Who Protects the Children?
An Organizational Response
by
Grandparents Resource Center
Denver, Colorado
Shirley M. Berens, MA. President and Founder
To a Five-Part Series in the Denver Post
May 21- 25, 2000 by
Patricia Callahan & Kirk Mitchell
PART I: The Denver Post Investigation - 2000
The Denver Post presented a five-part series of articles on the Colorado State
foster care system in the year 2000. Patricia Callahan and Kirk Mitchell,
staff writers for the Post, brought out many facts about the molestations,
starvation, abuse and negligence that children suffer in the foster care
system. The Post, and especially this team of writers deserve recognition
for the bravery and diligence with which they worked for the cause of our
fragile children in the foster care system.
The reason for our update on the article is because even after this intensive investigation, the problem still exists in 2005. That is five years after the fact. This updated article will bring the past and the present together in hopes that someone will help put a stop to the abuse that children suffer in foster care.
In the Best Interest of the Child
For almost half a century, families have been crying out loud for change in
the Human Services and Child Welfare systems. Families have been agonized
for many years, and are still distressed and afflicted by the ordeal that
the legal system, child protective services, and the Department of Human
Services are putting our children through. But nobody seems to really care
about the well-being of our vulnerable children whose lives are "managed" in
the foster care system, with the approval of the State's Child Welfare System
and the Department of Human Services. Thousands of children are ripped of
their individualism because the system sees that as being "in the best
interest" of the child. Our children are suffering because no one seems
to pay attention to the many concerns that the Grandparents Resource Center
(GRC) has been bringing forward, year after year, about Colorado’s
state foster care system. The GRC is a Denver-based nonprofit corporation
that serves grandparents raising grandchildren, and those seeking adoption
or legal custody of their grandchildren who are currently in foster care,
or in at-risk family situations.
While the focus of the Denver Post's five-part series was on private foster
care agencies, it is vital to point out that the greater hell in which our
at-risk children find themselves is in the state's own child welfare system.
Children end up in the private foster care system because there's something
inherently wrong with our nation’s child protective services. Many families
today do not trust "Social Services" (now known as Department of
Human Services) because of the tyrannical nature of dealing with families
and at-risk children. Families are torn apart by children being taken away
and sold off to unrelated foster-adoptive families.
Officials of Grandparents Resource Center (GRC), a nonprofit corporation based
in Denver, met with Colorado state officials, including the Lt. Governor, State
Senators and Representatives, to discuss remedies for the abuse and molestation
that our children suffer in the foster care system. Following this, and responding
to other complaints about certain malpractices of the Department of Social
Services' case workers and case managers in child placement procedures, a task
force was launched to investigate and correct the problems. However, the task
force participants were the same people whose departments were involved in
the malpractices, so it is doubtful that any real investigations or progress
will be made.
The federal government has awarded states huge amounts of dollars in grants
as a bonus for getting foster children adopted. Since then, it seems that many
county social workers have been looking for opportunities to professionally
loot children away from their families. In some cases, it appears that families
are falsely accused of some wrongdoing, during which time the children are
placed in foster care. Later an attempt may be made to terminate parental rights
of the family, adopt the children out, and make money from the federal bonus
for adoption. This has become a new way for State and County Human Service
agencies to make money off our fragile children, at the cost of the humiliation,
the horror, and the dehumanizing experiences that they put the children through.
Kinship Care: An Alternative for Foster Care Placement
We believe that there is no reason for children to be placed in foster care
if relatives such as grandparents, aunts and uncles are willing to raise their
own kin. The concept of placing at-risk children with suitable biological relatives
(Kinship Care) was originally introduced to grandparent families ten years
ago, by the Grandparents Resource Center. At that time, the idea was also proposed
to the Department of Social Services. But our state's Social Services department
failed to collaborate with GRC in implementation of Kinship Care.
Since its founding in 1989, Grandparents Resource Center has served many families
in the provision of Kinship Care support services across the country, but mainly
in the Denver Metro area, through Family Group Conferencing. Family Group Conferencing
is one of GRC's programs, which brings parents and family members together
to discuss a suitable temporary or permanent placement of children in at-risk
situations within the family. This is to avoid the involvement of social services,
which almost always leads to the placement of children in foster care.
