Welcome help for foster kids

If you’re a foster child in North Carolina, chances are you’ve already lived through more soul-scarring pain than most adults.

Maybe you were abused, physically or emotionally. Maybe you were abandoned, or lived in such desperate poverty that the state had to step in and move you to a foster home.

More than any other child, you need the kind of stabilizing enrichment that can come from belonging to a school football team or baseball team, or from having your horizons broadened on a school field trip.

But as it stands now in North Carolina, barriers stand between foster kids and these touchstones of childhood happiness. While most children have biological parents who green-light such experiences simply by signing permission slips and liability waivers, foster parents can’t do that. (They can’t even sign off for foster kids to do overnight stays at friends’ homes.)

Children must seek legal approval via the cumbersome red tape of their local Department of Social Services. Robert McCarter, managing attorney with the Council for Children’s Rights, says some DSS officials hesitate to grant such approval. They fear a foster child could get hurt playing sports or enjoying a field trip, sparking a lawsuit from the biological parent.

So, some foster children sit on the sidelines while other children play and travel and learn.

All that’s apparently about to change, thanks to Senate Bill 423, which sailed through the N.C. Senate on a 48-0 vote earlier this week. A companion bill passed the House 116-0.

As you might guess from the vote totals, this is smart, long overdue legislation.

It will give foster parents – and designated officials at any child care institution where a youth is placed – the right to approve participation in sports and field trips, as well as overnight stays with friends. It creates liability insurance to protect foster parents or institutions from lawsuits.

It also allows foster children 16 and older to buy their own auto insurance policies, eliminating a big barrier to a driver’s license and the mobility necessary to hold down an after-school job.

The new powers come with the stipulation that foster parents will observe reasonable and prudent parenting standards, defined in the bill as “careful and sensible parental decisions that maintain a child’s health, safety, and best interests while encouraging the child’s emotional and developmental growth.”

In other words, plain old good parenting.

The Senate bill is co-sponsored by senators Tamara Barringer, R-Wake, Kathy Harrington, R-Gaston, and Tommy Tucker, R-Union. Barringer, a law professor and former foster parent, tells the editorial board liability risks scare some potential foster parents away, and the rules erected around them keep foster children from living the full, rich lives other kids enjoy.

Having spent years working on this legislation, she’s hoping to see Gov. Pat McCrory sign it into law. She’s not a big crier, she says, but expects she’ll need plenty of tissue then.

“These children don’t vote, they don’t write checks,” she said. “They don’t have a voice.”

For one sparkling moment of legislative clarity, they finally do.

This story was originally published April 30, 2015 at 3:40 PM with the headline "Welcome help for foster kids."