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Because Children Can't Wait: Leading the Charge and Shaping the Change
March 30, 2004
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Thank you, Kitty, and good morning, everyone. Kitty and Mark, it is good to be with you again. I appreciate all that both of you-and everyone in this room-does for the children of this state! Kitty, that was a wonderful introduction! It is at times like this-when someone has said such nice things about me-that I wish two people would be in the audience: my wife, because every once and a while, particularly after I have been on a long road trip, she needs to hear those nice things! And my mother, because she would believe every word of it!
I love the work I do-and I love to talk about it-but I promise you that if I do nothing else, I will do two things today: stay within my allotted time, and stop speaking before you stop listening! I will never forget the story about a lecturer, also enamored with their topic, who went on about thirty minutes longer than the time set for the speech, at which time a member of the audience in the front row stood up and began walking out. Incredulous that someone would walk out on his brilliant oratory, he paused, and asked the person where he thought he was going. The person turned to face the lectern and said: "To get a haircut!" Even more incredulous now, the lecturer asked: "Didn't you know you needed a haircut before you walked in here?" To which he responded: "With all due respect, I didn't need a haircut when I arrived this morning!"
You know, I've tried to do my homework, in preparation for this presentation, but I'm at a bit of a disadvantage. I come on the scene from a national organization, at a gathering where everyone in the audience knows the local situation much better than I do. It reminds me of a story I heard once about a man who was hiking along a country road, on a spring day much like today. He came upon a shepherd and a huge flock of sheep.
The man said to the shepherd, "I will bet you $100 against one of your sheep that I can tell you the exact number of sheep in this flock."
The shepherd thought it over for a moment, and he took the bet.
Says the hiker, "You have exactly 973 sheep."
The shepherd is astonished, because that is exactly right. "O.K." says the shepherd, "I'm a man of my word. Take an animal."
The man picks one up and begins to walk away.
"Wait," says the shepherd. "Give me a chance to get a little of my own back. Double or nothing that I can guess where you are from."
"O.K., you're on."
The shepherd says, "You're from Washington, DC. You probably run one of those national organizations."
"Amazing," says the man. "You are exactly right! But tell me, how did you figure that out?"
"Easy," says the shepherd. "Put down my dog and I will tell you."
Now, friends, even though I'm not from Wisconsin, I do know a sheep from a dog. And I truly believe I have some things to tell you that are of value precisely because I bring a national perspective. But this story illustrates an important point.
Numbers matter. It's tremendously important to have the right data. But if all you know about a situation are the numbers, there's still a lot you don't know. As Ralph Smith from the Annie E. Casey Foundation likes to say, "Not everything that matters can be counted. And not everything that can be counted matters."
I once heard somebody say that statistics are people with the tears washed off.
Now, we need statistics. We need to know how many children we have in our "flock." We need to know how long these children are staying in care, and how often they move from one placement to another. But if we focus only on the numbers, and if we only talk to each other, and if we do not see the tears, we don't know much about the kind of lives they are leading-about the real-world outcomes. In a case like that, it wouldn't be too surprising if we did something stupid. And my friends, we can not afford a lot of mistakes, because these are children we're dealing with and they are a sacred trust.
Times are hard right now, as we all know. We're being asked to do much more with much less. This is true for national organizations as well as it is for state and local agencies. The same pressures squeeze us all. The squeeze might not be so painful if we had started out with a surplus - a surplus of dollars, of trained personnel, of public good will-of anything besides challenges. It might not be so painful if we had even started out adequately funded. But the fact is, our systems have never had the resources they needed to carry out their vital mandate. And now, while the dire needs are increasing, the resources seem to be dwindling day by day.
In the face of all that, we might be tempted to just sit tight and wait for better days. If we were shepherds, maybe we could just sit down under a tree. But children can't wait. As Gabriella Mistral said, "The child's name is today."