Six years ago, Phil Hernandez of the Denver Department of Human Services and
Shirley Berens, President of Grandparents Resource Center, met to examine the
concept of Kinship Care and to work on actually implementing it. The impetus
for the consideration of the GRC's concept was a New Zealand group of social
workers who came to Colorado by the invitation of the Department of Social
Services, and emphasized the importance of Kinship Care placement. As a result,
Grandparents Resource Center became a consultant to the Colorado Department
of Human Services Kinship Care Committee. GRC is also the one of the nation's
expert consultants on Kinship Care to the American Humane Association and American
Association of Retired Persons (AARP) in Washington, DC. GRC has had many TV
programs about the issue of Kinship Care with the Department of Human Services,
state senators and state representatives. Very few states in the nation consider
child placement with relatives as the first and best option. If no suitable
relative is available, only then is foster placement considered. But Colorado,
now known as one of the nation’s worst states on the issue of foster
care, has still not fully implemented the concept of Kinship Care. Just a few
counties in the state, including Douglas, El Paso, Gilpin, and Jefferson counties,
have slowly but progressively embraced effective Kinship Placement alternatives
for at-risk children.
Denver County Department of Social Services, under the former leadership of
Phil Hernandez, was in the lead to fully implement Kinship Care placement as
a better alternative to foster care, with appropriation of funds to support
Kinship Care families. But under new management by Chris Veasey, things have
taken a turn for the worse, with previously certified Kinship Care providers
being disqualified, and the children taken away put into foster homes. Adams,
Arapahoe, and Larimer counties are notoriously the worst counties in the Denver
Metro area when it comes falsifying child welfare reports and forcibly taking
children away from their families and placing them in foster care.
GRC has worked with more than 350 families involved with false child welfare
accusation in these three Colorado counties.
Funding in the Name of Kinship Care
The Denver Post laments over the $367 million dollars that the State of Colorado "doles
out" to private foster care agencies it doesn't control. But there is
more. Recently, the Denver Department of Human Services solicited agencies
that provide Kinship Care support services to apply for funding that had become
available. At the time, no agency in the State other than the GRC was providing
Kinship Care support services, but many agencies responded. Today funds are
doled out to all these other agencies, including Catholic Charities, which
the GRC had approached two years prior in an attempt to forge a collaborative
effort. At the time, Catholic Charities was not interested. But now, since
there is free money to be made in the name of Kinship Care support services,
agencies like Catholic Charities are suddenly there in line.
Conclusion
I would agree with the late Dr. Martin Luther King in that in order to rectify
and correct a corrupt system like the child welfare system as it stands now,
it is necessary to completely demolish and rebuild the system. The current
child welfare bureaucracy that puts our children in jeopardy of further abuse,
molestation and starvation needs to be shut down completely, and people who
genuinely care about children's welfare should be recruited to replace the
employees who are only concerned about.
The ultimate direction for fixing our current foster care woes is to dismantle
the foster care system and replace it with Kinship Care placement. Kinship
Care should be the primary focus in child placement options for the good of
children’s welfare. Foster placement should be considered only as a last
resort. There are certainly many blood relatives of children in foster care
who have been fighting the child welfare system to obtain custody of their
children, but the Department of Human Services has notoriously blocked all
chances for custody. These close relatives are willing to raise their at-risk
children in loving home environments, to protect, love, nurture and help them
grow into responsible and useful citizens of our country. Relatives certainly
provide better and safer havens for their children than foster "parents”.
Our legislators have been urged to consider the Kinship Care option, as a means
of properly protecting our children, and ensuring their ultimate well-being.
PART II: The Tragedy of Our Child Welfare System
My name is Shirley Berens, and I am the founder and President of the Grandparents
Resource Center. My organization has been working with grandparent families
for 16 years; providing support services to those raising grandchildren,
helping them to adopt their grandchildren and obtain custody, or reestablish
lost visitation privileges with grandchildren who have been placed in foster
care or who are living in at-risk situations. The GRC has worked with over
8,000 families in the Denver Metro Area in the last 16 years. We have helped
grandparents successfully negotiate placement of their grandchildren in
their own homes. Not once in the history of our service to grandparents
has there been a failed placement or an accusation of child abuse in a grandparent’s
home.
My own grandchildren were physically abused by their foster parents and foster
family during the eight years they were in foster care. In my attempt to work
with the system to remove my own grandchildren from foster care, I was subjected
to 5 psychological evaluations, denied rights of visitation and spent over
$75,000 in legal fees. After eight long years of legal battling, I was able
to obtain custody, and I have now adopted my two grandsons.
No doubt you have read or at least heard of the sometimes inhumane conditions
in which our at-risk children live in foster care. Having suffered so much
humiliation myself at the hands of our State Child Protection System, I cannot
believe that foster parents are not required to submit to a thorough background
and welfare check before being certified as foster care providers. If the
system spent half as much time qualifying new foster parents as they did investigating
me, I do not think our children would end up with the kinds of foster parents
that are all too frequently brought to light by the media.
