SHARI SHINK: We are failing kids in Colorado foster care

Colorado’s foster care system needs to offer children something better than what they’re getting. That may mean giving families the resources to stay together while ensuring their children are safe and protected. Other options should include moving a trusted adult into the home or moving an abusive parent out, rather than removing the child.

We have not just a legal, but a moral obligation to ensure these children thrive whether they stay with their parents, move in with relatives, or end up with strangers who signed up to be foster families. 

Right now, foster kids are not thriving, especially when it comes to school. They are absent more often, suspended more often, and drop out more often. About 70% of children in foster care do not graduate from high school. Not surprisingly, they attend college less often. Many go into the system with PTSD and emerge with drug habits, behavioral issues, and/or depression. Even their physical health is dramatically compromised. Teenage girls and young women who are or have been in foster care are far more likely than their peers to become pregnant. 

The statistics, and the heartbreaking and harrowing stories behind them, only underscore how severely the foster care system is failing children. I say that as someone who has been a part of that system in Colorado for decades — as a litigator for 33 years, and as an advocate, educator and, yes, agitator. 

There isn’t a single, easy answer. But the system – and the people who are a part of it – need to look hard at addressing five areas that have made real, system-wide improvement almost impossible and caused the kids to suffer as a result. 

• Moving kids around like pieces of furniture. Three or more placements are not uncommon. I’m familiar with a 2-year-old currently in the system in Colorado who’s spent time with six families in as many months. A common feeling among foster youth is that they don’t matter. That feeling is underscored by the trash bags many foster kids must use to transport their meager belongings from place to place. Quite simply, make this stop. Provide consistency. 

• No common sense. Courts, caseworkers, everyone in the system, seems to bend to bureaucracy and rules that can be, well, ridiculous. I’m thinking of the 4-year-old who’d been with the same foster family since birth. Happily, that family wanted to adopt him. Crazily, the system said he had to go to another family already on the list of potential adopters. What sense does that make? Who does it suit? Fortunately, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with my emergency motion asking it to intervene. He stayed put. Even when laws are changed to benefit children, they are too often not enforced.

• The silence of good people. Too often the people who care, and there are many, don’t want to speak up or speak out. Nonprofits that get state or county funding don’t want to jeopardize their grants with public criticisms. Foster parents don’t want their licenses revoked, or to stop having children who need them sent their way. Attorneys or advocates might worry they won’t get appointed to cases if they challenge the system too vociferously. Others often have too many cases or too little inclination to mount a meaningful challenge for a child. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I wasn’t on anyone’s list of top lunch companions back in the day.

• Lack of courage (even if it’s understandable). I’m talking here about people with some semblance of power or security who simply shrug their shoulders and say they’re doing the best they can. Or, even more annoying, no, we can’t do that, and you can’t either. Why not try? There is always something you can do, even if it’s not easy or even if it’s never been done. Real innovation requires real willpower. Let’s all stop conforming and compromising on what’s not actually in the child’s best interest. 

• The handcuffs of confidentiality. They’ll tell you confidentiality protects the privacy of families. No, it’s there to protect what the system does (and doesn’t do). This way the public doesn’t hear how its money is being misspent, or that these multi-million-dollar bureaucracies aren’t benefiting the children they’re charged with saving. As a result, even legislators don’t know what’s really happening to these kids even as they approve another expensive program.

Most importantly, we must give agency to these kids. Don’t keep deciding their futures without their input. Where do they want to live? Who makes them feel safe? What do they need right now? To that end, Colorado this year passed a Foster Youth Bill of Rights, which, in part, suggests foster children have a right to participate in their court hearings, that they have a say in their own lives. We’ll have to wait and see whether it will be enforced and if children truly get their voices heard. 

Foster kids deserve to come first, whether they only tangentially touch the system or end up spending years in care. It’s time the system made them the priority and put their needs above everyone else’s.

Attorney Shari F. Shink is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center and executive director of Cobbled Streets, which is focused on changing the lives of foster and homeless children.