Those of us who have children know from experience that children can't wait. They're always asking us, "Are we there yet?" "When will I be six?" "How many more days until school starts?" Or, as they grow a little older, until school lets out. People who aren't parents can probably remember the pain of waiting from their own childhood. Time moves very slowly, in a child's world.
Those of us who work for children and young people know that children can't wait in a different sense as well. While we adults may measure time in calendar years or fiscal years, in budget cycles or electoral cycles, or, especially since Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), in an allowance of fifteen months to permanency, children enter the world with their own non-negotiable developmental timetables. Failing to meet the needs that punctuate that timetable-in child time, not adult time-is likely to have long-term negative consequences. ASFA and the Child and Family Service Reviews (CFSRs) have made time move a bit faster for all of us, over the last five or six years, and that's a good thing. Children grow fast, while our systems tend to move slowly.
1. The CSFRs
So let's talk about those CFSRs. The Reviews have also caused us to generate a lot of data that we didn't have before, in a format that is consistent across the entire US. They've given us a framework for data consistency within states that are sometimes very large and various. That's a good thing too. Administrators in Vermont, in Oklahoma, in Texas, and in North Carolina are saying that it's a great help to have one set of factors they can track and measure in every district and every county. They're revising their provider contracts to reflect the same factors, and even without new resources, they're seeing a clearer and more hopeful picture.
Are the reviews always measuring the right things? Definitely not. The Child Welfare League of America is helping to facilitate a process to sharpen the instruments, and I'll tell you more about that in a moment. In the short time I have this morning, though, I want to focus on just three topics that seem to stand out from the experience of the states, as they analyze their CFSRs and work through their PIPs. These are engaging families, prioritizing front-end services, and valuing our workforce.
I know that the states which have shared their process are highlighting other success factors as well. These include prioritizing needs, choosing realistic goals, and integrating the PIPs with any other plans that are already underway in the state. For now, though, I'm choosing some areas where we're closest to the system's impact on human lives and that's what it's all about!!
I do not say that to denigrate good data. One of the first things I did when I came to CWLA was to almost triple the size of our research and data division. I'm happy to say that even though we've been through some downsizing-just like many of you-that division has remained virtually intact. It's a high priority.
At CWLA, though, we consistently deal with data in terms of its application to real lives, and with research in terms of its application to practice. We try to keep flipping the telescope, so we're looking at the big picture and then we're looking at the small one, and both perspectives get their due. That's what I'll be trying to do today as I talk about each of these three topics.
I knew you're doing that in Wisconsin too, and I know it's happening in the states that are already implementing their plans and seeing results. In Oklahoma, for example, every quarterly report for every supervisor includes two comprehensive reviews and four case reviews. So far, a little over a year into implementation, they have met the review criteria on 8 goals and 25 objectives. They know, to pick just one significant indicator, that they are now getting 99% conformance on worker visits with families. But the numbers don't tell them what impact those visits are having on children. So they flip the telescope. They look at the case reviews, and they talk to the people they're serving.
2. Engaging Families
As some of you will know, CWLA has developed a major document called Making Children a National Priority: A Framework for Community Action, as well as the first of a projected series of Community Implementation Guides. It's not just a document, but a new way of doing business, and we're beginning to work with communities to carry it out. Some say our Framework vision differs from that of the CFSRs in that it goes beyond the child welfare system. It includes all the actors in a community and all the things that children and families need to thrive - but I am not so sure that they are that different.
Its core is a statement of five universal needs that all children share. Briefly stated, they are Basic necessities, nurturing Relationships, Opportunities to succeed, Safety, and Healing when harm has been done. Supporting families is the first of the nine core principles that underpin the Framework for Community Action, and families are the first stakeholders we consider in every collaborative effort.
