On Tuesday, March 17, Governor Mark Dayton signed into law House File 8, a bill that implements two recommendations from the Governor's Task Force on the Protection of Children. The new law is effective immediately. In his press release on this action, Governor Dayton said that he has dedicated an additional $52.5 million for child [...]
The main piece (in my opinion) of Chapter 108 (the session law that was the omnibus Health & Human Services Finance bill) is Article 17, which establishes Chapter 256N in Minnesota Statutes, Northstar Care for Children. As I said in an earlier blog post on Northstar Care for Children, this program will make foster care, [...]
Yesterday Governor Dayton signed the omnibus Health & Human Services (HHS) Finance bill, making it Chapter 108 in the 2013 Session Laws. The main point of this bill was to establish the HHS budget, but there are also policy changes that will impact child welfare. One big change from earlier versions of the bill is [...]
Significant changes were made to the foster care statutes in the last legislative session. This post will summarize part of the new legislation changes, and more will come in a future post. Several definitions were amended: "Child" was amended to include references to other statutes allowing youth to remain in foster care to age 21."Sibling" [...]
A few weeks ago, we updated you on the new Adoption Assistance legislation that will go into effect in August 2012. Today we will summarize some of the other child welfare legislation that was enacted in the same legislative session. We will cover adoption policies in this post and in an upcoming post we will [...]