With little notice last January, our Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill that included more tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to things like health care, education and child support enforcement.

You may be wondering why I’m writing about all that now. With even less notice, part of those cuts were in a special medicaid program, but interesting enough, the federal departments that implement medicaid have not yet communicated what those cuts mean to state and local communities.

I don’t know much about how these funds are used in other states, but here locally we use a portion of medicaid funds called Child Welfare: Targeted Case Management to fund Child Protection services and other things that assist urban children who are so often “left behind” in their struggles.
Our local governments have been trying to get answers to their questions of what these cuts mean and how they will be implemented for months now – to no avail. The reason this is so important is that it will have a devastating impact here. Our Twin Cities area stands to loose about $30 million that is used to protect children.

On a more personal note, I work for an agency that uses these funds to provide long term intervention for children who, prior to age 10, have already developed serious deliquency histories. These kids come from families where 90% of parents have a criminal history, 80% have histories with child protection, domestic assault and mental health/chemical dependency. All of them are living below poverty levels and have done so for generations. We have been working with about 70 families in this situation now for about 6 years. And yesterday we got the most recent report from the researchers looking at the effectiveness of our effots. To summarize, using a statistical analysis called Cox regression, they were able to show that 31% of the children in the program are likely to have been charged with one or more criminal offenses between the ages of 10 and 13. The comparison is that 83% of the control group is likely to have been charged with one or more offenses during that same age span. These are amazing results that will not only affect this group of 70 kids, but the whole community. This is because we are talking about working with the 7% of young people who research has been shown commit 80% of juvenile crime and cost our communities more than $2 million each in incarcerations costs over their lifetime.

What I learned this week about all of this just made me sick, but has the ring of truth. Local officials who are working hard on all of this say that the federal departments are not likely to announce what the cuts mean and their plan for implementation until after the election. Do people who vote really care what happens to abused children these days? Maybe yes and maybe no. But we’ll have to wait until the end of November to find out what’s happening just in case. The outcome of the election will not affect all of this, the deed has been done. But I wanted to go on record about this. Unless this is stopped, years from now we’ll be hearing more about kids hurt and killed because child protection didn’t intervene. And our rates of juvenile crime will go up. The end of November will be the day all of this started. Don’t forget it!!