Now, child welfare systems come into the picture, in most cases, because family relationships are not what they should be. Caseworkers and foster parents can and do develop nurturing relationships with our children to make up for what's missing. Nevertheless, blood relationships remain the most basic relationships in most children's lives. And across America, our human services systems are doing a less than stellar job of supporting those relationships. That finding is turning up in the CFSRs in state after state, and I believe it's one of the areas that Wisconsin has identified for its Program Enhancement Plan.
Yes, our systems still have an enormous amount of work to do in recruiting, retaining, and supporting both foster parents and workers. Today I see many agencies that are interacting more respectfully with workers and foster parents than they did just a few years ago. They may even be approaching adequate training for their workers and their foster parents. But far too many are still behind the mark in the way they interact with mothers, fathers, siblings, and other relatives of the children they serve-particularly fathers and siblings.
I'm afraid this looks like a remnant of the old-fashioned rescue mentality; of the days when child welfare professionals thought their job was to take children away from their families and get them off to a better start in some other environment.
Today, we know that you can take the child out of the family, but you can't take the family out of the child.
Nor would you want to. Family members are usually our best resources, and each other's best resources. And we consistently undervalue them. Our theory has changed dramatically, but our practice hasn't always kept pace.
I said earlier that children can't wait, and that their clocks and calendars run differently from those of our systems. A mother who was interviewed for the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care provided one example of how those calendars collide. Maybe there's a court delay of six months in making a permanency decision… a fairly typical delay. "Six months within a family's life is a long time," she explained. "If I go to court in September and you give me six months, that's through February. That's Halloween-Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. Plus a couple of birthdays. Those are important times for a family."
Fathers, in particular, too often get short shrift. It takes an extra effort to find them and engage them. I know all the reasons why agencies under stress can't always muster that extra effort, but somehow, we've got to find a way to do it. A father who didn't care at one stage of his life may care a great deal at another, if we can just give him the opportunity.
It may be that neither parent is able to rally for the sake of the children. We cannot assume that, until we have offered a full array of adequate and timely services; but we all see such cases where they do rally. And there are still siblings and other relatives to consider. Some of you may have the pleasure of knowing April Curtis, a former foster child and the youngest member of CWLA's Board of Directors. While barely out of her teens, April has been bringing our organization, and much of the nation, to a more acute awareness of the importance of sibling bonds. She is a force to be reckoned with.
April reminds us that termination of parental rights terminates siblings' rights as well. Only 11 states address post-adoption contact for siblings in their statutes, though nine others make some allusion to it. According to April's research, only 26 states address the sibling relationship at all in their child welfare legislation. And there is no such thing as a sibling registry to facilitate reunions.
Although agencies do make efforts to keep siblings together, she estimates that up to 75% of sibling groups in some states end up living apart after they enter foster care.
Yet we all know that our relationships with our siblings are the most enduring relationships in most of our lives, predating our bonds with spouses and children and outliving our bonds with parents. And we know that siblings who grow up in families under stress are likely to have even stronger bonds than other siblings. According to a 1997 study by Indiana Law University, one of the leading reasons kids run away from care is to be reunited with their sisters or brothers.
April tells a story about a day when she was seven years old. A judge endorsed her social worker's decision that their grandmother's apartment was too crowded for April and her two sister and brother. But April had carried her piggy bank along to court, and her grandmother had taught her how to use a pay phone to call a cab. So she left the new foster home and found her way back to her grandmother's before the grownups knew what was happening. The grownups in question were so impressed that they let her stay, though that wasn't the first separation or the last.
If I had thought about it at all, I would probably have thought of one visit a month as a somewhat reasonable effort to keep siblings connected, until I saw it through April's eyes. April invites you to do the math, and you realize that's one hour out of 720, IF nobody gets sick, and nobody's out of town or on vacation, and there is no breakdown in transportation, and both siblings arrive for the visit on time. Very, very often, it's less.
Children can't wait. And that's a good thing. Because sometimes, like April, they grow up to be powerful change agents.
