 |
|
|
 |
|
 Anna Quindlen Celebrates
Volunteer Advocates
Author Anna Quindlen is an outspoken advocate for aiding abused children. Here she recounts the heroic actions of volunteer child advocates.
All writers have their regrets: a poorly wrought phrase here, an unconvincing character there. Paging through my scrapbooks and notebooks from decades as a reporter and a columnist, my regrets are both less tangible and more real. They are children, rising from the scribbled notes or the yellowed clippings, children beaten and bruised, neglected and abandoned, ignored or unloved. Sometimes I met them at schools, sometimes in foster homes or in government offices. Occasionally I reconstructed the story of their lives while they themselves lay in the city morgue.
It's impossible to be a journalist and retain any passion about the work without thinking that it does some good, to open the doors and windows and let daylight in. But it's also impossible to be a human being and walk away after a story is over and not feel as though you've abandoned the people and chosen the prose instead. This is doubly true when the story is the story of a child. More than doubly true. A hundred times. A thousand.
Volunteer advocates who serve children through CASA can recount a different kind of story, the story of the people who decided to become, not journalistic observers, not horrified onlookers, but engaged participants. As one couple admits, "Our daughter said she was tired of listening to us complain about how sad the news always was in the paper and on TV-how nobody helped make a difference. It was our time to either put up or shut up."
This is the story of the men, women and children of CASA, an acronym familiar to judges, lawyers, and families across America. The Court Appointed Special Advocates program was begun more than 25 years ago by a judge in Seattle who felt he needed more information about the children whose futures he was deciding in court. CASA trains ordinary people, working people and retired people, men and women, college educated and simply street smart, to become advocates for kids, to learn all they can about an individual child and his individual troubles and struggles and to report back to a judge about what the child needs as fairly and clearly as possible. It may be a kid in foster care whose biological parents want him back in their home. It may be a kid with disabilities whose mother is fighting for extra help in the classroom. It may be a group of kids, brothers and sisters, who have been driven apart by the legal system and who need to live together again. There are as many different kinds of cases as there are CASA volunteers.
The program is growing in leaps and bounds, so that any number written here will certainly be out-of-date by the time you read this, but by the end of the year 2005 alone there were more than 50,000 ordinary people working as court appointed special advocates. It is no exaggeration to say that they are the human component in a system that too often seems like a misery machine. The lawyers know the statutes, the social workers the regulations. But the CASA volunteer is assigned to know the child, one child at a time, to understand the boundaries of her life, to telephone her teachers, to consider her hopes and dreams, to try to come to some conclusion about what will be in her best interests. For children whose pasts have been chaotic, and whose future is uncertain, the CASA volunteer may be the most consistent interested presence in their lives.
Sometimes the most important job of those volunteers is to inject common sense into the situations they encounter. Dick Milton, who received CASA's Advocate of the Year Award in 2000, has made it his business to try to reunite siblings who have been parceled out to different foster homes, operating under the logical assumption that their brothers and sisters are all the family many kids have left. Beverly Tuttle, an advocate from South Dakota, discovered that the Native American teenaged sisters she was assigned had been placed in a juvenile detention facility for cutting school-to care for their quadriplegic mother. This CASA volunteer set out to find someone to care for the girls on the reservation until their mother could care for herself and for them. In one case in California, a teenager who had been in a foster home for many years was diagnosed with cancer. State policy required that she needed to be in a special facility, so at the moment she was facing terminal illness she was also facing the loss of the family she had come to love. It took Jan Miller, a CASA volunteer, to find out that the foster mother could get a waiver, and that the sick girl could be returned to the only real home she had ever known. [continue]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
