Changing children’s lives
By Jeff Bleich
President, State Bar of California
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Bleich |
In two months my term as President will end, and the first thing I plan to
do when I get home from the Annual Meeting in Monterey is play with my kids.
Several of my columns this year have focused on how every child needs a caring
adult in their lives, especially children who are in (or leaving) foster care,
children in custody or immigration cases, children with learning disabilities
and children who are hungry or homeless. After a year of working with some
of the heroes in our profession who help these children, I’d liked to
offer a picture of kids in America today and what we can all do.
The good news is that most kids in America today are doing fine. Statistically,
your kids are fine, my kids are fine. In fact, kids growing up in relatively
affluent two-parent families (where one parent has a professional degree) tend
to do better than fine. Apart from watching too much reality TV, occasionally
downloading disturbing things on their iPods and piercing things that God never
intended to be pierced, most kids are doing pretty well. Nationally, 84 percent
live in families with incomes above the poverty line, and more than two-thirds
live in stable households with adequate housing.
But not all kids start out with the advantage of having financially secure
and caring parents who have passed along a nice home and some enviable DNA.
In fact, a larger proportion of U.S. children lack the basic support that they
need than do children in virtually any other industrialized nation. The U.S.
child poverty rate is among the highest in the developed world. The U.N. found
that among industrialized nations, only Russia has a higher child poverty rate
than the United States.
If you look at any of the bad things that can happen to youth, such as depression,
drug use, teen pregnancy, violence, promiscuity or suicide, our rates are also
disturbingly high. U.S. homicide rates among 15 to 24-year-olds are four to
73 times higher than for the next 21 most developed nations. To put that statistic
in perspective, if you took the youth homicide rates for Austria, Japan, West
Germany, Denmark, Portugal, England, Poland, Ireland, Greece and France, added
them all together . . . and then tripled it, you’d get the U.S. rate.
Unfortunately, we have had an upside down view in how we treat high-risk youth.
We are willing to spend the very least amount of our time and money to keep
a kid safe and educated in a home with their family. We’ll pay far more
to put him through a series of foster homes and dependency services. And we
spend the most, the absolute limit, to institutionalize our children. And like
most things in life, we got the system that we’ve paid for. We have a
lot of neglected kids who are not safe and not getting an education. Many of
them are going through our dependency courts, our juvenile courts, and winding
up in institutions.
A child who can’t learn, and can’t get the special education he
or she needs is more likely to be troubled. In the bar’s own backyard,
we will have 20,000 dropouts in San Francisco alone and a 20 percent illiteracy
rate. Where do these kids go? 2,411 are placed in foster care, and on average
are shuttled from residence to residence to residence without any consistent
adult in their life.
These are the children who need us the most. Too many of them never leave
the system because no one is there to get them out. No adult is there to think
about them. And so in courtrooms and hospitals around this state, children
are turning up abused, beaten, pregnant, on drugs, lost, hopeless and desperately
needing an adult in their lives.
If we are honest with ourselves, the vast majority of lawyers will admit that
we don’t know these children at all. They are invisible to us. But what
they need most is for us and other members of the public to know them. Because
like every other child, they need some caring adults in their life who can
do for them what we all expect our families to do.
Over the years local bars and agencies have built programs that can effectively
connect lawyers to kids. Lawyers can provide four things: (1) legal advocacy;
(2) mentoring; (3) economic opportunity; and (4) financial support. The key
is that these programs are already here, and they just need for each of us
to contribute in the way that fits us best.
Keeping families together
The Bar Association of San Francisco has set up a program for children whose
families are being evicted to get them the social service, cash and legal help
they need to get into decent housing. They also offer ways to keep families
together by offering jobs to families in distress. For example, one program
allows working mothers to care for their own children by matching them with
attorneys who need day care. BASF also helps single parents with kids move
from welfare to work, by training them to work in law firms and then placing
them in law firm jobs.
And it has set up the responsible parenting project to work with parents who
don’t have custody of their children to teach them and help them to become
part of their child’s life again. For kids whose parents have abandoned
them or cannot care for them, lawyers can join a legal guardian panel. With
only a little bit of time, a lawyer can ensure that these children have a family:
a caring aunt or relative who can be their legal guardian.
Championing children
If there is no caring family member, many programs let lawyers provide that
care. This year, the California Young Lawyers Association piloted a project
to train lawyers to help young people transitioning out of foster care. Their
effort was so inspiring that one of the State Bar’s legal staff, Jill
Sperber, took the training herself, so that she could assist young people leaving
foster care. But we can all help keep kids in school and learning.
As every parent knows, students who can’t keep up in school often wind
up in trouble. Bar associations around the state have established programs
that get children an education and help with their learning and other disabilities.
Lawyers can also represent special needs children who should be getting an
individualized education plan and haven’t, or children in suspension
and expulsion proceedings, or who need medical help for their disability.
Law academies
Bar associations throughout the state now offer kids hope for the future through
local law academies. This year the Los Angeles County Bar Association started
a law academy that helps struggling students by focusing their studies on legal
issues, and giving them special assistance and direction. This program gives
students hope by also preparing them to work in a law office, to get mentors
and in some communities to work in an actual firm.
I know there are folks who think this is all good, but lawyers are too busy
and they aren’t that good with kids (we do tend to use big words and
we’re cautious to the point of being boring). On the latter point, there
is no better cure for being pompous or boring than spending time with kids.
But as for time, I know that we are all busy people. We sell our time in six-minute
intervals. We are tethered to our e-mail, Blackberrys, cell phones, fax machines,
voicemail; we are available to our clients, the courts and our adversaries
24 hours a day, seven days a week. Six minutes at a time and we often think
we can’t possibly find the time for this work.
But if we do not have time for a child in need, then who does? We are among
the most privileged people on the face of this earth. Each and every one of
us has a graduate degree, when only 3 percent of the world’s population
has ever been to college. Each of us is trained to protect individual rights.
More than half the world’s population lives under totalitarian regimes
where they have no rights. We practice in California, the richest and most
populous state, in the richest and most powerful nation in human history, and
as a profession we are among the wealthiest half of that state. If we do not
take responsibility for a generation of neglected and suffering children in
our own backyard, then who will? We should care about our time because with
smart choices, that time could save thousands of children’s lives in
this state.
So as I prepare to leave office this summer, I hope you’ll not only
join me in Monterey for the annual meeting, but that afterward, you’ll
take some time to play with a kid.
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