By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Jody Fountain testified before the Colorado Senate Appropriations Committee on April 14 with a story about a two-year-old boy.
The boy had been placed with his mother’s boyfriend. It was a kinship placement, the arrangement the state prefers when a child cannot stay with a parent. The boyfriend could not get certified as a foster parent. Something in his distant past disqualified him.
Years later, after Fountain adopted the boy, she read the disclosure file. Two weeks before the child was removed and put into foster care, the grandmother had called. The family had no money for food.
“I can’t help but think about all the children that are going to be placed in this situation as the support disappears for non-certified kin in the next few months,” Fountain told the committee.
On July 1, it disappeared. House Bill 26-1374 ended monthly financial assistance for Colorado’s non-certified kinship caregivers, and the state never estimated how many of those families would be unable to certify and keep any support at all.
What the payments were
Colorado law splits relatives who take in children into two groups. Research shows children do better with kin than in foster care, Melanie Jordan of the Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel told the Senate committee.
Certified kinship caregivers meet foster care standards. Background checks, a home safety walkthrough, training. They are paid at the full foster care rate.
Non-certified kinship caregivers either cannot meet those standards or choose not to.
Since Senate Bill 24-008 passed two years ago, they have been paid at 30 percent of the foster care rate, which rises with the child’s age.
Christine Miles, an adoptive mother who testified against the cut in April, put it at about $20 a day, against roughly $135 for professional foster care. Fountain put the certified foster care rate at roughly $44 to $66 a day, depending on the child’s age.
The 30 percent was supposed to rise to 50 percent this fiscal year. Instead the increase was repealed and the payments ended.
The money ran out on schedule
The program was built on a clock that expired.
Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat and a Joint Budget Committee member, explained it on the House floor.
“When that bill was passed a couple of years ago, it was passed utilizing TANF reserve dollars to fund the first two years of it,” she said.
TANF is federal welfare money, and the reserve was only ever meant to carry the program until the state picked it up. Lawmakers at the time said they hoped to find another funding source, Sirota told the chamber.
None was found.
Payments were expected to total at least $9.4 million from the general fund in the coming year.
The Joint Budget Committee instead wrote a $5.5 million reduction into the state budget and brought HB26-1374 to make the statute match. The savings are smaller than the cut because budget writers expect some families to get certified and collect the larger payment.
Whether those families can get certified is the part nobody measured.
Certification is not available to everyone
Jordan told lawmakers that federal law sets a floor for who may be certified to care for a child in the child welfare system, and a criminal record can put a caregiver below it permanently.
“There are some families because of their backgrounds that will not be eligible for federal certification,” Jordan told House Appropriations on April 6.
She was more specific in the Senate eight days later. A disqualifying conviction cannot be waived, she said, even one from decades earlier that the person already served time for.
“So those are the families that would absolutely not be able to become certified, and that this particular policy change will impact the most.”
Jordan volunteered that the state does not know how many. “We don’t have numbers on how many of these families will be impacted.”
The fiscal note never estimated it either.
Legislative Council Staff revised the note three times between April 2 and April 17. The $5.5 million figure never moved, and no version counted the families who cannot certify.
Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican who carried the bill with Sirota, described certification differently when he presented it to House Appropriations.
He said there is also a certified program and that gaining certification for kinship is relatively simple. The savings were calculated, he said, assuming a good number of non-certified homes would move over.
The caregivers who testified
Jody Britton spent five years as a non-certified kinship caregiver to the son she later adopted. She now directs family services at Be The Source, a nonprofit that works with foster and kinship families, and she helped pass Senate Bill 24-008 in the first place.
“While I understand it, I am devastated by the fiscal realities behind HB 26-1374,” she told the Senate committee.
Britton asked for three changes. Clarify that counties must still make reasonable efforts to support these placements even without a mandate. Require timely notice so families can prepare. Keep collecting data on non-certified kin so the state knows what happened.
“Many kin cannot or do not certify, and the devastation this bill will bring will create much chaos,” she said.
Miles told senators she used to think the way the state does.
“I’ll admit I once shared the state’s perspective. If kinship families want support, they should simply get certified,” Miles said. “It sounds logical until you look at the barriers these families actually face.”
Miles called certification a gauntlet rather than a choice, citing background check hurdles over decades-old issues and caseworkers who discourage families from starting the process at all.
Fountain, a foster parent, said certified homes are already full.
“A lot of us foster parents are maxed out. There are not enough of us.”
What the legislature did with the requests
The House gave Jordan and Britton most of what they asked for.
Rep. Lindsay Gilchrist, a Denver Democrat and a foster and adoptive parent herself, brought two amendments. Between them they required counties to notify families that payments were ending. They kept non-certified kin in the state’s annual report to the Joint Budget Committee. The bill would have struck them from the report’s subject and from both of its required findings. And they made clear that counties are not barred from providing the support federal and state law already require.
Gilchrist voted for the cut both times it came before her.
She called it a brutal vote in the April 6 committee hearing. Three days later, on the House floor, she said it was one of the hardest votes she would take on the budget and that she had heard from families devastated by it.
Senate Appropriations removed her amendments on April 14.
Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Democrat carrying the bill in the Senate, explained the removal as routine. “Not to say that those amendments are bad amendments, but this is what we do as bills come through here that are budget bills,” he said. “We strip amendments.”
The committee adopted the stripping amendment without objection, then passed the bill 7-0.
The next day, on the Senate floor, Bridges moved an amendment that struck the committee report in its entirety. Every House protection went back into the bill.
The final law requires counties to have told families by June 15 that their payments would end July 1. It also leaves the reporting alone.
What the law says now
The act did not just stop the payments. It struck the scheduled increase out of state law. Non-certified kinship caregivers were supposed to move from 30 percent of the foster care rate to 50 percent starting this fiscal year Both rates are crossed out in the signed bill, the one they had been paid and the one they were promised. Counties are also no longer required to provide the assistance, except where federal law and Colorado’s custody statutes already require it. The state’s promise to reimburse counties for 90 percent of kinship costs now reaches certified homes only, and carries the phrase “subject to available appropriations.”
The rules that were supposed to make certification easier are not finished.
Senate Bill 24-008 required the state board to strip non-safety standards out of kinship certification. Jordan told senators in April those rules had not taken effect and she expected them within about six months.
Rep. Brandi Bradley, a Douglas County Republican, asked on the House floor what happens if a thousand families do certify and start drawing the higher rate.
Taggart said the state covers 90 percent of county costs and the department would return with a supplemental request if the money ran short.
Nobody asked what happens to the families who apply and are turned down.
The state will keep reporting on non-certified kin every August through 2030. Nothing in the law requires it to count the ones who cannot certify.
Are you a kinship caregiver affected by this change? RMV wants to hear from you. Contact us at [email protected].