Youngstown Daily Legal News

Legislation would reform Ohio's foster care standards

TIFFANY L. PARKS
Special to the Legal News
Published: October 15, 2013

A House bill crafted to improve the state’s foster care laws has gained support from area organizations, former foster youths, foster parents and grandparents.

HB 213, a bipartisan proposal jointly sponsored by Reps. Dorothy Pelanda, R-Marysville, and Nicholas Celebrezze, D-Parma, would mandate training requirements and content of reports for court-appointed guardians and permit foster parents and foster children to participate in court hearings and to express their opinions about a return to the biological family.

“The issues raised in House Bill 213 are near and dear to my heart and the hearts of many other caregivers and parents across our great state,” said Marynell Townsend, the executive director of Ohio Family Care Association, a statewide nonprofit focused on support, advocacy and education for resource families.

“The reality is OFCA repeatedly hears from resource families who are deeply invested in the lives of children in their care and report feeling isolated and alienated from direct access to decision makers in the child beyond the caseworker.”

Townsend, who noted that she was adopted as an infant and later took care of her younger brother following her adoptive mother’s death, said many foster families fear that safety issues may be overlooked, discounted or not communicated to a judge.

“Guardian ad litems are a critical component in ensuring a child’s safety and best interests are considered,” she said of guardians appointed by a court to advocate for the interests of children.

“It is vital that GALs have a relationship with the child, current caregiver and proposed parent or caregiver. It is not enough for a GAL to consult with the caseworker and other attorneys in the case while waiting to be admitted to the courtroom.”

Townsend said foster parents have described scenarios where GALs cannot identify the child they are representing in court, even after the child has been in the agency’s temporary custody for years.

“I can honestly say in that in my 20 years as an active foster parent in four different counties, only one GAL has ever initiated contact with me or a child in my care,” she said. “This was only after the child had been in temporary custody two years and the agency had filed for permanent custody.”

Pelanda said the bill would allow foster children to participate in “normal childhood activities” such as spending the night with a friend by clarifying that state agencies are not liable for those events and would usher in a medical registry to enable pediatricians treating foster children to have access to the child’s medical records.

The proposed legislation was crafted after a 90-day study conducted by the Ohio attorney general’s Foster Care Advisory Group.

Pelanda said she and Celebrezze are “keenly aware of shortcomings in this area of the law.”

“This legislation is the first step in addressing some long-standing disparities in application of current law among jurisdictions, as well as inequities that are universally recognized as detrimental to the success of the foster care program in Ohio,” she said.

Crystal Ward Allen, the executive director of the Public Children Services Association of Ohio and a member of the foster care advisory group, testified in support of the bill before the House Judiciary committee.

“I appreciate the focus on improving the lives of the 13,000 children and youth that experience foster/group care every day here in Ohio,” she said.

“Several years ago, after enjoying a fabulous production of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Columbus’ BalletMet ... I was struck by just how crazy it must seem for children to be put into foster care.”

Clearly, Allen said, children and youth placed into foster care must feel like Alice falling through the rabbit hole and into the topsy-turvy world of “Wonderland.”

Allen said enacting HB 213 could provide a sense of normalcy for youth in foster care.

“The Wonderland of foster care is definitely not normal and HB 213 or any other legislation cannot make it so but HB 213 offers good language to improve the opportunity for normal activities, based on that child’s age and developmental status,” she said.

Allen highlighted the bill’s provisions that would allow foster caregivers to make decisions about extra-curricular and other every day activities that are based on a “reasonable and prudent parent standard.”

“This would allow the occasional spending the night with a friend (when the foster parent approves), joining the soccer team, taking driver’s education so whenever the youth can get their license (whether while in care or upon exit from custody) they will have been trained in safety techniques as well as qualify for the same auto insurance rates as other peers that took drivers’ education,” she said. “(The bill) is crafted with ‘good faith immunity’ language for caregivers and public-private child welfare agencies.”

HB 213 is co-sponsored by Reps. Terry Blair, Andrew Thompson, Dale Mallory, Fred Strahorn, Cheryl Grossman, Alicia Reece, Zack Milkovich, Gerald Stebelton, Michael Stinziano and Teresa Fedor.

The bill has not been scheduled for additional hearings.

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