Rethinking Foster Care

A year ago, I received an unexpected message on Facebook. It read: “Man we miss you how have u been. We were so devastated when u left.”   Of course my curiosity compelled me to respond immediately. Over the next hour, I reconnected with a former client – a kid who I represented over 15 year ago – who I hadn’t heard from in years. In our conversation, he shared stories of what happened to him and his brothers, all of whom had been in foster care, during the years in which we had lost touch. He described abuse they experienced in their foster home. As a result of that abuse, they ran away and experienced homelessness. When found, they were forced into a group home. All three aged out of foster care. All three spent time in jail. That night, after our conversation ended, one question pervaded my thoughts: Had I failed as their lawyer? The kids had been unsafe. They did not achieve legal permanency. They left foster care without a home. These are precise

Each fall, students in the University of Michigan Law School’s Child Welfare Appellate Clini c represent parents in termination of parental (“TPR”) appeals. We don’t cherry pick our cases for ones we're likely to win. Instead, at the end of July, we call up local courts and ask them to send us TPR cases in need of an appellate lawyer. We accept the first six we get. Then our students scrutinize the record, draft briefs and deliver oral arguments at the Michigan Court of Appeals.             Despite the randomness of our case assignments, every semester we discover laws being unenforced, which we bring to the attention of our appellate courts. Because of this, since 2015, our clinic has won roughly a third of our cases. We’ve gotten appellate courts to strike down a TPR statute for being unconstitutional , find that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires agencies to design service plans to accommodate the disabilities of parents in child welfare cases ,