What is CHINS?

Seems like there is something new for me to learn every day. I had not heard of CHINS before. It stands for Children in Need of Services.

I went looking trying to understand a post I read – someone was trying to help 2 kids (ages 4 & 6) who have been in placement with a foster family since Summer 2021. Their Mom has made progress on quite a few things and understood their plan to be reunification. The Mom reached out to a cousin when children were placed, so that cousin could become a Kinship placement. The Mom was told ICPC (Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children) would be explored because the cousin lived in a different state. To my knowledge, Dept of Social Services never followed through. The foster parents petitioned the court to change the judge (who has previously not recommended Termination of Parental Rights (TPR) multiple times because of mom’s progress). The result was that the judge has been changed to a CHINS judge.

I wondered what a CHINS judge is and why that would matter. I found this pdf LINK>What is a CHINS? It is from the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts. Once the CHINS petition is issued, it is up to the judge, not the parent or the school, to decide when to dismiss the CHINS. It really does not seem relevant to the circumstances of this case but maybe there is some kind of bias against a judge who hears these cases ? Regardless, the judge must consider the best interests of the child. That means the judge could disallow the parent and remand custody to the foster parents. At least this is my understanding of CHINS.

Someone who knows a bit about the state in question suggested – I would also contact the Ombudsman, send emails to the caseworker, supervisor, etc and cc her attorney asking what happened to looking into a relative placement. The sliver of hope, should TPR be granted, is that CPS is still obliged to consider kin first, before allowing foster parents to adopt. You’re just going to really have to push. They likely didn’t move the kids to a different state because mom was doing good and making progress and they wanted them close for visitation. But, if TPR is granted, they may think differently. However, someone else corrected that mistaken impression – unfortunately when TPR is granted, that state no longer considers any biological relationships.

The original commenter added – There is a public defender for Mom, however she has only been able to see them a few times, none yet this year. Cousin has contacted the Ombudsman and I did advise her to contact them again and include the supervisors who initially stated (and I found out there is documentation) ICPC would be explored. Also this good news – it’s been continued until next week and the cousin is petitioning for guardianship. She and the Mom have been in contact with a resource also.

I will add only – it is a wonder that any poor person lacking abundant resources ever gets through the legal tangles !!

No Leniency

Sadly, it happens. A woman was sentenced to prison and is due to deliver in 6 weeks. She had hoped for leniency, but that didn’t happen. The minimum is a 15 year sentence, her earliest parole is 2031. She has no family who can take the baby (or be approved to take the baby) and she doesn’t know who the dad is. Her only option is foster care or adoption. She has been told by her attorney and by Child Protective Services (CPS) that CPS will need to sign off on any placement she picks. Due to her crimes and what happened, 99% of her friends have backed away from her, so there are no friends willing to take her baby. CPS will be notified the minute the baby is born and will take custody. She has a public defender for an attorney, admitted guilt and took a plea to get the minimum available.

One response – access to information is going to be the first step. Make certain she fully understands how her institutionalization will impact the kid’s systemic involvement. But you have to be up front and realistic. Once she is in the custody of the state, she has very minimal legal rights over the child because she’s classified as a dependent of the state and that’s always been their tool to remove or restrict civil rights and liberties from people. Her child will be adopted, if there are zero kin to step up for the baby. There’s not a state in the country that wouldn’t move for a termination of parental rights for an incarcerated parent with such a long sentence. This is a tragic situation where there are basically no options. Her rights will be terminated and the child will be adopted.

Someone else noted that foster care and adoption are likely not actually her only options. Depending on how involved the state already is (hopefully less because the child isn’t born yet) she can likely assign a non-family legal guardian through the duration of her prison stay. Legal advice ASAP is crucial. In my state, she would be able to sign power of attorney over as soon as baby is born and keep the Dept of Family Services from even stepping in – as a temporary situation at first, until a guardianship could be set up.

Yet, it is noted that because of the situation and history, CPS must approve the placement chosen and her attorney has said the chances of them even considering a private placement outside of an adoption are almost zero.

