A juvenile court officer who’s based in Sioux City says she’s engaged in a “fundamentally different” way of working with troubled foster care kids, to try to keep them out of the prison system. Lisa Nelson is part of what’s called a “crossover team” in Woodbury County.
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The team includes law enforcement and court officials like Nelson as well as staff in group homes for foster care kids and mental health therapists.
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One of the team’s goals is to keep foster care kids from being sent from a foster care group home to juvenile detention, because it means the kid then gets a criminal record.
About one-third of the foster care kids who wind up in the prison system got there because they were involved in some sort of incident in a group home. Nelson’s team has been working with Georgetown University on this project since 2008. Nelson made her comments during recent testimony at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. More than 415-thousand American kids are in foster care today. Iowa ranks among the top 10 states in the percentage of its children in foster care.
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