My oldest grandson, now 17, was in foster care for 8 years. His foster mother
often bragged about how her foster children paid for her farm house in Ft.
Lupton, Colorado. She received more than $8000 each month in tax-free child
care subsidies from the State in exchange for housing eight foster children.
For her, it was an easy way to get rich; for some of us, it appears to be
exploitation of the system and of society’s most vulnerable children
who need love, care and nurture.
My grandson has just recently become comfortable enough to tell us how he
was abused by his foster parents and by the older foster children in the absence
of the parents. The abuse continued when he was institutionalized at the Cleo
Wallace Center in Westminster, Colorado, and he was never taught any social
skills, or how to read or write.
My younger grandson, now 14, was also in foster care. He had been placed in
foster care at the age of 13 months, and remained there until he was 4 years
old. He was also terribly abused by his foster mother, who blatantly told me
that my grandson was going to pay for her new van and her newly acquired home.
I fought for years to prevent her from adopting my grandson. I acquired pictures
depicting the physical abuse my grandson suffered at the hands of his foster
mother. The photos of his bruised little body helped me with my petition to
the court and I succeeded in obtaining custody of him. Despite the evidence
of the foster mother's abuse of my grandson, she is still a foster care provider
for a private child placement agency in the State of Colorado.
When I got the boys back from foster care, the younger one had speech problems,
and the older one was very destructive and always getting into trouble at school.
Today, the younger one is on the honor roll at his school, and has received "citizen
of the month" awards several times. My older grandson is in residential
treatment, partly because the system failed to help him with his mental problems.
During my struggles with the system to obtain custody of my two boys, I was
forced to quit my job at U S West, because the Department of Social Services
made it so hard for me to keep a job due to the required family probation plan.
I had to become an expert in the field of troubled children just so I could
qualify to even have visitation rights to see my grandchildren. For two years,
I was video-taped during every single visitation. The tapes were turned over
to the social workers assigned to my two boys so they could review and analyze
every single move I made with the children. On one occasion, one of the social
workers told me, "If you miss one visit with your grandchildren, we will
take away your rights of visitation." A couple of times they did withhold
visitation, once because I disagreed with allowing a foster mother to adopt
my grandson, and another time because I petitioned to adopt both my grandchildren.
A Great-grandfather's Death in Sorrow
During this ordeal, my late father, then alive, had been very ill. He was barred
from seeing his own precious great-grandchildren. During his last days, his
doctors wrote a letter on his behalf to the supervisor of the social workers
in charge of my grandchildren's placement to allow him to see his great-grandchildren
before he died. The supervisor denied the doctors' request. My father died
on "Grandparents Day" in 1994 without having seen his great-grandchildren
for the prior 4 years. He had attended all the hearings at the courthouse,
but because the social workers claimed he was a violent man, he was always
accompanied by an armed guard. This was a man who never had a police record
for doing anything wrong. He was a good man, a veteran of WWII who worked all
his life to provide for his family. The only war he fought and lost was against
the Department of Human Services. It is very sad that a great father, grandfather
and great-grandfather died with a sorrowful heart, due to not being allowed
to see his own great-grandchildren.
A Destructive System
Our system is very cruel to families in the name of what they call "the
best interests of the child." There seems to be an incredible lack of
compassion toward families in our State's Department of Human Services, but
yet, it continues to receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal
funding to place our children in foster homes that abuse, starve, molest and
torture them. These foster parents don’t seem to be held accountable
for their inhumane activities toward our most vulnerable children unless a
child dies while in their care. The Denver Department of Human Services a great
number of foster parents has criminal records. One social worker who works
for the Denver Department of Human Services said that persons with criminal
backgrounds make good foster care providers because they understand the children's
problems. It is somehow assumed that all foster children are problem children.
Officials fail to see that the conditions of foster care make the problems
worse. Our children are being punished for their parent’s negligence
in parental responsibilities, and are continuously being sentenced to the "living
hell" of the foster care system. Foster parents are not encouraged to
bond with the children, so the basic needs of children for a sense of identity
and belonging is denied them.
Grandparents Who Raise At-Risk Children
Many decent grandparent families have called my organization for assistance.
They have expressed dissatisfaction over the conditions in which their grandchildren
live in foster care, and have expressed the desire to obtain custody or to
adopt, but have been disqualified by the system as unsuitable placement options.
I must say that the one and only Child Placement Agency that has been very
supportive of my original concept of Kinship Placement was Synthesis, Inc.
