At one of my children’s latest 4-H meetings, they (the kids) voted to do a service project called the “Carry On Suitcase Project”. This program collects new and gently used suitcases, packed with age- and gender-appropriate personal hygiene items, books and toys, and distributes them to domestic abuse shelters and foster care agencies.

To paraphrase the comments about this program by one of the adult leaders of the club, ‘this is so important because these kids in foster care have nothing to carry their belongings in when they go from one place to another; most of the time their stuff is packed in garbage bags – once a child arrived at a new foster home and untied the garbage bag, and it was the garbage! They had put the wrong bag in the car when he was picked up.’

I’m sorry, but this is a blatant, bald-faced lie. Not saying that no child ever had to take his possessions from one foster home to another in a garbage bag, and not saying that a foster child’s belongings never got confused with the household trash, but it is completely unnecessary for the general public to have to dig deep and provide these kids with suitcases, personal hygiene items and toys.

Oh! You say. What a completely heartless and uncaring person MommyMagpie must be, to make these poor foster children schlep their stuff around in bags when lots of people have duffels and overnight bags lying around unused!

Nope, not heartless and uncaring. Just realistic.

According to the Foster Care manual (see section 4 at the link; it’s a Word document) for my state, the current ‘boarding care’ rate per child, per month, is $600. Yes, you read that correctly, SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS. This is meant to cover the child’s room and board. I’d take this to be a proportional amount of the rent/mortgage and utilities for the home. It’s also supposed to include “an amount for the child‘s personal allowance, personal necessities, school supplies, routine transportation, recreational expenses, etc. “ Foster parents are reimbursed for transporting the child to and from visits with the biological parents separately. They also may apply for reimbursement for transportation to and from medical appointments. (see link above, pages 31 and 32 of section 4).

So – let’s see…….imagine I am a foster parent and I have a foster child. I have three children of my own, so the foster child’s share of household expenses would be 1/5 of my total for mortgage and utilities (I’m including cable tv, internet access and telephone in the following figure), which would be: $155.40. Add another $200 for food. There’s $244.60 left EACH MONTH for personal allowance (between $25 – $50 per month depending on the child’s age), clothing and other things as specified in the quote above.

I looked online and found a complete 5-piece brand-name luggage set available at Wal-Mart for less than $80.

You mean to tell me that a foster parent can’t take the children in their care to Wal-Mart or another big-box discount store and get them an entire set of luggage to carry their stuff around in? We have to go begging for it?

Gimme a break.

(And the domestic abuse shelters most likely don’t need this stuff either. They get grant money according to the capacity of the shelter, and I’d venture a guess that they get a surplus amount.)

A link to this article came through my Facebook feed recently. According to the article, child abuse in West Virginia is declining, but the group “Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia” is advocating a three-pronged approach to further reducing the incidence of child abuse throughout the state.

The first item on their agenda, which can be seen if you scroll down the article to the embedded Scribd window, is to expand the In-Home Family Education program to allow for an expansion of early childhood home visitation programs statewide.

Next, they want over a half-million dollars to expand the “Partners in Prevention” program to all 55 counties.  This funds ‘training and local grants for evidence-based and innovative programs that prevent child abuse and neglect before it occurs’.

Finally, nearly a quarter-million dollars to fund a safe-sleep education campaign, a program about crying babies to deal with reducing shaken-baby syndrome, and a sexual-abuse-prevention training program.

The article says child abuse reports are down 39% from 2005 to 2009. Of course we all want the rate of child abuse to be zero, but the last time I checked, pigs have yet to grow wings. I’m just not sure whether throwing more money (a big portion of which is Federal money) at it is going to reduce it any more quickly.

One way I’d suggest to reduce those numbers is for the social workers who investigate reports to actually determine that there is something of substance there, rather than yanking three children out of school and child care, placing them in foster care before the parent is even notified, on the word of the 14-year-old sibling who was grounded for excessive truancy etc. and subsequently ran away from home on the advice of the high school guidance counselor.

And the guidance counselors – where do they learn to tell high-school students that if their parents impose disciplinary consequences (non-corporal) for any offense, that they can call an 800 number and be taken to a “youth shelter”?  When I was in high school, the guidance counselor was the person you talked to about where to go to college or trade school, and what to major in once you got accepted to college. I think if anyone had gone to my guidance counselor and wanted s*x advice, he would have said “don’t waste my time, that’s what your parents are for!”

Or recognizing that there are families which adhere to a more traditional moral code than what is glorified in many television programs and movies, and a house rule that prohibits sexual activity between a person listed on the tax return as a dependent, and a guest in the aforementioned home, is within the limits of parental authority.

But there’s not much likelihood of those things happening.  West Virginia is the most socialist state in the union according to this article, with public expenditures swallowing nearly a third of the state’s GDP every year. For a state whose motto is “Mountaineers Are Always Free”, we just keep electing lawmakers and executives who see government intervention as the only answer to any problem, and encouraging activist groups to lobby for more government money to be thrown at their pet issue, so that we become less and less free, bit by tiny bit.

Where are we going, and why exactly are we in this handbasket?

I was originally going to post this as a comment to this post, but I decided to make it an entry in my diary because there might be folks out there like me who took a few years to get their wheels under them, so to speak. Until 2009 I’d never participated in a protest, never worked a political campaign, never put signs in my yard or stickers on my car, and certainly never worked any phone banks.  Now?  All that and more is old hat to me.

