Izzy Rose

Just stumbled across your site and wanted to personally invite you and your Washington audience to the first of its kind Stepmom Weekend Getaway.

read more at Stepmothersmilk.com

http://stepmothersmilk.com/why-stepmothers-milk/s-mom-escapes/stepmom-fete

Izzy Rose

Just stumbled across your site and wanted to personally invite you and your Washington audience to the first of its kind Stepmom Weekend Getaway in Austin, Texas in August!

read more at http://stepmothersmilk.com

Antoinette Carr

You have to read The Woodcutter’s Wife: A Stepmother’s Tale by Dolla Merrillees. Funny, sad, bracingly honest and a sometimes confronting look at being a wicked stepmother. I could relate to all she had to say - well done!

Abby Burlingame

I am wondering if this group is still in operation. I have called the contact person from shared parenting and gotten no response. I am a soon to be 2nd wife and am interested in starting an initiative campaign for shared parenting if I can get some interest.

Tiffany Kennedy

Hey, Feel free to email me at tiffanyk@leadpulseconsulting.com if you want to chat and maybe we can organize a group of us 2nd moms who understand the issues and can see things from a different perspective. We can support legislature together. They’re working on breaking up DSHS and restructuring it right now so lets follow this closely and work on having a say in the end result!! I e-mailed this to my rep:

TO: Representative Dave Upthegrove

CC: Representative Tina Orwall
Senator Karen Keiser

FROM: Ms. Tiffany Kennedy

EMAIL: tiffanyk@leadpulseconsulting.com

SUBJECT: Corruption of DSHS

MESSAGE: I am writing because I think it’s time someone in Washington start representing fathers, specifically non-custodial fathers, in the legislature. DSHS is grossly corrupt and mismanaged and either biased against or completely unhelpful to the non-custodial parents it also has to work with and supposedly assist. I have put together the facts of a specific DSHS case below so that you can see that these things are real, not just rumors or fantasies of parents abused by the system. If you’ve never had to deal with DSHS personally, first of all you’re lucky, second of all you’re not likely to truly know or understand the egregious acts they commit daily and always under the guise of “helping children”. DSHS should not be incentivized to abuse the paying parents by over collecting so that the agency gets more government grants. Why has this been allowed to go on? Where are the checks and balances?

1)Daycare support (which was supposed to be actually incurred by the mother/custodial parent) was ordered and enforced by DSHS in the beginning of 2007 based on ESTIMATED childcare expenses, not actual expenses
2)No review was scheduled EVER by DSHS, it was only reviewed at the request of the father, who was not given the information he needed to know he was overpaying, he had to guess
3)Mother (custodial parent) applied for, and received, TANF daycare subsidy. She entered that she received $0 on her subsidy application when in fact she was receiving $465 in regular support and $497/mos for daycare ($962/mos in total).
4) TANF (a part of DSHS) had the ability to verify if she recieved child support but did not do so, nor did they schedule a timely review of the subsidy award.
5) DSHS continued to enforce the support order of $497/mos daycare expense, giving the money directly to the mother, not the daycare. The mother, now also getting the subsidy, paid on average only $50/mos over the course of a year (2008)and pocketed the significant difference
6) When father asked for daycare review from DSHS mother accidentally provided a copy of the TANF app, otherwise father would NEVER be permitted to access that information except by permission from mother (and would likely never have known about the nearly $4k overpayment), Mother was permitted to hide the name and address of the childcare provider and changed daycares 3 or 4 times in a year to make it extremely hard for father to track or prove expenses
DSHS allowed mother to submit hand-written generic receipts as proof of expenses
7) It takes on average 3 mos to get a phone hearing on the docket with DSHS
Mother was given 3 continuances over 4 hearings (it has now been nearly a year since process was started),mother NEVER submitted any documentation which was new or relevant in any way,and never obtained legal counsel despite that being her reason for asking for the continuance(s)
9) Over the 4 phone hearings, 3 different admin judges have been assigned, each oblivious to previous hearings or decisions by the other judges (such as not to give another continuance)
10) $1700+ tax return belonging to the father has been held this entire time (over a year) until a decision is made on the overpayment
11) Because the caseworker was even remotely helpful to the father he was removed from the case
12) father has two additional small children to support IN his home but DSHS does not care about them or the detriment to them