Education & Child Welfare

We can’t succeed as a state if we fail to educate, protect, and serve the most vulnerable among us. Our schools need our full support as they implement new policies and procedures as we recover from the COVID 19 pandemic, and we need to take this opportunity to look at the educational inequities highlighted by this crisis and find ways to address them in a sustainable way. Our child welfare system cannot be run like a business. We have seen the deadly results of that approach, so we have to prioritize evidence-based models to rework our foster care system to protect children and fully support their foster parents while providing needed services to their biological parents. We also must create a child welfare system that trains and retains dedicated professionals to do this essential work.

My work on education and child welfare:

• Passed legislation that requires the Department of Children, Youth and Families to report all suspected cases of child sexual abuse to the children’s advocacy center. This ensures that victims and families get the support they need and abusers are held accountable

• Passed legislation allowing child and adolescent victims of sexual abuse to use a recorded forensic interview as testimony for a grand jury up to age 16, providing protection for the victims and increasing the ability to pursue accountability for the abuser

• Passed legislation in cooperation with the Department of Defense that establishes a military family advocacy program to address the unique needs of child abuse and neglect occurring in military families

• Expanded eligibility for access to high quality child care and an accelerated pathway to public pre-K for all 3 and 4 year olds in Rhode Island

• Secured funding in the budget to create psychiatric residential treatment facilities in Rhode island for our adolescent children in state care who are currently housed elsewhere across the country

• Supported funding for new school construction across Rhode Island