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Book Review – Wards of the State
Claudia Rowe’s new book Wards of the State is a powerful look at the child welfare system across the country with a focus on Washington State. Her main argument is that the system creates “the foster care to prison pipeline”. She’s not wrong. Her basic premise is that foster care is bad for kids due…
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Microsoft 50th Anniversary
I thought it would be fun to open the scary box in the garage marked “Microsoft Memorabilia” on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the mother ship. I’ll post interesting things I find as I go through it. I have no memory of when these pins came out, but there was some big corporate…
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Discussion with Author David Ambroz
I’m sitting down with author and former foster child David Ambroz to discuss his memoir A Place Called Home. Thursday December 1st 7-8 PM at Elliot Bay Books on Capitol Hill in Seattle. 1521 10th Ave. He describes homelessness, foster care, and the struggles his mom goes through. The two of us will talk a…
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Eliminate Nasty Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers in Kirkland!
Gas powered leaf blowers are a plague. Their two-stroke engines produce more climate changing gases than a fleet of cars and their noise is damaging to the ears of both residents and the people that operate them. For the best-selling commercial leaf blower, one hour of operation emits smog-forming pollution comparable to driving a 2017…
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Black History Month
February is Black History Month. As a late-stage boomer, I got almost none of this history in school, despite growing up in a majority Black city (Philadelphia) and a big academic focus on American History in my youth. I’ve tried to make up for this appalling lack of knowledge in the past few years by…
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Update on nondiscrimination protections for children and youth in Washington
On February 2nd I wrote about the former president’s HHS agency leaders filing a rule that removed protections for LGBTQ children and youth and how Washington was not affected, as we had strong state protections. The order has now been blocked by both the Biden administration and the courts. From the American Public Human Services…
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Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud
I get regular emails from the Children’s Bureau with a collection of news clips about child welfare across the country. Some are helpful, some random, some totally uninteresting. At the top of the email today is a story out of Florida about the difficulty people have in adopting newborns. (Full disclosure – I didn’t watch…
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WA Won’t Discriminate
Right before the change in administration earlier this month the federal Health and Human Services agency repealed a rule that prohibited government contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, (SOGIE) or on religion. Washington does not allow this kind of discrimination today, and won’t allow it in the future.…
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Improving Education for Incarcerated Youth
The laws that define education funding in Washington are complex. You know this if you have been reading this blog for a long time – I spent a good part of the last two decades working on bringing it into the modern world. You can spend hours reading overly long posts about that work here.…