Back in the early spring of 2010, when WV primary season was just getting started, I had the brilliant idea to ditch the social studies, civics and history textbooks my kids had been using (I’m a homeschooler) and give them a hands-on lesson in the electoral process.  So I started looking around for a good primary candidate whose campaign we could help out with.  As it happened there was a really nice, personable local guy running for the GOP nomination for WV-01, US House of Representatives.  I very carefully researched his positions on issues that are important to me and, after he passed those tests, I contacted his campaign and thus began one of the most exciting 6 months of my life.

We became regulars at the campaign office for the entire primary season, once even taking sub-sandwich fixings and providing dinner to all the staffers and the candidate.  We stuffed envelopes, put up yard signs, stuck bumper stickers on my car, made phone calls (my then-9-year-old son even spent some time on the phones) and basically were very visible as enthusiastic supporters.

Our candidate lost the primary, but we lost no time in contacting the nominee’s campaign and getting on board with him. We walked in parades, carried banners, stuck on more bumper stickers, made more phone calls, attended rallies and debates, and again were visible and enthusiastic.

I did everything I could to ask intelligent questions, be knowledgeable about issues and events, be honest about when I could do campaign/election activities and not blow off those commitments. I found that everyone we met was happy to answer my kids’ questions as well, and I got lots of very positive feedback on my ‘hands-on’ approach to teaching them about politics, government and elections.

After the election (congratulations Congressman David McKinley!) I approached the county chair and asked if she’d mind to let me know when the next county meeting would be.  She did, I went.

And at last night’s county meeting I was appointed by the county chair to fill a vacant seat on the county Executive Committee.

So just like audax, I showed up.  I don’t know where I’ll go from here, but I’m definitely going to keep showing up!

I’m no pundit, just an opinionated pro-life homeschooling conservative.

The backstory of this is that I got campaign signs from the local hq for most of the conservative candidates for the 2010 Midterms, and put them in my yard.  One of them didn’t have a wicket, so I stuck it in the dining room window.  The sign in my window endorsed Judge Yoder for a seat on the state Supreme Court.  One of my very good friends emailed me shortly thereafter and told me that His Honor did not have the endorsement of the state pro-life organization because he supported FOCA.  Needless to say, I couldn’t quite understand how a Republican candidate for public office would support such a heinous thing, so I emailed the Judge’s website and asked him.  What ensued was a very informative exchange wherein I got an education about candidate endorsements, the necessity of researching a candidate’s ENTIRE voting record, and a bunch of other stuff.

By the way, if anyone reading this is interested in reading the information I received from Judge Yoder, please let me know and I will forward it along.  It is a lengthy letter and several attached .pdf files and is just too much to post here.  In summary, Judge Yoder is, as far as I’m concerned, pro-life and should have received the endorsement.  Once I read the information with which he provided me, I was quite comfortable in voting for him and have resolved to always check out candidate’s positions myself, asking the candidate himself when possible (and squaring what the candidate tells me “off the record” with his offical campaign positions by pointed and persistent digging).

One thing that was brought to my attention by all this was the way pro-life organizations here in this state are perfectly willing to endorse candidates from either political party (never mind that the Democrats’ platform specifically states that they fully support broad access to abortion and contraception for everyone, which doesn’t sound very pro-life to me).  After the Bart Stupak betrayal that enabled the passage of Obamacare, the Michigan pro-life organization decided to not endorse any more Democrats for elected office, which I think is very, very smart.

Also brought to my attention by my exchange with Judge Yoder was the state pro-life organization’s habit of endorsing nominally pro-life incumbents, even when the challenger has taken a more strongly pro-life position.  Almost like they don’t want to upset the status quo………when the status quo is Roe v. Wade and legalized, government-subsidized abortion and millions of dead babies.

Now this is brought to my attention:  an editorial on Huntington News.net detailing how a nominally pro-life Democrat Congressional candidate did not get an endorsement because of his favorable vote for Obamacare, but our state governor, who went on record numerous times supporting it (Obamacare) and only started talking about repealing the ‘bad parts’ after it was passed AND he’d started campaigning for the US Senate, did get an endorsement.  I really don’t get that, and the writer of the editorial didn’t either.

While thinking about this post and deciding whether to put it here or on my regular blog, I remembered something I heard during the primaries.  I worked for the campaign of a candidate for our House district who lost the primary, and when the WVFL endorsements came out on their little palmcard, I was a bit dismayed to find that “my” candidates name wasn’t on the list, but several Democrat candidates had been endorsed.  the story I got was, that WVFL will only endorse the candidate in a primary who also has the endorsement of the national political party of which he is a member.

Excuse me, but I think that’s dumb, and counterproductive.  Seems to me that if WVFL were really interested in defeating the Culture of Death, they would take the time to vet the candidates themselves, paying attention to the platforms of the parties as well as the COMPLETE voting records of the candidates themselves, and do the following:  only endorse pro-life candidates whose party is also pro-life; endorse all pro-life candidates in a primary, not just the one who has the national political party backing (this would truly let the voters decide which candidate they want to fill a particular office – I know many voters who won’t vote for a non-WVFL-endorsed candidate, even when shown that another candidate has a better position on life issues); and finally to refuse to endorse any incumbent candidate whose party is not pro-life, especially when that candidate’s voting record aligns with party position rather than personal statements.

Basically for me, what it comes down to is this:  I will carefully research all candidates’ positions on life issues, and will read their Party’s official platform to see what it says about the same issues.  I will always vote for the most pro-life candidate on any ballot whose party’s platform is also pro-life (this is the only way I see to potentially avoid being Stupak’ed again).  Sometimes this will mean voting a straight ticket.  Sometimes it might mean voting for a so-called ‘unelectable’ third-party candidate.  Because you know, all it takes for a perfectly qualified but ‘unelectable’ candidate to win is – more votes than any other candidate on the ballot for that office.