The problem is twofold, the groups claim: According to a report they released on September 7, the state takes children away from their parents, sometimes unnecessarily, at a rate that is 30 percent higher than the national average, and often places them with unrelated foster families rather than capable relatives — even as those relatives fight for custody.
The NCCPR calls the method of placing children in the care of relatives "kinship foster care," and says it is the system's least harmful form. It also reports that Colorado processes such placements at a rate that is 33 percent below the national average.
According to the groups' research, 23.2 out of every 1,000 children from impoverished Colorado families are entered into the foster care system; the national average is around eighteen per 1,000. In Colorado, 12 percent of those children are put in group homes and institutions, as compared to 9 percent nationwide. Twenty-seven percent of children in Colorado's system are placed in the kinship foster care program, compared to 35 percent nationwide.
"More than 80 percent of Colorado foster children were taken away in cases where there was not even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse," according to NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler in a release that accompanied the September 7 report. "Far more common are allegations of neglect, and Colorado’s broad, vague legal definitions make it easy to confuse poverty with neglect."
The report sourced its data from Child Trends, a child welfare research organization that collects information from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, which is a service of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The data that the NCCPR and the MJCF took from Child Trends is from 2021.
Madlynn Ruble, deputy communications director for the Colorado Department of Human Services, sees things differently. "CDHS can’t validate or replicate the data in this report, and what’s stated in that report does not reflect what we see in our data," she tells Westword. "I can share that currently, of all Colorado children in an out-of-home placement, 6.9 percent are in a congregate care setting [group home], and 89.8 percent are in a family-like setting, either kinship or foster care. Of that 89.8 percent in family-like settings, 37.4 percent are in a kinship home."
In response, Wexler points out that the report's 27 percent figure is made up of all children in the Colorado foster system, not just those in family-like settings. Although the data used in the report is from 2021, he thinks it's unlikely that the numbers have changed drastically since then. However, it is worth noting that the rate of children in the Colorado foster system declined from 3.8 per 1,000 in 2018 to 2.9 in 2021, according to Child Trends.
Wexler also speculates that the discrepancy between the report's data and CDHS's may be caused by the organizations' use of different definitions of what constitutes a congregate care setting or kinship care setting when collecting data.
This is backed up by academic research, he added, noting as an example that foster parents are more likely to put children on medication for perceived behavioral issues. "While nobody has proven exactly why, the commonsense explanation is: If you love someone, you will tolerate more in the way of difficult behavior than if you are a total stranger," Wexler said.
Kevin and Laura Poss — farmers who live in Hugo — spoke at the press conference about their experiences with the foster system.
A couple years ago, the couple said they learned from another relative that the infant grandchildren of one of Kevin's cousins were in the hospital as a result of domestic abuse. The cousin asked them at the time, "When [the kids] get out of the hospital, would you be willing to take them?"
"We were there from day one," Kevin said.
The children are still in the foster system and not yet in a permanent home, according to Laura. For almost two years, she and Kevin have been fighting to bring them back into their family. "Had they been placed with us, they would have a permanent home right now rather than still being in limbo," Kevin noted.
Despite providing all the necessary documentation and meeting the necessary requirements, the couple said that as far as they know, the children are going to an adoptive foster family.
"We have the same culture as our family members," Laura said, explaining that she has an Italian background and Kevin comes from a long line of farmers in eastern Colorado. "They've never met their great-grandmother, who is still living. They haven't met their aunts. All of these people aren't able to parent them, but they still need to be in their lives."
Ponciano Gonzalez told a similar story at the press conference. He lives in Texas, but his nephew and nephew's daughter — Gonzalez's grand-niece — live in Colorado. His nephew lost custody of his daughter at one point and took classes and got training in order to regain custody. He succeeded, Gonzalez said, and the uncle and nephew were in communication with each other multiple times a week until one day, it suddenly stopped.
