State working out how to pay relatives who provide foster care under recent court decision

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Kentucky's top human services official said Tuesday that the state will comply with a court order to pay relatives who provide free foster care the same as they do licensed foster families.

But Vickie Yates Brown Glisson, secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said the cabinet is still analyzing how to apply the court decision.

"Our legal team is studying it," she said in a brief interview.

The court decision comes as a growing number of relatives, many of them grandparents, are caring for children removed from homes because of abuse or neglect and say the extra costs have caused them to burn through retirement savings and raise the children in poverty.

Some have reported losing homes or facing bankruptcy.

Officials say the state's drug epidemic has helped fuel an all-time high of about 8,500 children in state care because of abuse or neglect.

Meanwhile, the lawyer who won the foster payment case and an independent children's advocacy agency say they are getting inundated with calls from anxious relatives who are desperate for financial help and want to know if they are eligible under last week's court decision.

"People are out there, they are suffering," said Richard Dawahare, the Lexington lawyer who won the case on behalf of a great-aunt caring for two young boys who was denied foster payments.

Among them is Vicki Dever, a Shepherdsville grandmother raising six grandchildren, ranging in age from seven months to 13 years. She said the children suffer from the lack of financial help.

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"They are not punishing the grandparents. They are punishing the children and it's not their fault," she said.

Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said his organization has received dozens of calls since the federal court decision became final Oct. 10. One grandmother drove from another county to his office seeking information in person only to find she didn't qualify, he said.

"We have been inundated with questions," he said, speaking at Tuesday's meeting of the House Working Group on Adoption. "Sadly, the majority of folks we've talked to aren't eligible."

Brooks said even some state social workers with the Department for Community Based Services have called youth advocates seeking information about the court decision.

Glisson said the cabinet soon will send information to its DCBS offices across the state to help them with such questions.

"I want to make sure our DCBS offices know what this case means," she said.

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Meanwhile, Dawhare said he is urging people who think they might qualify to contact their social workers to let them know of their interest.

"I'd make my voice heard, in a nice way," he said.

Brooks said his organization has put together a list of questions and answers about the court ruling on its website, kyyouth.org.

The court ruling from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals became final after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by the cabinet of its decision earlier this year that the state must pay relatives who provide temporary foster care for children. 

But the order does not require foster payments to relatives who obtain permanent custody or adopt children.

For that reason, Brooks said it's increasingly urgent that the state find some way to restore Kinship Care, a program to provide financial assistance to relatives who take custody of children. 

The state closed the program to new applicants in 2013 because of a budget shortfall.

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The program provides $300 per month per child compared to foster care payments that start at about $25 a day per child or about $750 per month.

Dever, the Shepherdsville grandmother, said she and her husband are not eligible for foster payments for five of the children because they have permanent custody. And they are seeking permanent custody of the sixth child, an infant, she said.

The Devers get Kinship Care payments for three of the children they took in before the state froze the program but even those payments are in jeopardy because the state claims she missed a deadline to file paperwork. Dever said she has appealed and continues to get Kinship Care payments but cabinet officials told her if she loses the appeal, she will have to repay the money.

Even with Kinship Care payments of $900 per month, Dever, 58, who is disabled from a heart condition, said she and her husband, 73, a retired farmer, are barely scraping by.

Recently, she said, she couldn't come up with $20 two of the children needed to attend a school program that required a $10 donation per student. The school said it would accept a lesser donation and the children's great-grandparents provided each child with $1 so they could attend.

Dever said she and her husband never considered letting the kids go into foster care. She said the couple has taken the children in at various times after they were born to her daughter, who was involved with drugs; most recently, they brought the infant home from the hospital.

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"They said we could put them in foster care," she said. "We just couldn’t do that. After we took the first one how can you take one and not another. What would you say to them later in life?"

About 70,000 Kentucky children are now in the care of relatives, said Shannon Moody, with the youth advocates organization, addressing the House adoption panel Tuesday.

Of those, about 12,000 have been removed from homes because of abuse or neglect and about 5,788 are covered by Kinship Care, Moody said.

About 1,300 children are in "relative foster care," where relatives are licensed foster care providers and are paid the state's daily rate. But families sometimes get conflicting information about becoming licensed foster parents.

Some grandparents have told the Courier-Journal state workers told them they can't become licensed foster parents in order to get payments for grandchildren. Others have said workers told them there's no guarantee the state would place the children with them once they obtained such a license.

"That information has been really inconsistent in the past," Tara Grieshop-Goodwin, with youth advocates, told the adoption panel.

Cabinet officials said they are working to standardize such information.

Contact reporter Deborah Yetter at 502-582-4228 or at dyetter@courier-journal.com.

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