The research evidence substantiates what April knew when she was seven. Our Research to Practice team has collected numerous studies showing that:
- Children in kinship care experience greater comfort and fewer moves than children in other placements, and they are more likely to stay home once they return home.
- Frequent, purposeful visitation contributes to successful placement and reunification and reduces the time to reunification.
- Children who receive more frequent visits have fewer problem behaviors.
- Family Group Conferencing, which makes parents and other relatives respected members of the permanency team, produces dramatically improved outcomes for children, young people, and families. In one Northwest Institute study of older children in residential treatment, 93% were able to move to less restrictive settings when families were respectfully engaged.
- A number of highly promising programs, engage young people in care, family members, and foster parents as trainers. Judges, social workers, and administrators listen to them, for a change, and gain the benefit of their unique perspectives.
3. Prioritizing Front-End Services
Family bonds are worth preserving whenever that is consistent with a child's safety and well-being. If we accept this principle-and I think we all do-then we also have to prioritize front-end services.
Once again, I understand all the reasons why we don't. Federal funding streams are currently structured to put the lion's share of the dollars into foster care reimbursement. They make it hard for states to spend those dollars on mental health and substance abuse treatment that might keep children at home, or on alternatives like subsidized guardianship, that can keep them within the extended family. Fostering Results, a project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, describes the current federal funding structure as a straitjacket. Nevertheless, some states are busting out. Waivers have allowed Illinois, Connecticut, and Delaware to change their outcomes significantly.
- By subsidizing private guardianship, Illinois provided stable, permanent homes for more than 6,800 children. By keeping those same children out of foster care, the state saved $28 million, which it reinvested in other front-end services. The number of children in foster care went down from 51,000 to 19,000 in just five years.
- Connecticut used its waiver to provide intensive residential mental health services to children with severe needs. The children spent considerably less time in foster care and were able to function better when they did return home.
- Delaware identified families who needed substance abuse treatment and other services in an initial assessment. Instead of putting them on a waiting list, it provided appropriate services right away. Overall, the time their children spent in foster care was reduced by one-third.
Other waivers are in limbo, and HHS' current authority to grant them is scheduled to expire tomorrow. But that can't be the end of the story. I believe greater flexibility will be among the urgent recommendations that the Pew Commission on Foster Care releases this spring or summer. Although no recommendations have been made public so far, indications are that it will also recommend greater resources. Otherwise it's going to be like squeezing a balloon, where constricting one part creates a bulge in another -- and the breaking point is never far away.
4. Valuing Our Workforce.
Families First should be our motto. Let me turn the telescope again to the children and families behind the data and the people in our system who make a difference for them every day. The hearts and hands and feet of our system are the child welfare workforce, and many of those feet are walking out, or failing to walk in, for reasons that are clear to just about everybody. Two major national reports last year told us what we need to do about this. The federal government has a large role to play. In fact, the title of the 2003 GAO report was HHS Could Play a Greater Role in Helping Child Welfare Agencies Recruit and Retain Staff. I didn't say that, this time-the General Accounting Office (GAO) did.
That GAO report noted that workforce shortages were linked to poor CSFR outcomes in all 27 of the states that had been reviewed at that point. I believe this is one of the areas that you have identified for special efforts in your own PEP.
The other report, released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in tandem with a detailed study by the Brookings Institution, points out that social service jobs at every level consistently rank among the five worst-paying professional jobs as tracked by the U.S. Department of Labor. That says appalling things about our values as a nation. It's interesting, though, that money is usually mentioned last, if at all, in the exit interviews we have seen. Frustration is what drives people away-and a breakdown in the working relationship between staff and managers.
It almost seems that the more idealistic staff are, and the more highly motivated to benefit others, the more quickly they find the working conditions in most child welfare agencies intolerable. Creative and entrepreneurial employees are frustrated by the lack of opportunities to take initiative. They either find a way to bust out of the straitjacket, or they walk.
