Legislative panel on foster care meeting today
The Idaho Legislature’s Foster Care Study Committee is meeting today in the state Capitol; you can listen live here. It follows some controversy about how foster care placements, moves and adoptions work in Idaho. Today’s agenda includes an update from the Department of Health & Welfare, and presentations from a prosecuting attorney, a judge, a guardian ad litem attorney and a public defender. The panel will take public testimony at 2:30.
As today’s meeting opened, Co-Chair Sen. Abby Lee, R-Fruitland, said the panel’s next meeting, on Sept. 12, will focus more heavily on “questions, perspectives and concerns, as well as hopefully some recommendations from the department.” The committee includes 10 legislators from both houses and both parties.
Russ Barron, H&W deputy director, told the panel it’s a “very important topic” and he’s glad the committee has launched its study of the issue. “It’s a shame that we have to have it, I think, because of the issues we have, but I appreciate the fact that we are coming together to talk about these issues and what can be better in Idaho,” he said. “You’re talking a situation of children that have been abandoned, abused or neglected and trying to do something better, and it’s not always easy. The discussion is very much welcome by the department.”
Barron said, "There are things that we know we need to do better, and we have started doing better in some areas. ... Communication is the big one."
Today’s meeting is the panel’s second one; materials presented at its Aug. 5 meeting are online here.
Teri Whilden, a Canyon County deputy prosecutor who handles child-protection cases, told the panel, “It is an intense caseload.” She said, “The reason that children come into foster care: Methamphetamine contributes in some way to almost every case that I handle.”
She said the law requires the top goal to be to reunite a foster child with its parents, or failing that, with a relative. Non-relative foster parents take the children in and love them, she said, but in most cases, they then have to give them up again to reunite with family. Whilden said those cases often are “heartbreaking,” and very difficult for non-relative foster parents who have bonded with the child. Typically, children are reunited with family in 12-15 months; if not, a process starts to terminate parental rights and allow adoption, which takes two to three years.