One person noted that even the most distant of relatives may feel compelled to help, if she gets the word out that she’s searching for someone with any familial connection to assume guardianship of the child. She shared this story – I know of a family who wound up adopting a child because the parents’ rights were terminated – child was put in foster care because no one in the family would or could take the child. The adopting family only found out about the child through the grapevine because of a very distant familial connection – it was one of the adoptive parent’s distant cousin’s or great uncle’s great-grandchild or something crazy like that. The adoptive parents didn’t personally know the parents and had no knowledge the child even existed but was able to get the child out of the system because of the very distant familial relationship. They felt compelled to get the child out of the system because even though they didn’t know the child or parents – the child was “family.” These adoptive parents were also past the age of “typical” parents – they have grown kids and are old enough to have grandkids or great grandkids.

One brings up the possibility of a conditional surrender. She would still have visits with baby until adoption and she could do the terms of a surrender to require legally binding visits until baby is 18. It is an agreement between parent and adopters (both sides have to agree to the terms). If adopters don’t follow the agreement, the parent can take them to court. As far as what the courts can/will do, that is an open question until it happens but the courts do have the power to enforce it because it’s a legal agreement. However, sadly all it takes is the adopters with a good child psychologist to go back to the judge later on and say it’s detrimental to the child to continue those visits.

And maybe it won’t actually be 15 years. One shared – What we learned after the fact having had no experience with the prison system, our son’s mother was sentenced for 15 yrs in federal with no option for parole. We assumed there was no leniency based on what her lawyer said. Now at 3 years in, she only has about 2-4 years left. I would highly recommend temporary guardianship.

And then there was this story with a happier ending – Someone I know ran multiple ancestry databases on her newborn because she was facing prison time with no viable caregiver in her family. She had casual flings during that period with no way to contact the potential fathers. She was able to narrow it down to a family. Several awkward phone calls later, she found the father. He eventually took custody (I think his brother and sister-in-law were involved for a bit too and they were foster parents, so an easier time of getting CPS approval initially, while the formal paternity testing was being done. She gave birth while out on bond before her trial. This process may be harder if the person you are helping has the baby in a jail or prison setting where she cannot access DNA kits. And the reply was – sadly, she is already incarcerated. And so this – Some states allow lawyers to petition for a DNA sample from the baby to narrow down paternity. She may need to work with a legal team knowledgeable about foster care and incarceration. I know it’s a long shot, but if it pans out the baby may have the possibility to be with relatives.

An Issue of Fairness

Today’s story is about a father who had to fight for over 6 months to bring his daughter home from the custody of the Div of Child and Family Services (DCFS) in Illinois. They had been trying to adopt her out from day one. Especially, when they found out that he lived in a different state. It took 6 months because DCFS lied to the judge at the shelter care hearing saying that they were afraid for his daughter’s safety and that he hadn’t had a relationship with his daughter in over a year.

He didn’t have a physical relationship because of the distance and not being able to afford to travel. He lives in Delaware. For some odd reason, they were under the assumption that she was born in Illinois, not Delaware. They were surprised when he showed up to the emergency shelter care hearing with less than 12 hours notice. He brought his baby girl’s birth certificate with him.

At this point, he can only honestly believe that the mom was working with them, so that the baby girl couldn’t come home with him on day one. The child’s mom wasn’t happy to see him there that day either.

To clarify, it was the mom’s criminal charges that caused DCFS to be involved to begin with. Therefore, DCFS was given temporary guardianship and he was ordered by the judge to go through the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC) process. Then, DCFS admitted at the final hearing, through his public defender, that he was never supposed to go through that process because he was the non-offending parent.

The real harm came when his baby girl was moved from foster home to foster home. He now knows she was placed in homes that were foster-to-adopt, all the while the child’s mom was active in seeing her. The baby girl was calling out for her mom all the time.

He can only thank God that the lady who did finally take her in for the last 4 and half months was a guardian angel. Because of her wonderful behavior he and his whole family all consider her to be “grandmother” to the baby girl.

There was a reason she was in the picture. Her son had also had a daughter with the same woman. The lady has had custody of that baby since birth but DCFS opened a case, even though there shouldn’t have been.