I saw the news story just a week ago reporting over 50% turnover in Milwaukee last year. That's awful. But our 2003 nationwide survey found an average of 45% turnover in private agencies across the country, and most of the Milwaukee case managers worked for private agencies, if my information is correct.
Again, it's not just about the numbers. It's about the kids.
You and I both know what a tragedy high worker turnover is for fragile young people! How much it costs when a young person who has never been able to trust an adult finds someone trustworthy, takes the risk, and reaches out to place her trust in that person, and then loses, yet one more time, because that worker leaves the agency? The workforce crisis in child welfare deprives the young people who most need stability, who face the steepest and loneliest climbs toward adulthood, of the tenuous footholds they are able to gain. And that is a tragedy.
We expect the federal government to do more. CWLA supports the Child Protective Services Improvement Act, H.R. 1534, which would create an incentive fund to help states build a strong workforce and also provide loan forgiveness for students who work in child welfare. That would be a good place to start.
We also recommend that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review and assess employee screening tools as part of the Child and Family Service Reviews process. Competency-based interviews are one of the tools the GAO report recommends. HHS, which reviewed the GAO findings and agreed with most of them, should track the recruitment and retention of child welfare workers nationwide in the context of improving overall child safety.
There are things that agencies can do too, though. CWLA's Workforce Initiative has been busy for several years identifying agencies that are successful at recruiting and retaining high-quality staff and disseminating their best ideas to the field. Our team also studied best practices in the business world, to see what works for the for-profit sector. Most of our recommendations closely parallel those in the other reports, but the one that came from the business world is not in either of them, and I'd like to emphasize it.
Our study showed that every organization, whether it's the Ford Motor Company, Wendy's restaurants, or the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, will retain workers if it can make its mission crystal clear and gain its workers' commitment to that mission. And whose mission is more compelling than ours?
I frequently challenge the audiences I address to go out and invite everybody in their city, their state, and our nation to buy into the mission and vision of child welfare. That's how we will make children a national priority. But obviously, before we do that, we have to sell it to our own employees. Is it possible that we have been overlooking that first step?
I am not one who assumes that the business sector does everything better than the public or nonprofit sector. We're pretty good at what we do. Still, it may be that business has a few things to teach us about refining and packaging our vision and keeping it in front of our employees as a star to steer by. Let's at least think about that.
So what else did the reports call out as solutions for our workforce?
- All of the studies, including our own, mention university training partnerships. They work, especially when they include tuition support. In Kentucky and California, 86% and 85%, respectively, of workers who are helped to obtain higher education, remain with their agencies beyond the time they committed to in accepting assistance.
- Training always pays dividends, even if it's in-service and in-house. And staff development opportunities that expose workers to a wider world pay big dividends.
- Agency accreditation has gone a long way to boost morale and worker retention in a number of agencies, including large public agencies. And we are seeing more state agencies take up the challenge. That's good news for children and families.
- We also strongly support enhanced supervision, mentoring, career ladders, and leadership development, because we know they work. And because we're in big trouble without them!
High turnover is a problem at the tops of our organizations as well as down in the ranks. In both the public sector (where commissioners have an average tenure of not much over two years) and the private (where charismatic leaders often determine the culture and character of an organization), the Baby Boomer generation is planning retirement. With the exception of a few states, there's precious little planning for succession.
To recap, then, there are at least three steps we must take to reach better outcomes for our children: engage families, prioritize front-end services, and value our workforce. There are lots of other factors that matter. One of these is the role of the courts, which is so critical that the Pew Commission is making it one of their two areas of focus. I believe that Wisconsin is doing better than most states in this regard.
5. Financing the System
The other major area for the Pew Commission is the system's financing. As Jess McDonald has been heard to say, solving that puzzle is not rocket science-it's MUCH harder than that. Jess likely will be giving you a glimpse into the Commission's thinking in his address tomorrow, so I won't try to anticipate him.
Let me just state CWLA's position on this matter briefly and simply.
