Is a Washington law pitting child protection against parental rights?
Some people tasked with caring for abused and neglected children believe it is, and say children are dying because of it.
One of those people is Amy Parks. She and her husband have been foster parents for nine years. They adopted a child from the state’s foster care system. That little girl was horrifically abused by her biological mother and another man.
“She has severe trauma from her torture,” said Amy. “We’re supposed to be protecting the kids and we’re not”
Someone called Child Protective Services when someone saw the child in a car with her mother doing drugs inside it. After initially accepting a safety plan, the mother later refused to participate and even stopped getting drug tests.
Amy said the state returned the child to the biological mother anyway. “They just left it like that and 10 months later, she nearly died,” Amy said.
A lawsuit has been filed in that child’s name accusing the state of negligence.
Amy believes the state will face many more of these types of suits because of House Bill 1227. Passed by the legislature in 2021, it’s called the Keeping Families Together Act. Its intent is to safely reduce the number of children placed into foster care, making it harder to remove a child from a home.
The standard now requires a showing that the removal is necessary to prevent “imminent physical harm” to the child.
The law goes on to clarify that things like inadequate housing or substance abuse do not, by themselves, constitute imminent physical harm and that the possible physical harm to the child must outweigh the harm that will occur as a result of the removal from the home.
Since it went into effect in July 2023, it has reduced the number of children placed into foster care, by about 28%. But in that same time period, the number of deaths and near deaths of children on the Department of Children, Youth, and Families radar shot up 114%.
“Not only are kids and parents dying, there are kids who are being maimed and seriously neglected throughout this. Neglect has been basically written completely out of the statute, so that’s why I’m talking about this is that kids are at serious risk.”
That is the comment from a local social worker who spoke to 4 News Now anonymously, afraid they would lose their job for speaking out. They said since the act became law, they and their co-workers have to leave children in unsafe home situations pretty much daily.
We reached out to a number of local legislators about the law, including Spokane’s State Rep. Timm Ormsby, who was one of the sponsors of HB 1227. He declined to comment.
We also reached out to the new secretary of DCYF, Tana Senn. She wouldn’t comment but her office directed us to this report that says no changes need to be made.
In it, Senn’s predecessor blamed the increase of child deaths and near deaths on the availability of highly addictive and hazardous drugs combined with a lack of substance use disorder treatment.
“If you are high on meth, if you are high on fentanyl or heroin or any other hard drugs, you have lost the capacity to care for and nurture your children because you have lost the capacity to pretty much do that for yourself,” says 35th District Representative Travis Couture.
Couture proposed legislation to combat what he sees as policies that favor the rights of drug addicts over the safety of children.
He adds, “They say that removing children from biological parents is traumatic, but it’s less traumatic than being dead.”
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