Rep. Nick Wilson Discusses Child Welfare Issues at SOAR - October 13th

So, this past year we looked a lot at ingestion cases. There's a fatality and near fatality board that looks at cases with children, and those numbers have gone through the roof of ingestions where a child gets into maybe prescription medicine or illegal drugs, and actually now with the rise of like edible marijuana, things that actually look like candy, it's become a very dangerous situation for our children, and it could be a complete accident, or it could be total negligence or recklessness. And in the welfare bill this past year, we was able to criminalize that to the appropriate degree of what's happening in that house. So that was one portion of the bill, and others looked at the training and awareness, and Hopefully, some of our medical professionals in here have received that training already. But that's an example of something that's important that's in these child welfare pieces of legislation. This upcoming session, we're going to visit the grandparents' rights issue, hopefully strike a balance there to where we don't want families fighting each other in court. We want to find a way to help everyone, the parents and the grandparents. And we're, I'm trying to predict ahead what we're kind of looking at. A very important piece of this is proper placements for children that are in foster care. If they require an elevated level of need, making sure that they're in a placement where they're receiving that, or simply a placement that just makes sense for that child. If it's a Christian, hopefully they're with a Christian family. So we're just, I'm the vice chair of the families and children committee in the house, and we're We're just very locked in on making lives safer for children, making Kentucky better for families, and how we can pass legislation that reaches that goal.