Sheri Louie fell in love with Kristina the moment she saw her at the group home for medically fragile children in Fresno. A licensed vocational nurse, Louie had spent years working with children like Kristina who need special medical equipment to stay alive. But something about the fragile baby with expressive eyes felt unique.

“I had a connection with her. It was more like how I felt with my daughter,” said Louie, whose biological daughter, Cynthia, is one year older than Kristina. “I loved all the kids there, but I loved Kristina different.”

Kristina has cerebral palsy, autism and Moebius syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes facial paralysis. She’s one of thousands of children with physical and developmental disabilities who enter California’s foster care system each year. These children often require specialized care, therapy and education services. Because of their disabilities, they can be harder to place with a foster or adoptive family — now called a “resource family” by the state — than children without disabilities.

Yet, like Louie and her husband, Kenny, many families do foster and ultimately adopt children with disabilities. That’s despite challenges these families often encounter, such as receiving insufficient medical supplies to care for the children and incomplete information from child welfare agencies about the children’s health histories. Foster families and their advocates are working to mend the gaps in the system that can cause undue stress on these children with disabilities, who, in most cases, have already been through trying times before coming into foster care. Because the children are considered wards of the state, advocates say that California should do more to protect them and ensure their health conditions are well managed. This is also a racial justice issue, because Black and Native American children are disproportionately enrolled in foster care, due to societal inequities.

Recent efforts by the state to improve supports for foster children and resource families, as well as streamline access to services for kids with disabilities and youth with mental health needs could help. A new phone line called the Family Urgent Response System provides 24/7 phone support to foster children and their caregivers, and a mobile response team in each county can visit families in crisis. California health and social service officials are also working to implement a 2018 bill that calls for better integration of care for children in the child welfare system who are receiving services from multiple public agencies.

Connecticut’s home care workers, who have struggled without a contract since last summer, are celebrating today.

After almost a year of negotiations, the state has agreed to give the 10,000 workers a pay increase, health insurance, and even paid time off.

The workforce, which is mostly women –predominantly women of color, take care of 6,000 of the state’s most vulnerable residents in their homes and are paid by the Department of Social Services and the state Department of Developmental Services through Medicaid funding.

“Here today, we have taken more than a giant step,” Suzanne Clark, secretary treasurer of SEIU Healthcare 1199NE, said during a Wednesday rally at the state Capitol building. “We have revolutionized — to be able to have finally [paid time off], finally have a pathway and not just a foot in the door but a big foot in the door for health insurance and PTO for home care workers across Connecticut.”

At a protest outside the governor’s residence last month, Brenda Glazier, who cares for a man with a traumatic brain injury, said her house is in foreclosure and over the past year she’s had to work through COVID-19 because she had no sick days.

“We’re caring for people who have health insurance and we don’t,” Glazier said.

She said if they get sick they can’t take time off because they don’t get paid. Since federal funding for COVID-19 sick days for these workers ran out at the end of September, anyone who took time off to recover from the virus didn’t get paid, union officials said.