So this man is just putting his story out there. Maybe it will help someone or some parents, by letting them know that they can fight Child Protective Services (CPS) so that they can bring their kids home and not give up hope during the long and frustrating process. It will be 2 years in January that his baby girl has been back home.

Finally, under the heading of people can and do change – Thankfully, the child’s mom has also been slowly making progress with her own issues and is able to be somewhat involved in being a mom to their daughter.

Hope Meadows

I stumbled upon mention of this reading something else. It was just a little “also” paragraph at the end but I was intrigued and had to go looking into it.

On a quiet street in Rantoul sits a small neighborhood of 15 nondescript duplex houses, part of a larger subdivision built decades ago to house the families of pilots and workers at the now-closed Chanute Air Force Base. Although it’s impossible to tell just by looking, something remarkable is happening here: adopted kids from troubled backgrounds are finding acceptance and support in the arms of neighbors old enough to be their grandparents. That’s by design at Hope Meadows, a community bringing together several generations of people from all walks of life for one purpose: building a safe and stable environment for adopted children.

Started in 1994 by Brenda Eheart, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hope Meadows is a neighborhood of adopted children, their families and senior citizen volunteers, all working together to form a community of support and interdependence. What was started as a permanent destination for adopted children has also become a place where adoptive parents find support as they deal with often troubled kids, and where seniors can find continued purpose as they age. Hope is the first iteration of a social services model known as ICI – intergenerational community as intervention – and it is on the verge of spreading nationwide.

Families seeking to adopt move to Hope Meadows and are paired with children in need of a permanent home. Each family lives for free in one of the 15 six-bedroom homes converted from pairs of duplex apartments, and one parent is employed by Hope Meadows as a “family manager,” earning a stipend and health insurance coverage for the family. Meanwhile, senior residents at Hope volunteer for six hours each week and receive reduced rent on an apartment in the neighborhood. There is on-site counseling available for adopted children, and the whole neighborhood regularly participates in group activities that build intergenerational relationships. The secret of the program’s success is that the relationships are allowed to form naturally, which helps provide meaningful interaction and a sort of informal therapy for all involved.

The children adopted at Hope often come from situations of sexual abuse, neglect or overwhelmed parents, Calhoun says, and they often have issues with trust and abandonment. At Hope, those children find a permanent place to unpack their bags, literally and figuratively. With the seniors and staff involved, the families have constant support. The seniors have raised their own kids and can give hindsight about what might work in whatever situation. The support makes a lot of difference in the closeness at Hope Meadows because everyone is looking at what’s good for the children.

Hope used to accept foster kids but now the program focuses solely on adoption. Hope Meadows found that the bonds that were broken when those foster children eventually left were too hard on everyone involved. It was like they were losing not only the attachment to the foster parents, but an attachment to the entire community. Childhood is all about forming attachments. That’s how we evolve, and if that’s disrupted when you’re young, it makes it harder to do it again and again. It’s harder to trust and believe that this is really going to be your new family, your new home.

The community’s senior volunteers benefit from the program as well, and not just in the form of reduced rent. Seniors at Hope generally feel a sense of continued purpose because of the impact they can have on young lives, and the relationships they build provide meaningful interaction. As seniors grow older, they can rely on community members to look after them. Seniors are an integral part of Hope’s success because they provide wisdom and support for other community members.

The program is intergenerational, interracial, inter-whatever. Many of the adopted children are African-American and most other residents are white. Everybody gets to know everybody else as an individual, and when you know someone as an individual, it’s harder to put them into a category. This is it’s intentional. The majority of children in foster care are African American.

The Executive Director at Hope Meadows is Elaine Gehrmann. She is a former Unitarian minister and public defense attorney. Gehrmann says she wanted to be a part of Hope because it “deals with the whole person and their whole situation. Being a lawyer, clearly I helped some people, but I could only help them with their legal problems,” Gehrmann says. “A legal problem may be the least of your problems, and may be a manifestation of a larger problem. This place provides a lot of the things that communities used to provide that they don’t anymore.”

This blog was excerpted from a longer article. You can read the complete Illinois Times story here – This Is The Village It Takes.