Consider This from NPR - In Some States, An Unpaid Foster Care Bill Could Mean Parents Lose Their Kids Forever

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Parents who have their kids placed in foster care often get a bill to reimburse the state for part of the cost. NPR found that in at least 12 states there are laws that say parents could lose their kids forever if they fail to pay it.We hear about one family in North Carolina who had a child taken away because of an unpaid bill. And NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro takes a closer look at the laws behind such cases.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. On a Friday night, families show up at the high school football game in Beargrass, North Carolina. Beargrass is a tiny rural town, population 93. Here we go, Blues! Get the ball! Get the ball! A few miles from that football field, at the end of a dirt road in a well-kept trailer home, is where Brandon and Sylvia Cunningham live.

Hey, honey. Now, they admit that there was a period of time when they were pretty irresponsible parents. I was always blowing money. I'd come home on Fridays, paycheck gone. You know, wake up broke Saturday. You know, we were so bad into drugs then and we weren't working and doing anything good with our lives. Brandon hurt his back while hauling buckets at the phosphate mine. And Sylvia got injured while lifting boxes at the drugstore. A doctor prescribed pain pills and they both fell into addiction. We were at the worst

point of our lives. They took the kids. We went straight to prison. I did nine months. He did almost six. Their four children were placed in foster care for about two years before the Cunninghams got serious about changing their lives. When children have been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months, federal law tells child welfare agencies to, in most cases, move to get them adopted. The Cunninghams were up against that time limit. A judge laid out a long series of steps the Cunninghams needed to take to get their kids back, and they followed through. They went to parenting classes and therapy. They got jobs, multiple jobs. They showed up for visits with their kids. And the parents got sober and submitted to frequent drug testing. Hair follicle after hair follicle after hair follicle after hair follicle, drug test.

The court would eventually determine that Brandon and Sylvia Cunningham had shown that they could be safe parents. So their kids finally came home. But here's where things started to get strange. The court returned three of their children, but not the fourth. I don't understand how we get three of our kids back and that one child is just gone. The fourth child, a boy who was three then and is now seven, stayed in foster care. Then he was made eligible for adoption. Now the reason for all this is the Cunninghams had failed to pay back a debt, a bill to reimburse the state for part of the cost of their child's foster care. It's crazy. I don't understand it. Nobody in this county, everybody who knows our story, I can show people the documents and they read it and they're dumbfounded by it.

Consider this. Across the country, many impoverished parents who have their children placed in foster care get a bill to reimburse the state for part of the cost of that care. And when these parents fail to pay that bill, there are laws in at least 12 states that say it's okay for those parents to lose their kids forever. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Monday, January 9th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate

with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. In North Carolina, over the last two years, appeals courts ruled in 200 cases where parents faced losing their children. And failure to pay a bill to cover some of the cost of foster care came up in 30% of those cases. Now, most of the time, it was included with more serious charges, like abuse or abandonment, where there seemed to be good reason to take children. But in a dozen cases, failure to pay some of the cost of foster care was the only reason,

often when the argument to take children away wasn't so clear at all. NPR found multiple stories like that in North Carolina. One woman, the victim of domestic violence, reported her abusive partner to police. Her kids went into foster care, and she lost her children for failure to pay, even though she speaks limited English and says no one told her. One man says he was penalized because when he was in prison, he failed to put aside some of the pennies an hour he made from a prison job. And then there's the case involving Brandon and Sylvia Cunningham, the couple we heard from earlier. They followed all the steps laid out by a judge to get their four children back from foster care. But then the court returned only three of the kids.

And the reason given was that the Cunninghams had failed to reimburse the state for part of the cost of foster care. NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro took a close look at the Cunninghams case and the laws that can keep families like theirs apart. Across the country, impoverished parents get sent a bill when their children go into foster care. It's a little-known practice. An NPR investigation last year showed it's a policy that leads to bad outcomes. Because in the vast majority of cases, kids go into foster care not because they've been abused, but for neglect. And neglect is often an issue of poverty. Parents are homeless or can't buy food. They're addicted. To get their kids back, parents need to stabilize their lives. And that takes

