to requirements like bedroom numbers or size, even though, the report noted, most relative caregivers are already low-income, with nearly 40 percent below the poverty line, and most living in the poorest areas of the state. When relatives couldn’t get custody of their young family members, they often risked losing touch with them completely — a situation that can traumatize both children and families, leaving them to grapple with “ambiguous loss” and symptoms akin to post-
percentage than in surrounding states, according to a report produced by Paul Vincent, an Alabama-based child welfare consultant who was tapped by Gov. Asa Hutchinson this spring to perform a review of DCFS practices. In Texas and Oklahoma, Vincent found, 29 percent of foster care placements are with relatives. Meanwhile, the number of Arkansas kids in foster care far exceeds the available foster beds in the state. “And given the recent increase in the number of children placed in out-of-home
BRIAN CHILSON
how DCFS practices impact grandparents and other relative caregivers. In 2010, the committee’s report found that although some 33,600 grandparents were responsible for around 42,000 children in Arkansas, there were only 913 foster children living with relatives (out of over 4,000 kids who entered the foster system at some point that year). The reasons for the discrepancy between the high numbers of grandparents caring for children outside of DCFS and their low representa-
"DE FACTO KINSHIP NAVIGATOR": Dee Ann Newell, director of Arkansas Voices for the Children Left Behind, tries to help families seeking custody.
tion within it seemed a combination of infrastructural and cultural barriers. Grandparents and other relatives were often unfamiliar with the resources available to them and bewildered by DCFS processes. DCFS staff reported they rarely had enough time to adequately track down and vet family members for consideration in determining placement, and a significant minority felt they hadn’t been adequately trained on DCFS policy regarding relative caregivers. Some reported that their supervisors, or the judges who oversaw their cases, were opposed to relative caregivers on principle. And others noted that many such families were unfairly held to strict “foster parent standards” when it came
traumatic stress disorder. Caseworkers reported that they recommended ongoing visitation between children whose parents had lost their rights and other members of their extended family less than 40 percent of the time. As one relative caregiver quoted in the legislative report put it, “When the biological parents were deemed ‘not fit’ and their rights were terminated, not only was a branch severed from the child’s family tree, the entire biological family tree was chopped down.” The situation that existed in 2010 seems to persist today: For the last four years, the fraction of the state’s foster children who are living with relative caregivers in Arkansas has hovered between 13 and 16 percent, a far lower
care, the problem is getting worse,” Vincent wrote in the report, released this July. “Increasing the use of relative placements is the simplest and most promising next step toward expanding placement options.” Other states are demonstrably better at protecting relative caregivers’ interests. Eight states, mostly clustered on the East and West coasts, have active kinship navigator programs, such as 1-800 numbers or websites maintained by private groups or state governments that grandparents and other relatives can turn to for support, counseling and practical assistance. In New York, recognized as having a model kinship support system, the program offers access to attor-
neys familiar with kinship care law. In some states with kinship navigator programs, like Florida and Hawaii, 43 to 46 percent of all foster children live with relatives, according to a 2012 Annie E. Casey Foundation report. As part of the legislative study process, DCFS created a guide to provide relative caregivers with information about the system. But Arkansas has no dedicated kinship navigator program, and that role effectively falls to one nonprofit group: Arkansas Voices for the Children Left Behind. Its founding executive director, Dee Ann Newell has become the state’s “de facto kinship navigator,” spending hours on the phone each day talking with grandparents and other relatives who are trying to find ways to keep their family together, even as, in some cases, their grandchildren are being advertised for adoption on the nightly news. From 2006 until 2012, Arkansas Voices, which also works with incarcerated parents, qualified as a “family formation” program under the state’s administration of federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds. The money enabled it to run 10 offices around the state to serve grandparents, each with a dedicated site coordinator who helped relatives identify the meager resources available to them outside the DCFS system. (Many qualify only for food stamps and small TANF child-only subsidies of $81 a month, topping out at $457 for nine or more children. But even that’s often denied, Newell said, as many county operations staff, who distribute TANF funds, are unaware of relative caregivers’ eligibility.) Since budget cuts in 2012, however, Arkansas Voices has gone unfunded and its physical offices and toll-free hotline are shut down. “The populations I work with aren’t very popular,” Newell said. She now fields all requests for help on her home phone, as she and a group of professional volunteers continue on unpaid as a labor of love. Often, the issues relative caregivers bring up point to another set of problems in supporting kinship care: that DCFS staff and other child welfare workers view the family members of parents who lost custody with suspicion, as though the parents’ issues are common to their entire family. It’s an attitude that Newell calls “The Apple Tree”: the assumption that, when it comes to child welfare cases, the apple never falls far from the tree. “That these are the bad parents who raised www.arktimes.com
OCTOBER 29, 2015
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