Michelle Bachmann Lied About Raising 23 Foster Children
June 18, 2011
addictinginfo.org
( I want to know Bachmann's total compensation for those wards of the state! )
By Matthew Desmond
If you were watching the Republican Presidential Candidates debate last week, you probably heard Michelle Bachmann state repeatedly that she personally has raised 23 foster children. This is more than just stretching the truth, it is an outright lie. Some of the foster children she took in were only in her care for a week.
Via The Daily Beast;
Bachmann often says she has “raised” 23 foster children. That may be a bit of a stretch. According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Bachmann’s license, which she had for 7 1/2 years, allowed her to care for up to three children at a time. According to Kris Harvieux, a former senior social worker in the foster care system in Bachmann’s county, some placements were almost certainly short term. “Some of them you have for a week. Some of them you have for three years, some you have for six months,” says Harvieux, who also served as a foster parent herself. “She makes it sound like she got them at birth and raised them to adulthood, but that’s not true.”
Yet Bachmann clearly had some of her foster children long enough to enroll them in local schools, and it was through them that she got involved in school politics. While she taught her own children at home before sending them to private Christian schools, state law required foster kids to go to public school. Seeing their curriculum, she became convinced that “politically correct attitudes, values, and beliefs” had supplanted objective education. She helped found a charter school but soon left the board amid allegations that she was trying to inject Christianity into the curriculum. Then, in 1999, she decided to run for the local school board.
Read more at; thedailybeast.com |
