The state could adopt a “loved ones first” approach to foster care

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (Capitol News Illinois) – Illinois lawmakers may soon make it easier for children in foster care to live with their relatives or others close to them.

The Department of Children and Family Services office is located in Springfield. (Capitol News Illinois file photo)(Capitol News Illinois)

Child welfare experts have long touted the benefits of children staying in foster care with relatives. Advocates say these arrangements provide children with more stability, lessen the trauma they experience, improve their mental health and reduce the number of times the child is moved from one home to another.

But state and federal laws often made such placements impractical. To get paid to support the children, relatives had to follow the same strict rules that apply to other adoptive parents. They are subject to a rigorous home inspection with room size requirements, as well as restrictions on the number of people and gender of people who can sleep in the same room. Future parents also undergo extensive classroom training.

In 2023, however, the federal government decided to allow states to use separate standards for relatives of children in foster care and for other foster parents, in an effort to match more children with loved ones.

Today, Illinois lawmakers are moving forward with a plan to do just that, while making other changes that will encourage the placement of children with relatives. The Illinois Senate unanimously approved the measure, known as Kinship in Request, or KIND Actin the fall. But the House must approve the changes before it adjourns in early January, otherwise the bill will have to go through the entire legislative process again to reach the governor’s desk.

“I think it’s really important that we realize how unfair our systems are when it comes to foster care,” said Sen. Mike Simmons, a Chicago Democrat, one of the bill’s 15 co-sponsors. in the upper house. “This is an excellent step forward in terms of respecting the integrity of the families from which these children come, which includes their immediate family but also their extended relatives who love them.”

The Illinois record

Nearly 10,000 children – more than half of the total number of children in the care of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – live with family members.

But more than 60% of these families are not eligible for monthly foster care payments, annual clothing vouchers or foster care support groups, according to the ACLU of Illinois.

“Support for relatives, relatives who have not received the same type of support as foster parents, for example – I am talking about monetary support – is in my opinion a very important element in managing the time that a child goes into foster care. custody of DCFS. We want to make sure they get back into their home environment as quickly as possible, and this is one way to encourage that,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, said in a statement. press conference on December 11.

Casey Family Programsthe nation’s largest foundation focused on foster care, says prioritizing kin caregivers decreases sibling separation, reduces the risk of abuse and increases the chance of achieving permanency.

Placing foster children with relatives could also help Illinois do a better job finding permanent homes for children in its care. Illinois’ foster care system ranked in the bottom third of states in 2019 for children placed in permanent homes, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Between 2017 and 2021, the number of children placed in permanent homes decreased by 7.8%, according to the 2021 Congressional Child Welfare Outcomes Report.

KIND Act Changes

The KIND Act would allow DCFS to seek additional federal funding to implement a families-first approach. DCFS would use federal money to put more effort into finding families of foster children, informing them and improving support services, as well as conducting background and identity checks.

“By promoting kinship care and addressing systemic issues related to long tenure and insufficient foster care support, the KIND Act aims to improve the safety, stability, and well-being of children taken care of by DCFS,” said Senator Mattie Hunter. , D-Chicago, a lead sponsor of the bill, said at a November conference Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Payments to relatives particularly affect black children, who are overrepresented in the foster care system.

In Illinois, in October, more than 18,000 children were in the DCFS system; more than 8,000 of them were black. In terms of proportional representation, black children are 250% more likely to be placed in DCFS care, according to the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The poverty rate for black Illinoisans is 27.7%, compared to 8.5% for white Illinoisans. Preventing these families from accessing government subsidies for foster care adds additional hardship and repeats the cycle of poverty they face, according to the University of Alabama Institute for Human Rights.

“We know that the vast majority of children arriving are overrepresented and the KIND Act removes financial barriers that prevent loved ones from caring for children,” said Nora Collins-Mandeville, director of systems reform policy at the ACLU of Illinois. , in an interview.

“The relatives who come forward have far fewer resources than a foster parent. And so the fact that we don’t even pay, in our current system, these relatives the same amount that we pay a stranger to care for a child, it’s quite frustrating,” she said .

Under the KIND Act, there would also be different criminal history requirements for relatives and foster parents. The federal government authorizes DCFS to waive “non-security license» for caregivers on a case-by-case basis. Relatives would be subject to a personal analysis assessing their criminal record and its potential impact on the child. The bill would allow DCFS to take into account, for example, the overrepresentation of minorities in the prison system, particularly for minor drug offenses.

The foster care legislation would also require courts to oversee DCFS’ implementation of the family-first approach. Courts would have a greater role in family tracing efforts, for example by reviewing whether DCFS is complying with the requirement to notify relatives that a child has been removed from parental custody within 30 days. Additionally, courts would be able to expedite the emergency placement of children with relatives who are awaiting a custody hearing.

Controversial history

The bill’s sponsors called the measure historic because of the collaboration between DCFS and the ACLU, which have long fought over state care for children in foster care. In 1988, the ACLU sued DCFS BH v. Johnson. Three years later, the two parties entered into a consent decree to reform DCFS to provide safer housing, reduce caseloads per employee, protect DCFS funding, allow for more oversight and accountability and improve the training of social workers.

These efforts have encountered serious obstacles over the years.

A period of two years budget impasse between Democrats in the General Assembly and Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, which ended in 2017, had a major impact on DCFS funding. This forced the agency to close many group homes across Illinois. This has led to children in DCFS care being housed in places not designed to house children long-term, including psychiatric hospitals, juvenile detention centers and shelters, and even DCFS offices.

Since then, DCFS has struggled to recover from the loss of funds in 2017 and has not implemented the changes outlined in the consent decree.

In light of these deficiencies, in 2018 the court appointed a special master to DCFS to ensure meaningful action was taken and to ease tensions between the ACLU and DCFS,

Pritzker, who defeated Rauner in the 2018 election, campaigned on a promise to reform the system. Since 2019, the DCFS budget has almost double from $1.22 billion to $2.03 billion, primarily to hire more staff and caseworkers. Despite these improvements, a Cook County judge has continually detained DCFS Director Marc Smith. contempt in court in 2022 for failing to find adequate placements for children in foster care, some of whom were still residing in psychiatric hospitals. An appeals court later overturned the contempt citations and Smith resigned at the end of 2023. He was the 13th DCFS director in 10 years.

“For a good period of time, the agency’s management experienced no stability. We had a turnover every year. It wasn’t until the Pritzker administration that we had a director there for several years. And that can be really difficult. You have different priorities for each leader that comes in,” Collins-Mandeville said.

Despite turnover at the top and ongoing legal battles at the agency, DCFS has reduced the number of young people The number of people in care has increased from 50,000 in 1995 to 16,000 in 2023. This number, however, increased last year to 18,000.

“Today marks a day we have long hoped to see: The ACLU and DCFS align on historic legislation that provides a critical opportunity to reform Illinois’ foster care system,” Collins-Mandeville said in his testimony to the Senate. committee.

Amalia Huot-Marchand is a graduate student in journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and a member of its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service that distributes coverage of state government to hundreds of media outlets across the state. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.