- First, we must preserve and expand the federal guarantee of Title IV-E Foster Care and Adoption Assistance.
- Second, we support comprehensive reform of the child welfare system so that states and child serving community agencies have both the flexibility and the new federal investments they need.
- And finally, we oppose any attempt to trade flexibility for capped funding - this offers us less, not more.
This approach is not national reform because it is not informed by the evidence base and by practice wisdom, and it does not offer the new investments we need to protect our children and strengthen our families-and it does not respond to the CFSR's and the national story they tell.
6. The Data Workgroup
I told you that I would come back to some problems with the CFSR data. Many thoughtful people, including the state commissioners, federal officials, and researchers who constitute our National Working Group to Improve Child Welfare Data, have been concerned that the reviews were not measuring all the right things. John Tuohy has been active in our National Working Group, and last year he participated in the special subcommittee on outcomes. He helped shape the group's recommendations to the Children's Bureau on current and future outcomes, and he has contributed a great deal. We are grateful for his participation.
One of the reasons this data group is so important is that we know more now than we did when the CFSR process was first designed. Because so little useful data was around in 1998 on quality-of-life outcomes for children and families, the good folks at the Children's Bureau designed a process in which the data system determined the outcome measures, rather than vice versa. The information they set out to collect is the information that was available then, what AFCARS and NCANDS can produce.
According to Carrie Friedman, the Director of our National Data Analysis System, that's useful data for administrative purposes, but it doesn't tell us much about what's happening at the child, family, and community level. The case studies are supposed to provide the view from the other end of the telescope, but many observers have noted that the sample sizes are too small to yield useful data.
The members of the National Working Group, who include folks from the Children's Bureau as well as state agency administrators, continue to work on understanding the comparability issues around state outcome measures. Right now a sub-group is trying to reach consensus on the definition of placement stability. We know that this is not a reliable measure because of the different ways that states count placements. The group hopes to develop a threshold definition against which states can compare their data. After they succeed with this one, Carrie tells me, we'll tackle other definitions.
CWLA manages the National Resource Center on Child Welfare and Information Technology. Both the Center and our National Data Analysis System are providing support to the states, and so is the National Child Welfare Resource Center for Organizational Improvement, at the University of Maine. I'm sure many of you have worked with them.
We recommend-and have formally suggested to the Children's Bureau-that the Bureau provide both technical assistance and resources beyond what is currently available. The experience of the states that have benefited from the Center, and from other supports, could be made available to all the states. CWLA recommends three steps:
- First, create the opportunity for states to share tools that enhance their ability to use data effectively, perhaps through an online forum and through added sessions at the National Data Conference.
- Second, provide staff experts to help states do some of the work they need to make their data into a tool for better practice.
- And third, offer more capacity-building grants, so the wealth of information available in many of the state systems can be transformed into improved outcomes for children in other states.
Now that the reviews will soon be over, we're ready to move on to the real work around the US-developing child welfare systems that are worthy of our children. Let's get everybody on board with making children a national priority. We can do it if we stick together and we don't give up.
7. Children's Memorial Flag Day and Mid-West Conference
Before I close, I want to enlist your support for two upcoming events that can help us to make sure children are a priority and they don't have to wait. The first is an annual observance CWLA has been heading up since 1998, called Children's Memorial Flag Day. April, as you all know, is the month dedicated to preventing child abuse and neglect. We have set aside the 4th Friday in that month-that's April 23rd, this year-to remember children and young people who have died as a result of violence.
While the number of child abuse and neglect reports has been falling slightly, in recent years, the number of maltreatment deaths has stayed just about the same, at around 1,200. We know that this number is probably an undercount. And we know that it does not count the thousands of older children who are murdered every year, or those who take their own lives. In many cases, both of these are child abuse deaths that took ten or twelve or fourteen years to happen. A young person ceased to value his or her own life, or anyone else's, because some of those non-negotiable needs were not met in the early years.