Pam Hoggins, the Director of Synthesis, Inc., has worked with my organization
in placing grandchildren who were in foster care with suitable relatives. Pam
gave relatives of youngsters in foster care an opportunity to become certified
by her agency as Kinship or Relative foster parents.
Young Kimberly Thomas of Denver Public Schools says, "When I was in foster
care, I didn't have any friends. I always had to be looking over my shoulders
to make sure no one was watching how I was brushing my teeth. I didn't wear
shoes most of the time when school was closed. Sometimes, I wanted to kill
myself. But now that I'm with Grandma, I feel I'm in heaven. We go to church,
we go to the park. We cook together, and have fun telling each other stories.
My grandma loves me dearly, and she has given me hope to live. She is my angel
who delivered me from foster care."
As the originator of the idea of Kinship Care in the State of Colorado, I worked
with Carol Wahlgren and the State Kinship Care Committee for two years, from
1997 through 1999. She was then the director of the Kinship Care Unit of the
Colorado Department of Human Services. Carol acknowledged that "…in
all the years we have tracked more than 500 placements with relatives, we have
had only had 5 incidents of failed placements. These were mainly due to lack
of information, follow-up and other support services." According to Carol, "only
one of the failed placements was considered an abuse case”.
More than 60,000 grandparents in Colorado are raising grandchildren. Many of
them are full-time primary caregivers of their grandchildren. Five million
of America’s children are being raised today by their grandparents, with
2.8 million residing in grandparent-headed households in all fifty states (U.S.
Census Bureau). If it were not for grandparents, the system would have at least
twice the amount of children in Youth Detention Centers or in prison.
The Grandparents Resource Center works with entire families to create nurturing
assets for the children in the family who may be at-risk. Without any funding,
but with volunteers and staff (mostly provided by Seniors Inc.), whom we train,
we help and provide support systems for grandparents to successfully raise
their grandchildren. We support grandparents as they provide their grandchildren
with stability, love, care, nurture, a good home environment and the family
security they do not have in foster homes.
Financial Subsidies for Grandparents Raising Children
It seems to me that much of the money the State Department of Human
Services gets annually ($300,000,000) goes to deepen the pockets of some elite
individuals
in the Child Welfare system, with the obvious $367 million poured into the
private foster care system. Yet, the child welfare system fails to provide
grandparents with the necessary financial support they need to care for their
grandchildren, while foster parents receive an average of $900 per foster child
per month from the state. In some cases, foster parents receive as much as
$1,200 to $1,500 a month for foster children with special needs. Grandparents
who are lucky enough to qualify for adoption subsidies receive only the minimum,
and are spending their life savings to make ends meet. Currently, grandparents
who are certified Kinship Care providers in Denver County get $369/mo. in kinship
subsides for the first child, and then $99 per month for each child thereafter.
Besides receiving a gross amount of money for foster children, foster parents
get other benefits such as a clothing allowance, respite care, and recreational
allowances from the system that grandparent/kinship care providers do not receive.
Foster parents get free food from the food banks while grandparents practically
have to starve the fourth week of the month just to make their house payments
or pay utility bills.
The Failure of Foster Care System
Child Welfare statistics show that 70% of juvenile delinquents are teenagers
who come out of foster care systems. Very few grandchildren that have been
raised by their grandparents end up in prison. Many of the great leaders and
statesmen of our country have been raised by their grandparents. The foster
care system needs to be abolished, and the Child Welfare funds awarded to grandparents
or other suitable family members raising children who love and care for their
own blood, who can help them become better human beings and responsible and
useful citizens of our country.
Since it is obvious that our state and some county Departments of Human Services
cannot and are not able to work diligently with at-risk families and the most
vulnerable members of our communities, I would recommend that organizations
like the Grandparents Resource Center, the Northeast Parkhill Grandparents
Association, the North Huron Counseling Center for Grandparents, and other
community family agencies be given the opportunity to serve and support families
for the good and moral well-being of our children.
One organization that families trust in Colorado is the Grandparents Resource
Center. However, due to lack of funding, the GRC is unable to serve the increasing
number of grandparent families who call on us for help. Even parents who are
in jail call on us to support their parents in taking care of their children
while they are serving their time.. Should their children suffer the consequences
of their parents' delinquency and negligent behavior? Certainly not!
It is time for our state officials and all those who have the well-being of
our children at heart to rise and defend the future of our innocent children
who have become victims of our foster care systems.
Shirley M. Berens, MA
President & Founder
Grandparents Resource Center
March 30th, 2005