Hearing set for today on foster-care policy
Posted on Thursday, October 2, 2008
Opponents of the state’s ban on unmarried couples fostering children said Wednesday that they will ask the Department of Human Services at a hearing today to suspend its practice. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, the American Civil Liberties Union, and physician and social worker associations said the ban puts an unfair burden on an already stressed foster-care system.
“We simply do not have enough foster homes in this state... by creating a blanket policy such as that arbitrarily [disqualifies ] potential foster homes. That just simply does more harm to children, and they’ve already been through a lot,” said Jennifer Ferguson, deputy director for Arkansas Advocates at a news conference at the Capitol.
Human Services Department officials have said that the policy has been in place since 2005 as a directive but the department only recently announced it intended to make it a formal policy. Today’s hearing is part of that process.
Ferguson said the coalition “had only recently” learned of the formalization process when the notice was officially pub- lished 45 days ago.
Human Services spokesman Julie Munsell said the directive issued in 2005 should have been publicly submitted sooner for scrutiny by the Legislative Council.
“That was an oversight,” she said. Department officials realized in January that several directives hadn’t been formalized — or made into official policy — because some former staff workers had operated under the mistaken assumption that they didn’t need to be.
But she added that the foster ban directive was just one of about a dozen other directives, most of which were cleared by the council Wednesday.
Dr. Eddie Ochoa, president of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics said the hearing will be an opportunity to “educate voters” about a measure on the Nov. 4 ballot that would establish a law to ban unmarried couples who live together from serving as foster parents or adopting children. The state doesn’t currently bar unmarried couples from adopting children.
The ballot measure “will be even broader than the policy we’re challenging,” he said.
If the parents of a minor child were to die and married or single relatives weren’t available, the law would require that the child “be given to a stranger,” said Ochoa.
“None of us would want that for our children. Nor do we want that as child-health professionals for some of the most vulnerable populations of children in our state,” he said.
Jerry Cox, president of the Arkansas Family Council Action Committee, which is pushing the ballot measure, said today’s hearing, which came at the request of Arkansas Advocates and other groups, is “an unnecessary distraction.”
“We’re disappointed that this little group of people has gone out here and derailed the process,” he said.
Cox said studies show children do better in families with a mother and father. He said he would have those studies at the hearing today.
Ochoa said “three decades of research” show that there is no social, economic, emotional and psychological difference between children raised in samesex households. He cited 2002 and 2006 studies published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Rita Sklar, executive director of the Arkansas ACLU, disputed Cox’s characterization of her group’s efforts, saying that Human Services Department policy was “slipped in” while a lawsuit challenging an earlier ban by a state board on homosexuals becoming foster parents was being decided in the courts.
Today’s hearing is a necessary forum for public discussion and comment, she said.
In 2004, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox ruled that the state policy banning homosexuals as foster parents couldn’t continue because the state hadn’t proved that gay foster parents posed a threat, so the policy exceeded the board’s mandate to protect children.
The Arkansas Supreme Court in 2006 upheld Fox’s ruling, declaring the policy of the Child Welfare Agency Board to be an unconstitutional breach of the doctrine of separation of powers because the Legislature hadn’t authorized the board to take that action.
But by then, the new directive on unmarried couples had been in effect for more than a year.
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