A local man has written a book about a custody battle between himself and the Child Protection Division of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.
“Sky: Child, Interrupted,” is a memoir by William Dale West.
Robert MacDonald, (ie. Mayor McDickhead) mayor of Lewiston, said on Sunday that he wanted to publish a registry of welfare recipients because he was annoyed by disabled children coming to the state for help.
Leaving aside the asinine notion to publish the names of people on welfare to a website...
As the parent of a special needs kid, who has gone through all the hell of dealing with public schools, special education, physical restraints, social workers, IEP's, complaints against top administrators, cover-ups of child abuse, falsified documents, arm twisting and threats to report me to DHHS for refusing to drug her on several different pills and as retaliation for complaining about an incident where my daughter had to be checked for a concussion, etc, I gotta ask where this idiot gets his information? There is nothing great about any special education system in Maine. Especially Lewiston's.
Sure they mean well and think that they're only trying to help, but having lost sight of the fact that kids are kids, it's now all about medicating the kids to keep them quiet and docile during all day kindergarten time and identifying families where trouble could be brewing to feed the states cash cow of a child welfare system.
Mayor McDonald is obviously out of touch with the current educational financial trends as well. Just think about how much money the schools would loose if he got all the special needs kids out of his state which is in direct opposition to the current trend of diagnosing more kids with special needs so the schools can qualify for more federal funding through the DOE and Medicaid which pays for more normalization services such as occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, etc, thus pumping more federal money into the schools which isn't all dispersed to the welfare sucking parents of the special-ed student, as Mayor McDonald would have you believe. The loss would be tremendous to any town and many schools couldn't survive without this extra money, and many professionals who work with these kids would be out of a job.
Therefore if, like Mayor McDickhead says, you are a parent of a special needs kid coming to Maine for the special education services, then you are just as ignorant and stupid as he is.
And you're feeding your kid to the dogs. So there.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data released last week, Maine is the only state in the nation where the number of uninsured children has increased significantly since 2010.
Changes to Portland’s new school bus routes are unlikely, according to some of the roughly 25 parents who met with Portland School Department officials on Wednesday.
Parental rights to opt out remain strong after a bill to make it harder was vetoed, leaving districts with few options for getting more students inoculated.
As Maine State Police detectives continued to search this week for the person or persons who posted dozens of naked photos of underage girls from across Maine on Facebook, advocates for victims of sexual assault encouraged the teens and others to remember they were victims of a crime and should seek support if necessary.
It’s fall, and schools across our state have welcomed students back to the classroom. The start of the school year is an exciting time for every community, a time many of us look upon fondly. But while most students are ready to learn and do their best, some are facing a monumental challenge: hunger.
Laura Blaisdell’s youngest son just started second grade at their local school in the Willard Square section of South Portland. He’s her second boy to head off to the Dora L. Small Elementary School in this comfortable coastal neighborhood, about a mile from the beach.
This month has brought the start of another school year in Maine and, on that momentous occasion in all guardians’, parents’ and children’s lives, the annual newsletter, handbooks and expectations welcoming students back.
For the first time in Maine, parents can easily look up vaccination rates at their local elementary school. The Maine Center for Disease Control publicly released the data for the 2014-15 school year, revealing how many children were exempted from school-required vaccines — and for what reasons — in kindergarten and first-grade classes.
So here comes the LePage Administration all concerned for families now after cutting successful drug treatment programs under the guise of welfare reform and trying to do away with treatment options such as Methadone and replace it with Soboxone instead of adding it to the states arsenal of tools to help people. Here he comes concerned for the babies born addicted while piss testing parents in an effort to boot them off welfare.
The conference is the latest initiative by the LePage administration as it grapples with Maine's drug epidemic.
I'm sure anybody who attends this seminar will hear about how the state is adding more police and making jail cells available for addicts.
You'll hear talk about the need for more foster homes but little about helping the kids by helping their parents by making treatment options and good supports available or anything. You'll hear nothing about how much more this approach costs, just that the legislature should provide more funding to support policies that punish rather than treat addicts and destroy families rather than help the children.
Scores were down last year, but because the Smarter Balanced test was only used once, comparisons with results from other years are largely meaningless.
School districts across the state released students early from school Wednesday because school officials deemed the temperatures in the classrooms were too high for student and teacher safety.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Maine Sen. Angus King, and New Hampshire Sens. Jeanne Shahaeen and Kelly Ayotte, are calling for an investigation into the Food and Drug Administration's recent decision to approve the use of the painkiller OxyContin by children as young as 11-years-old.
Biddeford’s mayor is vowing to crack down on disruptions of City Council meetings by critics of the city’s response to sex abuse allegations, and has accused them of using the issue to further their own political aims.
It's probably a good thing that the legislature has to approve any lawsuits against Maine's Child Protective Services. God only knows how much the taxpayer would be paying out for the fraud, incompetence, corruption and abuse of families and children that Maine's most easy targets often suffer at the hands of sadistic, power hungry and very often clueless social workers.
On the flip side, this will just make CPS Workers more likely to crack down on innocent daycare providers, because they're paranoid and will rather be safe than sorry.
Police say the use of the social media site for this purpose, which in this instance includes at least some girls from Maine, is rare and has magnified the problem.
The next step will be like in England where the schools have to report potential terrorists just because a teacher doesn't like the parents political beliefs.
Several parents who sent their children to the now-defunct Sunshine Child Care and Preschool in Lyman have filed a civil complaint against Maine Department of Health and Human Services and several of its bureaus, alleging the agency was negligent in how it handled reports of abuse, licensing violations and other complaints against the daycare and its owners, Cheryl and Dan Dubois.