “contributions” out of policy discussions.
It is clear you lack the mental capacity or acuity to speak to substantive subject matter.
Making an example of DCFS workers Carlos Acosta and that other guy that were inhumane and returned AJ Freund to his drug infested parents would be a good start.