Bucks County Seeking More Foster Parents

Too many Bucks County kids, particularly teens, have to be sent to homes outside the county because there aren't enough foster families to take them in.

Navigating the teen years is hard enough with a loving family, a familiar school and close friends. Imagine not only losing your family, but then having to switch schools and leave friends when you have to move to a foster home outside your school district. That is the situation facing more than 100 Bucks County children, many of them teens, who are taken into the county's social service system. And that is why Roxanne Watkins-Hall is working so hard to recruit new foster families. Of the 370 young people in the custody of the Bucks County Children & Youth Social Services Agency, one-third of them must go to homes outside of Bucks, county social workers said. Watkins-Hall, the county's foster parent-volunteer recruiter, is trying to …

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Pet of the Week: Kittens and Rabies Awareness Week

All pets adopted at the Women's Humane Society between Sept. 27 and Oct. 1 will receive a free rabies vaccination.

In honor of Rabies Awareness Week, the Women's Humane Society has decided to waive the rabies vaccination fee for all pets adopted between Tuesday, Sept. 27 and Saturday, Oct. 1.  If you adopted a young pet and the rabies shot is not due yet, the fee would be waived on your return visit. If you adopted a very young pet, you'd pay the $30 exam fee but the Humane Society would waive the $21 rabies shot fee, Adoptions Counselor and Volunteers Manager Kelly VanValkenburgh said. The two cats featured have been adopted, but the Humane Society has many kittens that still need good homes.  The minimum amount it would cost to adopt a kitten from the society is $70 – a $20 donation for the animal and a $50 deposit for the spaying or neutering cost. …

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Scholasticity

Look Harder

Some people need to look deeper to find things that many of us take for granted.

In the past few weeks at school my daughter had to complete a timeline for her life starting at birth.  Now for the average child this may not seem like a tough task, but my daughter is adopted from China, so very little is known about her birth, let alone her parents. Last year she had a similar assignment.  And like last year, a few days after the completion of the project, the sleepless night began for her and I, questions concerning whether her parents were dead or alive, followed by the reasons for her abandonment. It doesn’t matter that we are close or that we love each other - that is for certain, but some questions may always remain unanswered.   We know that she was, in fact, abandoned and our friends from China told us that …

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