State hears testimony on foster-parent ban
Posted on Friday, October 3, 2008
Department of Human Services officials listened Thursday to two hours of often emotional testimony on a state practice barring unmarried cohabiting couples from being foster parents, almost all of it from opponents.
The ban has existed since February 2005, but department officials said an “oversight” kept it from being submitted to the Legislative Council or subject to a public hearing until now.
A decision on whether to keep or discard the policy will be made shortly after the public comment period ends Oct. 18, said Julie Munsell, spokesman for the department.
Eighteen of the 20 speakers opposed the ban.
Barbara Miles, a former foster child who is now a mother of two in Little Rock, said she remembers being scorned for being in foster care. The state foster care program needs more loving homes, not fewer resulting from an exclusionary directive.
“Foster children face a lot of obstacles,” she said. “We should not put any more obstacles in their way.”
Dr. Roger Hiatt Jr., one of two people who spoke in favor of the existing directive, said more traditional families should be recruited to be foster families. Expanding the pool of foster parents to include unmarried, cohabiting couples, he said, would be entering into “uncharted waters.”
Currently, on any given day, about 3, 700 foster children are in state custody with roughly 1, 100 foster homes. The imbalance means that many children have to live in group homes and contributes to one of the nation’s highest rates of multiple transfers, said Jennifer Ferguson, deputy director for Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, which requested the hearing.
Dueling sets of data offered by supporters and opponents of the ban left many speakers unimpressed.
One opponent of the policy, Stephanie Simonton-Atchley, a psychologist, said that any study can contain “methodological flaws.”
“I’d caution the use of statistical data to make decisions on individual cases,” said Simonton-Atchley, director of behavioral medicine at Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
Both sides have advanced studies that support their respective positions. And both criticized the other side’s data as flawed and ideologically driven.
John Thomas of the Arkansas Family Council, which is pushing a ballot measure on Nov. 4 that would broaden the current ban on foster care to include adoptions, cited studies indicating children in homes with cohabiting unmarried couples are at higher risk of abuse, neglect, poor school performance and a host of other social ills.
He urged the department to keep the ban.
“By creating homes led by cohabiting couples the state will be putting the most vulnerable children in the most vulnerable home environments. By doing so it will establish that a cohabiting home is equivalent and as good as a home with a mom and dad,” Thomas said.
Jill Fussell, a pediatrician and member of the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said more than three decades of research indicates that children raised in same-sex household have the same outcomes as those in traditional heterosexual homes.
The ban “unduly limits opportunities for children to have access to safe and nurturing environments. We need more foster homes, not less,” she said.
Several speakers said the policy was a covert attempt to discriminate against same-sex couples who want to be foster parents.
Lisa Teer, who said she is a single mother and “taxpayer,” said she was at the meeting to learn more about the issue.
She called the ban “modernday discrimination at the cost of innocent lives.”
Holly Dickson, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said the ban is “illegal” as it violates the due process and equal protection clauses of the U. S. Constitution.
Her office had been contacted by a minor who wanted to live with her aunt after being sexually abused by a parent, but was placed several counties away with strangers because her aunt was in an unmarried, cohabiting relationship, Dickson said.
“The fact that one family was devastated is reason enough to do away with this ban,” she said.
The ban has a long history. The current practice was set out in a department directive less than three months after a similar state ban against homosexuals as foster parents was struck down by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox in 2004. Two years later, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld Fox’s ruling.
By then, the new directive on unmarried couples had been in effect for more than a year.
A Human Services Department spokesman said after the meeting that if the current ban is scrapped, a state licensing standard might also have to be modified to allow unmarried couples to become foster parents.
“In essence, we might have to do both,” said Munsell, referring to a requirement by the Child Welfare Licensing Agency Review Board.
That requirement states: “In a two-parent home, the husband and wife shall be joint applicants, shall each actively participate in the approval process, and shall provide verification to the social worker or agency conducting the home study that they have been married at least two (2 ) years.”
Munsell said that because a “two-parent home” isn’t defined in the standards, if the decision is made to scrap the ban, then the agency would proceed with allowing unmarried, cohabiting couples to foster children.
“We believe [the board ] hasn’t defined it. That gives us more flexibility how to administer it,” Munsell said.
The department would work with the board to modify its standard, she said. The board would have to change that requirement by a vote, she said.
The board was created by former-Gov. Mike Huckabee in the mid-1990 s and still has a majority of his appointees, Munsell said.
It meets monthly, but hasn’t yet met in October. She said “theoretically” it was possible that the board could adopt a new standard that “specifically addresses cohabitation and excludes it,” she said.
And if voters approve the Nov. 4 proposed initiated act to ban unmarried, cohabiting couples from fostering or adopting children, “it makes all of this a moot point,” Munsell said.
Gov. Mike Beebe is opposed to the ballot measure, but hasn’t taken a position on the department’s current foster ban, said spokesman Matt DeCample.
“Let’s get everyone’s input and take a good hard look at this,” DeCample said, adding he didn’t know when Beebe would make a decision on the matter.
Beebe’s administration began a review of the Children and Family Services Division late last year and has examined specific policies “on a case-by-case basis,” DeCample said.
But the governor didn’t leave this directive in place necessarily because he supports it, De-Cample said.
“I don’t know that you can pull one component out. We’re looking at the big picture,” he said. “Our first priority is always the best interest of the child.”
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
