Consider family first in foster placements

It's for good reason that federal law requires child protective workers to look to relatives first if parents are unable to keep their children safe and well cared for.

Staying with family - especially a relative who has been an active part

of their life - can be much less traumatic for a child than staying with a foster family they don't know.

Kinship foster placements help kids stay grounded even as the earth seems to be crumbling beneath their feet.

Children living in kinship foster homes are less likely to be split apart from siblings. They are forced to move less frequently than foster children placed with non-relatives.

They show fewer behavioral problems than their peers placed in non-kin foster families. And if their parents are able to address root concerns and the family is reunified, they are less likely to re-enter the foster care system.

But local advocates say the state Department of Human Services has been agonizingly slow to comply with federal and state law regarding kinship placement.

Just yesterday, The Gazette ran a Des Moines Register story that found that only one quarter of Iowa children in foster care actually are placed with family members.

DHS Spokesman Roger Munns told that reporter it's been hard to move those numbers - which have stayed pretty steady over the past eight years.

Maybe the clue lies in another Register finding: DHS caseworkers only made “diligent” efforts into finding and screening potential family placements in three out of four cases.

And I have a difficult time believing that there's not one suitable and willing family member in most of those cases when DHS workers do take the time to try for kinship placement.

In the past few months I've talked with families who have jumped through more hoops than you can imagine in an effort to keep their families together after DHS removed children from a relative's home.

Take the Dubuque grandmother who became a licensed foster care provider just so she could care for her two grandsons - who she'd been helping raise from birth - when the state terminated their father's parental rights.

The state gave her the license, still the children were given to an unrelated foster family, who has since adopted them.

That grandma can't even see her grandsons now - the clothes she bought for them hang in the closet, outgrown and never worn.

And DHS is having a hard time placing children in need with family?

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net