These are the children who Hillary Clinton, in speaking at our national conference this year, called "the last, the least, and the lost." We focus on children who have died for the benefit of those who are living. We recognize that stark grief can capture people's attention when sunnier stuff might not. In recent years, every state has been participating in some way, but we still have a long way to go. We'd like to see an observance in every community. There's a Flag flyer in your conference packet. Please get in touch with us if you'd like to hold a Flag Day observance where you live, work, or worship.
The other event is our upcoming Mid-West Regional Conference, which will take place in Indianapolis from June 7 - 11 of this year. It will be combined with a National Juvenile Justice Summit, so one registration covers four days of information, inspiration, and interaction with your peers from around the region. You can read about it and register online at www.cwla.org.
Everyone-from front-line worker to CEO-needs the encouragement, support and good counsel of friends and colleagues-today more than ever. That challenge leads me to share two complementary thoughts that I would like to close with today, the first of which is actually a story.
A visiting lecturer was speaking to a group of businessmen and women on the subject of risk management-a subject that we're not unfamiliar with.
To drive home one of his points, he asked for a volunteer from the audience. He asked him the following question:
"Imagine that I have a huge steel I-beam here-25 feet long and 6 inches wide. If I put it on the floor in front of this audience, would you be willing to walk across it for $50?"
"Of course I would", said the volunteer.
"All right," said the lecturer, "now let's imagine that the I-beam is now 75 feet long and has been suspended high above the ground between the two sides of a gorge, with a 300 foot drop. Would you be willing to walk across that same I-beam for $50?"
"Of course not," said the volunteer.
Raising his voice dramatically, the lecturer continued. "Now imagine," he said, "that I am on one side of the gorge and you are on the other - and I am holding one of your children over the edge. If you don't come across the I-beam and get your child, I will drop him. Now will you cross the beam?"
The volunteer hesitated for a long moment before making his reply-actually, a question. He then said, "Which one of my kids do you have?"
I can tell by the laughter in the room that a good number of you who are parents have had "one of those days" with your kids!
I tell this story to make a very important point. You are unlikely to ever meet an individual who says that he or she does not care about kids. Politicians of every stripe are famous for kissing babies and wanting to pose surrounded by children. All of us truly do want the best for children on some level. But the way people express that seems to vary a great deal.
The man in my story was being asked a very clear question: exactly what steps are you willing to take to help a child? What kind of priority do children have for you when the going gets rough; when there are choices to be made? And his answer revealed what may be an even harder question-WHICH children are you willing to help?
The truth of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of parents would do whatever it takes to get across that I-beam; but as a society-perhaps through our benign neglect-we don't, and kids are slipping through the cracks and to one extent or another falling into the gorge!
Yet I want to leave you today with a reminder that despite this apathy-or benign neglect-good things keep on happening! Parents take advantage of a second chance and learn how to better nurture and protect their children. Young people are graduating from high school and college this month who would have dropped out years ago if you or someone who works for you had not provided an unforgettable interruption in their lives. I first heard that phrase from a New York school principal named Lorraine Monroe, who likes to call whatever point she's most determined to prove today "the Monroe Doctrine." One of her doctrines is that young people respond to adults who believe in them-not easily, and not at first, but over time, if you hang in with them. You've all seen it happen, because you're all believers. I, too, am a believer!
So I leave you with the challenge to continue "walking the I-beam" for kids…and to never stop being that "unforgettable interruption" in a child's life. I thank you for all you do on behalf of children. And I thank you on behalf of all those kids who never had the chance to say thank you-or perhaps never even knew that a thank you was in order, as their life is better than it would have been because of the difference you have made in some quiet but profound way.
I appreciate your attention-I think I stayed within my allotted time-and I don't think anyone left to get a haircut! Enjoy the rest of your day and keep up the critically important work you do each and every day!
Thank you very much.
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