Foster Care/Child Welfare System Reform Effort
This year, Melanie has joined forces with local, state and national children's advocacy groups to investigate and promulgate reforms in the child welfare system. The watch words for the reform effort will be "Uniformity" and "Accountability".

Some of the Issues Raised to Date
1. Too many families are hurt by the antics of a poorly performing child welfare system. If we look at the trends in child welfare, we see that there is a huge push for licensing foster and fost-adopt homes. We also note that there is little credence paid to the policy of relative placement before stranger placement of children. In their overzealous attempts to assure that foster care homes exist, the bureaucracy often shortchanges children out of homes with loving, caring relatives. The children are thrust into overcrowded group homes where molestation and other horrific abuses are prevalent.

2. Current practices intended to protect a child's privacy are being abused by the court system. The lack of sunshine in the juvenile dependency courtrooms allows for rampant abuse, because there is no system of accountability. No one is allowed to watch. We have seen cases where, because attorneys and other interested parties were not allowed access to vital court records, huge errors causing great pain and anguish to children, have been made. The children in these cases need to have their privacy secured, that is a certainty. But without some way to monitor what happens in the court, we have no accountability.

3. Family friendly court access-currently the law requires easy access to the courts for families whose children or grandchildren are wards of the court or otherwise involved with the juvenile dependency system. But in practice, access to the court is often baffling to families. Many families are not allowed to ask for court records to prove what might have happened in the case previously. If a family member must participate in the process "pro-per" (or by representing themselves) there are no guidelines to help them discover how to manuever the process.

4. In addition, because of the lack of uniformity in procedures from county to county-families with children who are placed out of county might lose precious rights by following their home county local rules instead of the local rules of the out of county placement-and by doing so lose a right to appeal or file an important document.

5. Federal Incentive funding for termination of parental rights are encouraging counties to quickly terminate the rights of a parent rather than exploring options that might be better for the child. Current economic reality is bleak for counties. Each county has recently suffered huge blows to funding with the passing of the latest budget. In addition, it is likely that counties will be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties because the state does not have a working statewide child support system, or a working statewide welfare computer system.

One shudders to think that counties might be inclined to terminate parental rights and to place children in foster care so that they might line the county coffers, but without a rigorous watchdog system in place-our children are at risk of becoming a meal ticket for the system. We need to take action now to assure that such a scenario never actualizes!

Resident Services-
This program is based on the premise that some people who live in affordable housing can benefit from other social services and programs. In addition to providing families in need with referrals to other agencies the Resident Services program provides: crisis intervention assistance to families, summer lunch programs, food closets, shots for tots programs on site, head start on site, community movie nights for the children who live onsite, computer access, and assistance with building computer skills.

Affordable Housing for All
Melanie serves on the board of directors for the Community Housing Opportunities Corporation in Davis because she believes that the hands on experience of guiding policy within an organization that advocates for affordable housing will lead to the development of ideas that will end homelessness.

Some of the ideas that have been developed and implemented to date include:

CHOC also helps families to move to home ownership with sweat equity type home ownership programs.

.Women's Issues
Over the years, Melanie has lent strong support to womens' groups. Melanie was a legislative intern with the California National Organization for Women when she was in law school. After graduating law school, she served for several years on the Califonia National Organization for Women Legislative subcommittee. She was the co-chairperson of Women In Action Lobby Day in 1999, and served on the committee for two years prior.

Some of the areas of interest in which Melanie became involved include:-Family Law Task Force: This is a think-tank effort to look at Parental Alienation Syndrome and other abuses in family law which lead to the loss of child custody for women who should never have lost their children. Helen Grieco is spearheading this effort, and Melanie has been involved with the effort. It is our hope that during this legislative year we will see great reforms in the trend of child custody issues, women, and junk science.

Other Women's Issues include:

Melanie studied women's issues as her theme while she was at Chico State University in California.

Child Support Reform
For her first 3 years post law school, Melanie was the executive director of a national grassroots child support reform organization. She was instrumental in crafting the reforms that were recently implemented in child support in the state of California.

After helping affected parents to successfully advocate for changes in the child support system, Melanie rolled up her sleeves to participate in 9 of the 14 child support reform workgroups. These workgroups were charged with creating new policies, procedures and practices for ensuring that the new Department of Child Support Services runs smoothly, that policies and procedures are uniform throughout the state, and that they system is accountable to the public it serves.

Great strides have been made over the past two years since the creation of the Department of Child Support Services. Melanie hopes to participate in a similarly successful effort to reform the child welfare system.

 

Melanie A. Snider, Esq.
1111 Howe Ave., Ste. 555
Sacramento, CA 95825
Phone: 916-447-7681 Fax: 916-447-7683.

© Copyright 2009, Melanie A. Snider. All Rights Reserved.