22 Oct 2009 / Posted by cr

When children are removed from their homes due to reports of abuse or neglect, it’s the responsibility of family court judges to decide whether they can be returned safely to their parents or must be taken into state custody for their protection. And when that life-altering decision must be made, it is every child’s right to have his or her case heard by a judge who is free to choose the best option for keeping that child safe based solely on the facts at hand.

In Tennessee, however, a new law threatens children’s safety by interfering with these critical decisions — pressuring family court judges to limit the number of children they place in foster care for reasons completely unrelated to the facts of each child’s case.

And Children’s Rights is now in the midst of a heated legal battle to block it.

The law, which went into effect in July, imposes fiscal penalties on counties that exceed a prescribed limit on the number of children placed in foster care. State officials have been clear in their public statements that the intent of the law is to cut costs and reduce the overall number of children in state foster care by making judges think twice before taking kids into custody.

We agree that reducing the number of children taken away from their families and placed in foster care is a worthy goal. And we agree that judges must weigh their options very carefully before they take the drastic step of committing children to state custody. But the way to reduce foster care placements safely is to enhance services aimed at strengthening families and safeguarding children’s well-being at home — services that Tennessee has cut in recent months.

And attempting to pressure judges to weigh the fiscal circumstances of their cash-strapped counties alongside the interests of the children appearing before them not only violates children’s constitutional rights, but also places those children at risk of very serious harm.

In September, Children’s Rights took action, asking the federal judge presiding over our long-running (and successful) class action to reform the entire Tennessee child welfare system to issue an order blocking implementation of the law. The official organization representing family and juvenile court judges in Tennessee filed a brief strongly supporting our claims. And last week, we went to court in Nashville to present our case.

The federal judge heard testimony from Tennessee’s family court judges who said the law is already having the chilling effect that state officials intended — and harming children in the process.

Judge April Meldrum said she felt pressured to house children in profoundly undesirable alternatives to foster homes — like emergency shelters and even local jails — or to transfer children’s cases to other counties because her own county simply could not afford the cost of exceeding the limit imposed by the law. She recounted one instance in which her staff worked late into the night to find an alternative to foster care for one child, who slept on a bench in a courtroom while they searched.

Judge Meldrum works in Anderson County, which leads the state in both the number of methamphetamine lab seizures and the number of children taken into state custody due to parental substance abuse — hard realities that the arbitrary limit imposed by the state law utterly fails to take into account.

While the federal judge in our case ruled last Friday that the children who are the plaintiffs in our broader child welfare reform class action are not legally eligible to bring this new action against the state, he also acknowledged that we had raised substantial legal claims. We must now do everything in our power to get those claims addressed.

And we will. As the editorial board of Nashville’s Tennessean wrote today, the Tennessee child welfare system “is intended to be a safety net for children who, for whatever reason, no longer have a responsible guardian. This law has ripped a gaping hole in that net.”

Children’s Rights will not stop fighting until this very dangerous law has been struck down — and Tennessee’s vulnerable children are once again assured they will receive fair hearings at the most precarious moments of their lives.