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http://www.khi.org/news/2010/jan/25/better-pay-needed-foster-care-attorneys/
Better pay needed for foster care attorneys
SRS chief says parents and children often poorly represented
Photo by Mike Shields
Don Jordan, secretary of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services
Jan. 25, 2010
TOPEKA — Lawyers charged with representing children and parents in foster care proceedings should be paid more, Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Secretary Don Jordan said Monday.
Testifying before the House Social Services Budget Committee, Jordan said many of the often-heard complaints about the foster care system are rooted in the fact that parents and children are poorly represented in court.
They would be better represented, he said, if their attorneys – most of them court appointed – were paid more.
Typically, Jordan said, attorneys for the parents and children are paid $60 an hour; public defenders are paid $80 an hour.
Jordan said he’s been in conversations with parents who hadn’t met or spoken with their court-appointed attorneys until five minutes before a hearing.
“What happens is the attorney says to stipulate to whatever’s said and to not do anything to make the judge mad,” he said. “So they go in and they stipulate to the findings and, well, what they don’t realize is they’ve stipulated to whatever is in the file.”
If a parent disagrees with information in the file, Jordan said, their attorney should bring the disputed issues to the judge’s attention.
Jordan said he’s also spoken with teenagers in the foster care system who had never met the attorneys charged with representing them. Most, he said, didn’t know their attorney’s name.
Committee members spent much of the 90-minute hearing reviewing a Division of Post Audit report on SRS’ handling of foster care cases.
The audit, released in July 2009, found that in many cases SRS social workers were insufficiently trained in how to interact with prosecuting attorneys.
Though 80 percent of the 135 social workers surveyed statewide by the auditors said they had never been pressured to include or exclude information thought to be detrimental to a parent’s case, in Wichita, half those surveyed said they had been pressured.
Jordan said that training problem had since been resolved.
He told the committee that the system for deciding whether a child belongs in foster care assumes the child and the parents have a voice and are heard. When they’re not, he said, the system’s checks and balances don’t work.
The audit was ordered after Jordan in March 2008 in Wichita told a group of parents and grandparents whose children and grandchildren were in foster care: “In Sedgwick County, oftentimes, we end up writing things because it’s what our social workers get bullied by the district attorney’s office into writing. So they really have no belief in what it says.”
Later, Jordan said he had misspoken, noting he could not cite a specific instance in which a social worker had been pressured to commit perjury or misrepresent the facts.
But, he said, there had been times when the department’s social workers and the district attorney’s office had disagreed over which facts in a case were relevant.
The audit found that while disagreement between social workers and prosecuting attorneys were not uncommon, half the social workers in Wichita said they felt “occasionally” or “frequently” pressured to include or exclude information detrimental to a parent’s case.
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