Broadcast Overview 
Children victimized by abuse and neglect need permanent placements as soon as possible, decreasing the health and safety risks associated with lingering in foster care. On any given day in America, more than 520,000 children are living in foster care and as many as 60 percent of children who outgrow the foster care system end up homeless.

Recently, national attention has begun to focus on the plight of these children. Removed from their own homes, which failed to nurture them, these children desperately need the sense of security that a permanent home provides. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 set new guidelines for court processing of child abuse and neglect cases. Although court and systems improvement programs based at the State, community and jurisdictional levels parallel one another, often they do so without coordinating or collaborating even at the local level. Providing permanency in a timely manner to abused and neglected children requires close and concentrated collaboration among courts, social services, and the communities in which they function.

On February 10, 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, in cooperation with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Permanency Planning for Children Department, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau, will host a “live” national satellite broadcast to address the need to improve the handling of abuse and neglect cases. This satellite broadcast will provide state-of-the-art information relevant to the field; inform professionals involved in publicly or privately supported court and systems improvement efforts about innovative practice improvements; discuss improvements through judicial leadership and communitycollaboration; and, examine specific roles each discipline can play in improving practice.

• Share model court practices for abused and neglected children.
• Encourage the improvement of permanency planning for children through thorough judicial review and timely resolution of each child’s case.
• Present methods of improved collaboration between the child welfare system and the dependency courts by illustrating working program models.

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