Still Undecided?    
This Woman May Help     

   My opinion about child-parent reunification isn't well qualified. 

   Gay Courter's opinion is based on three decades of experience with the system. She was a guardian ad litem for 25 years.

   She wrote "I speak for this Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate," now used in recruiting and training guardians. She and her husband Philip produced more than 50 films on foster care, adoption and other child-welfare topics. Philip served for 10 years as chairman of a Standing Committee for Children and Families. 

   They have been foster parents, and adopted a daughter, age 12, who had been through 14 placements, many of them abusive, over nine years.

   After Jordan's death, Mrs. Courter wrote to the Tampa Bay Times that she watched people like Jordan's mother, herself once a foster child, grow up rootless, uneducated and engaged in substance abuse. Those without safe, permanent homes have gone to jail, been homeless, bore children who also ended up in the system, or died from violence or drugs.

   Jordan, she wrote, was a pawn to the policy of reunifying children at all costs. 

   "The court disregarded the voice of reason, the voice for the child: the guardian ad litem."

   "Even if Jordan had not been murdered, his life would have been dismal. Many youngsters suffer daily from abuse and neglect, and themselves end up in courts, jails and the mental health system. Child welfare specialists have superb tools to determine which families will never be safe," she writes.

   "Jordan's mother may spend the rest of her life in prison, costing far more than the price of protecting her own childhood, and Jordan's as well."

   Gay Courter considers the magistrate (whose signature is a scribble) among the guilty parties.

      Jimmy