Kids today

Here will be found articles about child welfare, parenting, state  programs for dependent children, and other non-school-related issues involving children that appeared mainly in Illinois Times and Illinois Issues.

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I was for a while an official Disaffected Youth, and as such was made a member of state and local committees of 1970 White House Conference on Youth, the Urban Needs Committee of Springfield's United Way, an Illinois Department of Public Health's drug abuse program planning group, the Committee on School Organization of the Governor's Commission on Schools, and similar groups.

In the 1970s (still a youth myself) I was hired to write state agency publications that pertained to kids and schools-school district organization in Illinois in the first case, and drug abuse among kids in the second. The most significant of these (at least to me) was Getting It Together: Community Action Against Drug Abuse (Illinois Dept. of Public Health, State of Illinois, Springfield, 1971). Very much a how-to and very much of its time, it deserves the oblivion into which such publications fall.  It was however the occasion of my meeting the excellent Lynford Keyes, one of those able and dedicated career public servants who then roamed in herds through Springfield streets but today seem on the verge of extinction. 

An altogether more serious project came my way twenty years later. Jim Nowlan, then Director of Research for the Illinois Tax Foundation, invited me to make a report on the State of Illinois's programs for children. (See "Afterword" below.)

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After 40 years I cannot say that Illinois children are better off than they were when I started except in gross material terms. My work had nothing to do with that decline, but it saddens me to say that it didn't do anything to slow it either. 

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Note: Pieces about public education, from pedagogy and politics to school buildings and higher education, appear under the topic "Common schools."