Alabama is one of the poorest states in the nation - yet they've drastically reduced the use of shelters. New Jersey is also broke, but look at their record - only one child under age 13 placed in a shelter in six months in the entire state. The Mercury News reports that Santa Clara County closed its shelter because it was such a disaster for the kids. The reason "Receiving Homes" are worse is because the trauma of removal that you describe is compounded with every additional move - and a receiving home *guarantees* an additional move for half the children placed there. They're also worse because of the constantly changing shift staff, instead of having foster parents.

The alternative to institutionalizing children in places like the Children's Receiving Home is known as "first placement, best placement" and it means just what it says. You have enough options available so when a child really must be taken, that child can be placed *immediately* with a good foster family, Other states and localities are doing it, there's no reason Sacramento can't.

Mr. White, I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to your family. You don’t say when this happened. But, as I’m sure you know, a wave of hysteria over supposed “mass molestation” usually said to have happened in day care centers, swept over the country from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s. Hundreds of lives were ruined, - not least the lives of very young children who were persuaded that they’d been abused when nothing had happened. It’s discussed in a chapter of my Book, Wounded Innocents, published in 1990 and updated in 1995. There were several such cases in California, in Kern County, San Diego, and the most notorious: The McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles. Ultimately, former Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories exposing the failure of media to view the allegations with more skepticism. But such lessons are quickly forgotten – including at the Los Angeles Times, not to mention the Sacramento Bee. Today, I can no longer simply say “McMartin” and expect a young reporter to know what I’m talking about. But I also have to disagree with you in one respect: My first post on these issues (http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/30239/Sacramento_Child_removal_capital_of_California) was followed by a spirited debate with a reader who also had a profound personal experience. But it was the opposite of yours. It became apparent that either he, or someone close to him, had suffered severe abuse at the hands of a parent or relative and CPS had failed to come to the rescue. As a result, he disagreed with everything I said, and no amount of data would persuade him. He said nothing was more important than personal experience. So even though your experience reinforces my point of view, I have to repeat here what I said to that other reader: The problem with personal experience is - it’s personal, and when anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data. I, too, will never believe a PR campaign from a CPS agency. But if, say, two years from now, using the same methodology I used in NCCPR’s California Rate of Removal Index (on our website here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/2009californiaror.pdf) I find that Sacramento County is taking away significantly fewer children, and the child safety indicators are the same or better – then I *will* believe things have gotten better.

Only if the Bee puts a new reporter on the child welfare beat.

UPDATE: A later story in the Bee does include a brief mention of CPS' bias against the birth mother - it gets two sentences in the 14th paragraph, far less space than the Bee devotes to congratulating itself for its reporting on the case. This story also includes a link to the full report.