"I kept calling, kept trying to reach out — called my other nephews to see if they had heard from him," Gonzalez said. "Finally, I get a call from a stranger/friend of his [who told] me that he was in jail."
A month after initially losing contact, Gonzalez said, the friend was finally able to help him get in touch with his nephew. "[My nephew] gave me the caseworker's name, because he wanted me to take custody of his child," Gonzalez said. "So me and my wife talked about it...and called. We gave her all our information; she said it's going to take a couple of weeks. So a couple weeks went by; we called her: nothing. Called her again: nothing. All of a sudden, she's gone. So we get another caseworker. Called her, gave her all our information again; several weeks later, she's gone. All of a sudden we get another caseworker. We called her, gave her all our information. They contacted Texas [child protective services]; we gave them our information; they did the [home study]. A month later, they told us that we passed; we were cleared. They sent the paperwork to Colorado; Colorado cleared us. Still nothing. That was two years ago."
Gonzalez said he is ultimately worried about his grand-niece "losing her identity. She's not going to know who she is; she's not going to know anything about the family or where she comes from."
Annie Martinez, an attorney who represents Gonzalez and focuses primarily on family defense through her private practice Bridge Legal Solutions, tells Westword that one of the main problems is that adoptive parents have a head start on the adoptive process compared to relatives of a child newly placed in the foster system, who are usually not looking to or expecting to adopt before their young relative is separated from their immediate parents.
Additionally, she says, adoptive parents often have a more in-depth knowledge of the adoptive process and foster system, and more access to legal resources based on the fact that they have already been working to adopt a child.
"[The foster system] really does favor foster parents," Martinez adds. "In these cases, they're treated like saviors that come in to take these quote-unquote 'broken' children. ... And so they get put on a pedestal; they get support from the county."
On top of that, after a couple of months or years in the custody of a foster parent, Martinez says child-welfare officials will start to worry that a child has grown too attached to the parent and can no longer be moved to the custody of a relative.
Although the issue is statewide, she explains, it often starts at the local level because of the policies of each county's human services department and the discretion shown by the officials who work there. "The counties have free rein," she says, noting how a state or federal standard for handling child-welfare cases could improve the outcomes of many cases.
"Colorado has made tremendous strides over the past decade to support child and family well-being and to keep families safely together," Ruble says. "Colorado has seen the lowest number of child welfare out-of-home placements in its history, with a 46 percent decrease in child-welfare-related out-of-home placement in Colorado over the past fifteen years, from 6,580 children and youth in out-of-home care in September of 2008 to 3,544 today. All of this information is accessible to anyone interested through our CDHS Community Performance Center site."
She adds: "CDHS has not been contacted by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. We would be eager to meet with anyone to share how our work is fundamentally about striving to support families so they have what they need to prevent child maltreatment and unnecessary out-of-home care. We have engaged with families served by our system so we can take steps to be a more supportive system."
In addition to NCCPR's recent report, the Child Protection Ombudsman of Colorado released an annual report on September 5 in which it announced that "the independent agency closed a record 1,083 cases in Fiscal Year 2022-2023." Complaints from youth were said to have driven a 14 percent annual increase in cases.
Of the CPO’s closed cases during the fiscal year, 30 percent involved concerns regarding how child-welfare services handled reports of abuse and neglect. Access to services and personnel issues were the second- and third-highest concerns — appearing in 21 and 19 percent of cases, respectively.
"We are supportive of the work the Child Protection Ombudsman is doing," Ruble says. "In an ideal world, we would not need a child welfare system to ensure protection of all children and youth, and children would never be abused and neglected. Unfortunately, we are not at that ideal state yet, but we strive to continually implement new services, supports and solutions to support families. Removing a child from their home is an option of last resort, and one the state, and counties, take very seriously. Whenever a young person is removed from their family, our primary goal is to support reunification with family whenever possible. We acknowledge that some families have not had a positive experience with the child-welfare system, but our goals are the same: to keep children safe."
