About This Blog
Youth-serving organizations take on a serious responsibility when they open their doors to children and other vulnerable people. Fulfilling that responsibility well requires two things working together: a safety culture strong enough to prevent harm, and independent investigations credible enough to find the truth when someone alleges mistreatment.
Youth Services Law covers both. Posts examine the legal landscape, practical decisions, and organizational choices that shape how schools, camps, churches, colleges, faith-based groups, and community organizations protect the people in their care and respond when something goes wrong. The goal is the same in every post: precise, useful guidance for child protection and investigations.
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Featured Post
September 8, 2026
Every plaintiff's attorney in a youth sexual abuse case asks the same question: did the organization follow accepted safety practices? Many organizations assume the answer required two adults present at every activity. That assumption does not hold up under scrutiny. No universal legal standard...
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PTSD Awareness Day falls on June 26, and it’s a good time to review requirements for ADA accommodations of children in youth programs. When a child in your program has PTSD-type behavioral problems, your organization’s legal obligations under the ADA do not wait for a formal diagnosis, do not disappear because the behavior is disruptive, and do not permit…
Every incident report your organization files is a legal document, not potentially, not only if something goes wrong, but a legal document from the moment someone signs it. After three decades of advising youth-serving organizations through litigation, licensing investigations, and regulatory audits, I have seen more cases turn on the quality of an incident report…
Tuesday’s post on Doe v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University walked through what happens when an institution investigates itself amid structural pressures that make an objective result difficult to achieve. That case raises a question every youth-serving organization and its counsel eventually face: when allegations of misconduct arise, do you investigate internally, or do you bring…
On May 21, 2026, a federal district court allowed a former Virginia Tech student’s Title IX claims to proceed, after cataloguing a series of investigative and procedural failures that the court found raised a plausible inference of sex discrimination. The order is not a verdict. Virginia Tech may yet prevail. But the court’s detailed account of what…
How a youth organization responds to a parent complaint about staff can determine its legal exposure. Here is what the law requires.
Many youth organizations have discovered the hard way that their child protection policies had a critical gap: they addressed what adults must not do to children but said nothing about what happens when one child harms another. That gap is not a minor oversight. Research, shows that more than 70% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated…
At 4:15 in the morning on June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sat in a rain-lashed tent at Portsmouth and made one of the most consequential decisions in modern history. The weather over the English Channel was still miserable. His meteorologists offered a narrow window of improvement, not a guarantee. His commanders were divided….
We have long known about the replication crisis in social science research — the problem that few findings hold up in later studies. In April 2026, the largest replication project ever attempted found that only about half of the existing research holds up under further testing. This finding has profound implications for youth-serving organizations that want to follow evidence-based practices.
Saturday, May 31, is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. The observance exists because what happens to young people at the moment the system releases them is, by most measurable standards, a national failure. Approximately 20,000 youth age out of the U.S. foster care system each year. They leave without a permanent family,…
May 31 is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. Every year, approximately 20,000 young people reach the age of majority and exit the foster care system in the United States. They leave without a permanent family, without a home to return to after a hard week, and without the informal adult guidance that…