The story of how Jennifer Gardinier came to take in five kids who needed a home begins with her 4-year-old daughter making friends in the cul-de-sac.
Soon after Gardinier and her husband, Stacy, bought a house in Dacono, their daughter met a boy the same age who lived down the street. The two would run around the cul-de-sac and ride bikes together, Gardinier recalled. “He and my daughter became fast friends.”
The boy was one of five siblings, and his family was struggling. The children often came to the Gardiniers’ house for meals, then stayed for hours playing in the backyard and swimming in the pool.
The situation at the boy’s home, which included methamphetamine use and criminal activity, had drawn the attention of Weld County child welfare officials. For a time, authorities took the children from their parents and placed them in a foster home, then returned them home. The parents spent time in jail, and were evicted from their house. They moved with the kids to a motel room, where the drug use continued.
Then in the summer of 2023, as Gardinier was driving to her job as a legal assistant in Greeley, she got the phone call that would change their lives dramatically. It was a caseworker from Larimer County telling her the kids were going back into foster care. The little boy she first met as he rode a bike around the cul-de-sac two years earlier said the only place he wanted to live was with the Gardiniers.
Would she take them?
“There was no hesitation,” she said. “These children needed a safe place to go.”
By the time Gardinier had driven back home, the five children — ages 1, 2, 4, 6 and 16 — were at her house.
The children still live with the Gardiniers, who are moving to adopt them after their parents’ rights were terminated. The foster home is one Colorado calls a “kinship placement,” which includes not just relatives but friends, neighbors and teachers.
These types of placements have increased by nearly 40% statewide since Colorado passed a new law that allows those parents to receive monthly financial support without going through the same intensive training that other foster parents must complete. Colorado now has more than 800 kinship families, up from 588 a year earlier.
Foster placement rates start at $42 per day
Federal law changed in 2023 to allow states to have certification processes for kin that are different from foster parents who weren’t known to the children. The goal was to increase the number of children going to homes of people they already know and reduce the trauma of foster care.
In Colorado, the new certification process for kinship placements requires six hours of training — not the 27 hours required for other foster parents. A background check and home safety visit are still required, but some of the rules for kinship parents were relaxed, including the square-footage requirement for a child’s bedroom. A second state law removed some disqualifying factors for kinship parents, such as criminal histories involving domestic violence or drugs that were more than 5 years old.
The state law also allows kinship placements to receive at least some money to help offset the cost of care, even if they don’t want to go through the certification. They can qualify for 30% of what are called “maintenance” payments, which are set based on the child’s needs and can include child care expenses. Next year, that increases to 50%. If kinship parents become certified, they receive 100% of the monthly payments.
The “maintenance” rates range from $42.86 per day for children 8 and under to $66.44 for teenagers. Daily rates go up to $109 for foster homes that are certified as therapeutic or treatment homes, which are for children with intense behavioral issues or other acute needs. When the legislature passed the new law in 2024, it was estimated to cost $13 million the first year and $29 million the second year, about half of that from federal funds.
Relatives, friends, neighbors, coaches, teachers and other adults who are asked to take in children they know are most often taken by surprise, said Jeannie Berzinskas, kinship care program administrator at the Colorado Department of Human Services. It’s a different situation from people who choose to go through foster parent certification and put their names on a list to receive a phone call that could come in the middle of the night.
Kinship placement parents often have other kids in their house, work full time and can’t fit in 27 hours of training when they were just asked to take in children who aren’t theirs.
“It’s easier to do that when you’ve made a conscious decision to be a foster parent and had time to prepare,” Berzinskas said. “It’s harder when you are going to work and have kids in the home. Having to do all that was a pretty significant barrier for families.”
More children in foster care are with strangers, not relatives
More children who’ve been removed from their parents are living with strangers, rather than someone they know. There are 978 children in kinship care and 1,407 children in traditional foster care.
Those numbers are shifting, though.
This year, 53% of kids entered foster care by going to a relative or someone they know, compared with 50% the year before.
Colorado child welfare officials have tried for years to increase the number of kids going to kinship placements.
“If a child cannot stay at home, the first question they are being asked is, ‘Is there family or friends or neighbors where your kids can go?’” Berzinskas said. “There is an expectation that caseworkers are reaching out to kin.”
A mountain of research shows that foster placement is less traumatizing, and leads to fewer behavioral and mental health struggles, when children can go live with grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends or others they feel comfortable around. “It reduces trauma because of the familiarity and continuity,” Berzinskas said. “There are still familiar sites and smells and sounds.”
Kinship placements have higher success rates, in terms of how long the placement lasts and whether it leads to adoption, as well as higher rates of reunification with the children’s parents, she said. Cultural customs are more likely to stay intact, and if kids can stay near home, they are more likely to continue going to the same school.
Gardinier took in the five neighborhood children before the new laws went into effect, so she had to squeeze 27 hours of training into her life, which had just gotten exponentially busier. The family had to dip into their savings to feed and clothe the children, who arrived with only what a caseworker had purchased at Walmart on the way to her house.
It took months to get through the coursework, the background checks and fingerprinting, and the required safety measures, including creating an emergency fire escape plan. When they finally qualified for the stipend, it was a relief, but it by no means covers all the costs of raising five extra children, Gardinier said.
“The kids eat like sailors,” she said, laughing. “They are growing constantly.”
Under the new law, Gardinier would have received 30% of the financial help as soon as she took the children, before she was certified.
The oldest child, now 18, has gotten away from drugs since moving away from his parents, Gardinier said. He now has a job and is working on his GED. The little boy who first befriended Gardinier’s biological daughter is 9, and the two are still friends, but now, Gardinier said, “they fight like brothers and sisters would.”
15,000 kids are living with relatives but don’t have child welfare cases
The Office of the Child’s Representative, whose attorneys represent kids in the child welfare system, praised the new laws to increase kinship care, saying kinship care “often provides a more positive, connected, and natural experience for children and youth who cannot live with their parents.”
Attorneys in the office are concerned, however, that child welfare officials are encouraging kinship placements as an alternative to filing dependency and neglect cases, which are the civil cases that could result in termination of parental rights and decide how best to support a child in foster care.
It’s a concern because children are afforded certain rights and treatment options when they are the subject of civil abuse and neglect cases, including the determination of custody, said Sheri Danz, the office’s deputy director. The office is seeing fewer attorney appointments to dependency and neglect cases and more appointments to probate cases, which could decide guardianship, or family court, which could allocate parental responsibilities to nonparents.
The situation is leading to “unaddressed trauma history,” as well as “little to no county department support” and a “dearth” in services that help with safe reunification for parents, she said.
There are an estimated 15,000 children who are being raised by relatives or close family friends without formal involvement from child welfare, state officials said.