money to rent a big enough apartment or buy a car to get to a job. The bill to reimburse the cost of foster care is often a big one, sometimes hundreds of dollars a month. We know that when families have additional bills, children stay in foster care longer, which is not what we want. That's Asia Schomburg, who is the Biden administration official in charge of foster care policy and funding. The goal is to increase the opportunity for economic stability and mobility and not adding challenges. And that's Tangela Gray, the top federal official for child support enforcement. A few months ago, after NPR's reporting, Schomburg and Gray put out new guidance and

recommended to states that they stop charging and collecting money from poor families when their kids go into foster care. North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services told us it was moving to comply with the new direction from the federal government. Officials in Martin County, where the Cunninghams live, did not respond to our requests. I told the two federal officials about several families I'd met in North Carolina. I don't know the specifics of the Cunningham's case. That's Schomburg from the Federal Children's Bureau. But just going back right to the whole purpose of this guidance and the importance of reuniting

children with their parents and understanding, right, the devastation that a child support bill can cause. Child support is a term for that bill to make parents pay for the cost of foster care. The practice of charging parents, and only poor parents, is a leftover from another time, from a federal law still on the books from nearly 40 years ago, when Washington wanted people who got welfare to share responsibility and pay some of the cost of that assistance. Last year, every state returned money to the feds, almost $96 million collected from parents. But now reuniting children with their parents is considered the best practice.

And in 2018, Congress passed a law to make that the top priority, which raises the question, if the federal government is now telling states to quit sending a bill for foster care, then why do parents lose their children when they don't pay? How can you say this is right? Attorney Benjamin Cull represents Brandon Cunningham and other parents. Your child is never coming home because you failed to give the government money, even though the government never asked you to pay a dime. That's another hard-to-explain thing about these cases in North Carolina.

I can't tell you how much the Cunninghams owed for their son's foster care, because county officials never gave them a bill, never told them to pay. In Brandon's case, it was clear and undisputed the government never even once mentioned child support, never asked for a dime. Without being told to pay or how to pay or how much to pay, the Cunninghams say they had no way to pay. The Cunninghams appealed the decision to take their son and put him up for adoption. Last year, North Carolina's state Supreme Court issued its ruling. It went against the Cunninghams. The court said it doesn't matter whether the Cunninghams were told to pay or not, because parents should know they have an obligation to pay for the care of their children.

Sydney Batch is a member of the North Carolina State Senate. And so we're telling parents and children that we're going to sever a relationship and a bond permanently because someone didn't have enough money to pay child support. That is absolutely wrong. And I think it's immoral. Batch is also a Raleigh family law attorney. She sees clients, ones who live from paycheck to paycheck, struggle. Do they pay that bill for their child's foster care or on better stable housing? Which is oftentimes and almost always a requirement to regain custody of your children. Then they end up paying child support, but they don't have a house for their children to come back to.

Batch says the law already has plenty of other grounds for, if necessary, ending a parent's rights to their child because there's horrible abuse or the parents didn't get sober or didn't follow the steps laid out by a judge to get their child back. Batch says it's time for her colleagues in the state legislature to change the law that uses failure to pay for foster care as a reason. It's a tax on the poor, and it is a permanent, irrevocable penalty because you happen to be poor in North Carolina and are not able to pay your bills, so therefore you lose custody of your children. All right. It's a truck. It's a

truck. What is that? A pig. Today, Brandon and Sylvia Cunningham live in that trailer with their three children who came home, two older teens and a two-year-old. It's a Saturday morning. Brandon makes good money now. He works at a company that cuts lumber for fence posts. He builds decks on the side. He stays at home on the weekends when Sylvia works two jobs at restaurants. But they know how people saw them and how some still see them. Yeah, put us down. Talk to us like we were trash. As long as we had been addicts in our history, we would never be productive citizens.

We would never stay sober. Even if we did it for a while, we would relapse and be drug addicts again. And they're wrong. They're wrong. Once you get clean and you see how great life can be, you don't ever want to go back to that and be that person again. You never wanted to be that person to start with. The Cunninghams try to make sense of what happened

to their family. Their house is filled with pictures of their kids and many of the son who was gone. This trailer echoes with memories of bad times. Now they save their money and watch it grow in a brokerage account. They've got their eyes on a new house, a brick rambler not far away. That was NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ilsa Chang. bold investments in the future of bioscience and cybersecurity, cultivates visionary work in the arts and humanities, and prepares students to become global citizens by teaching more languages than any other university in the country. Indiana University. Nine campuses, one purpose.

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