The measure could cost Utah up to $500,000 in federal funding, 2 percent of the $23.7 million now flowing into the child-welfare system. But the benefits - keeping children out of shelters - outweigh the costs, argued the bill's sponsor, Rep. Wayne Harper, R-West Jordan.
Members of the Child Welfare Legislative Oversight Panel agreed and unanimously endorsed the measure on Monday. It will go before the full Legislature in January.
Duane Betournay, director of the state Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS), supports the bill. So do advocates who challenged the ban as misguided and hurtful to children.
"This looks like a big step in the right direction," said Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. Wexler urges lawmakers to pass the bill quickly, and make it effective immediately.
"The sooner this becomes law," he said, "the sooner children can be freed from needless institutionalization and be placed in the arms of loving relatives, where they belong."
Emergency kinship placements have been banned since May under a "better-safe-than-sorry" interpretation of the federal Adam Walsh Act, which requires that all adoptive and foster families, including kin, undergo lengthy FBI criminal screens.
The federal law doesn't say criminal screens must be completed before placing a child. But that's how Utah understood it, and lawmakers changed the law to comply with that interpretation.
As a result, children removed from abusive or neglectful homes are being placed in shelters, some for eight weeks or longer, waiting for kin to clear FBI checks.
Of the 2,193 children removed from homes for neglect or abuse in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended in June, 80 percent had documented inquiries for kinship placement.
Harper's bill would free the state to place children with a noncustodial parent or relative, like a grandparent, after checking them against state criminal and child-abuse databases.
"That takes 5 to 10 minutes at most," said Harper. Meanwhile, the state will submit fingerprints for an FBI screen and, depending on the results, re-evaluate the placement.
The legislation also would give priority to placing children with a noncustodial parent, relative or friend of the family.
That encourages Carole Shauffer at the Youth Law Center, who meets next week with DCFS to discuss concerns about the state's overreliance on shelters.
In 2006, 141 children, up to age 3, were sent to the Christmas Box House in Salt Lake City. Their median stay was four days.
"I am always concerned about young children spending any time in congregate care," said Shauffer. "It's best just not to have shelters. If they're there, you tend to use them."
Lawmakers on Monday discussed other ways to support kinship caregivers.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are 42,000 children living with relatives in Utah; most of those placements happen informally.
How the Adam Walsh Act affects these informal arrangements is unclear. Betournay has categorically refused to discuss the subject with the The Salt Lake Tribune.
So-called "kinship" placements tend to be safer and more stable than traditional foster placements, research shows. But in Utah, a large number fail.
Jacci Graham, director of Grandfamilies, a support group for kinship caregivers, blames a lack of supports.
Most of the relatives that Graham aids are grandparents who are not involved in the child-welfare system. They step up to care for their grandchildren with little knowledge of the commitment they're making or the legal roadblocks to enrolling the kids in school or securing medical care for them.
Grandfamilies help families in Salt Lake and Tooele. Other areas of the state have zero supports.
Graham would like to expand the program, which is partly funded by DCFS, but doesn't have the money.
"You will have more of them fail, if you do not give resources to these families to be successful," said Graham. "These are troubled families and troubled children."
kstewart@sltrib.com
