Posted on 07/19/2002 6:13:57 AM PDT by jonefab
The Kansas governor's election is coming, and I wanted to share a very personal story about one of the candidates. This happened about 6 years ago, and I feel I owe it to the person to share it.
Six years ago we started foster care and took in our first child. She was an adorable, bubbly 4-year-old. We were her third home in about five months.
Prior to coming into “the system” she had grown up in a series of shelters and wherever else her birth parents had seen fit to leave her.
She was a doll and we bonded immediately. Everything was going well with the placement. She was happy; we were happy. She was in a day care that she enjoyed and was learning a lot. It all looked good.
Then after about three months, we got a phone call from her school. The state was refusing to pay for her child care. Standard procedure for foster children is that the state will pay this; it is not means tested in anyway. (You can skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to read the details of the buracratic stupidity.) This is not a “subsidy” to the foster parent; it is the state providing for a child in its custody.
Unfortunately, because the subsidy is handled by a different part of Social and Rehabilitation Services than the foster program, they found that we didn't “qualify” for this “benefit.” Their reasoning was that because we were full-time students, we were not eligible for such a subsidy.
We could have been making $5 million a year, and that wouldn't disqualify us. If we had been going to bartending school or something, they would “subsidize” us. If we were taking up to three years to complete an associate degree program, we would qualify. But we were both within a year of finishing a bachelor's degree and a doctoral degree, and we were ineligible. Beside the stupidity of these tests in general, what they seemed to forget was that we were taking a ward of the state into our home, and they were responsible for the financial support of the child, not us.
This put us into quite a bind. There was no conceivable way on our student budget that we could provide for this child; we were going to lose her. She was going to need to go to another home and be uprooted again.
I skipped school for three days, spending my afternoons on the phone. I called everybody I possibly could think of who might be able to stir things up, ask questions, whatever it was going take. I spoke to about 10 people at SRS; all they could do was read the rule, not explain it. They didn't understand the difference between reading it slower and telling me why it was that way. I called the governor's office, senators and congressmen, state representatives, newspapers, TV stations, even the White House. I got very few calls even returned. Of those who did, they would say, “Yep, that's dumb. Oh well.” It amazed me that all these politicians and bureaucrats who boast about taking care of us really couldn't care less.
Finally, I received a phone call. Not from any local elected official, but from an aid to a state representive across the state. I was not even his constitutant. His greeting was, “Carl, how can I help you”? I explained the details. He was as amazed as I was and promised to make a “couple of calls.” He kept his word.
By the next afternoon SRS had had a rules meeting to evaluate the policy. They called the school and said that payment would be made. The child would not have to be moved again. In fact she never was. We kept her, and three years later we were able to adopt her. Brooke is growing and is quite a young lady now.
I am writing this to thank Tim Schallenburger and his staff for going out of their way to help a little girl and her proud parents. He is a Republican candidate for governor. I will thank him again on election day, I hope you will too. He did not buy a vote, he didn't beg for it, he earned it. We need more officials like that.
Carl DeAmaral -
Louisburg
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