Colorado has 367 foster children who are eligible for adoption because their parents’ rights were terminated, and more than one-third of them have been waiting at least three years for a permanent home.
Twenty-five of the children have been waiting seven years or longer for an adoptive family, shuffling from foster home to residential facility. They are the toughest for caseworkers to place, often because they have physical or mental disabilities, or because they are teenagers who’ve been through years of trauma as wards of the state.
Colorado for six years has invested in a national program that uses specially trained caseworkers — similar to private investigators — who dig into school and court records and conduct detailed interviews in search of relatives, coaches, teachers, family friends or anyone who has crossed paths with a child and might adopt them.
But state funding for the program isn’t included in next year’s proposed budget. The cut was a blow to county child welfare departments and a sore spot among some lawmakers on the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, who questioned whether Colorado was bailing on kids who have the toughest time finding homes.
The Colorado Department of Human Services, which includes the child welfare division, contends the program isn’t worth the money, pointing toward a COVID-era study that reviewed adoption rates among the kids on the state’s toughest-to-place list.
The study of Wendy’s Wonderful Kids, a program funded by the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption and related to the Wendy’s hamburger chain, found that Colorado foster kids assigned to a Wendy’s caseworker were no more likely to get adopted. But the analysis, which took place from 2018 to 2021, was plagued with concerns about virtual casework during the pandemic and questions about whether the foster kids in the control group were as tough to place as the children in the Wendy’s program.
The study, conducted by Colorado State University and the Kempe Center at the University of Colorado, suggested that the reason there was no statistical difference between the two groups was possibly because Wendy’s Wonderful Kids was placing kids with “higher acuity” and more “complex needs,” allowing for adoption at similar rates.
A nationwide analysis 10 years earlier found that children in Wendy’s Wonderful Kids were 1.7 times more likely to be adopted. And for teenagers, it was three times as likely.
The program has been expanded across the country, now in 18 states and starting in 11 more. In Colorado, its funding has come from the Dave Thomas Foundation, counties that want to participate, and the state.
Colorado contributed $340,000 to the program this year — but that was eliminated in next year’s proposed budget, which was written by the governor’s office after consultation with state agencies. The money has gone to Raise the Future, which runs training and recruitment programs focused on getting kids adopted and preventing “failed adoptions.”
Budget committee chair says making kids wait is “abhorrent”
The adoption program cut is just one in a list of human services budget decisions that have caused a rift between Gov. Jared Polis’ office and the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee. Those include not requesting money to fulfill caseworker staffing needs identified in a workload study, funding shortfalls for services for senior citizens including Meals on Wheels, and inadequate funding to clear waitlists for people who are blind or deaf. The committee is responsible for writing the budget, which takes effect July 1, after receiving requests from the governor and state agencies.
“It is a super big concern for me,” Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat and chair of the Joint Budget Committee, told state human services officials during a committee meeting last month. “The fact that we have children who are languishing in our child welfare system because we can’t find adoption placement is just abhorrent to me.”
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Raise the Future is asking the budget committee to restore the $340,000 in state funding and “direct” the human services department to continue contracting for the services. “County and philanthropic dollars cannot fill this gap,” the organization warned in an email to lawmakers. And reducing state funding “will also constitute a very troubling shift in the responsibility for serving these youth, who are wards of the state, from (the state human services department) to the good will of our overburdened counties and nonprofit philanthropic funding.”
The program, which has matched 228 children with permanent families since 2018, now has 152 children on its caseload.
Raise the Future CEO Ann Ayers said she was shocked at the state child welfare division’s interpretation of the study “which says in like 25 places that it was completely compromised by COVID.” Caseworkers interviewed for the analysis said they sometimes could not get into public buildings to retrieve court files during the pandemic and that it was awkward trying to get to know kids via virtual meetings, in part because foster parents or others in their households could overhear them talking.
The fact that children with a Wendy’s Wonderful Kids caseworker were just as likely to get adopted as other kids was “actually a huge win for the program” because counties ask for help with their hardest cases, Ayers said. The caseworkers look at “every neighbor, every soccer coach, every pastor,” sending out 100-200 inquiries per child, she said.
In one recent case, a Wendy’s caseworker found an adoptive dad for a 10-year-old boy who had first been adopted at age 3 and then given back to the state of Colorado. Even though the boy had lost contact with his biological family after his first adoption, the caseworker was able to find his biological grandmother, great-grandparents, a half-sister and two aunts, Ayers said.
Then the caseworker connected the boy’s biological relatives with his current foster dad, who had considered adopting him but had been unsure of his ability to handle the boy because of his years of trauma from living in the foster system and going through a failed adoption. The “support network” of biological relatives “that was previously nonexistent” persuaded the foster dad to adopt him, Ayers said.
She questioned why the state would not want to back a public-private partnership that includes a national philanthropic organization with a goal of emptying the foster care system. The Dave Thomas Foundation provided $365,000 for Colorado’s program this year, slightly more than the state.
The state’s contribution to the program makes up 22% of its total funding, but it helps counties by decreasing their contribution, Ayers said. About 20 counties, from Saguache to Otero to Denver, choose to participate in the program.
We are not going away. I can’t let these kids not be seen.
— Ann Ayers, CEO of Raise the Future
If the state funding is not restored, Ayers said the program will continue. “We are not going away,” she said. “I can’t let these kids not be seen.”
The proposed cut comes after decreases in state funding for the Raise the Future’s other programs in recent years.
State human services officials, in explaining the proposed funding cut, said many county child welfare divisions are having their own success at finding adoptive homes for children who’ve been in the system for years. Counties still will be able to buy the services from Raise the Future, using annual state funding allocated to county child welfare divisions to pay for caseworker salaries, adoption subsidies and therapy services.
The issue is likely to resurface during the months’ long budget process, which continues into the spring.