Kansas bill highlights grandparents rights issues

A Wichita state senator and family members of abused and displaced children went before the Senate Judiciary Committee today to try to enhance the status of grandparents in child-custody courts. Senate Bill 52 would automatically establish grandparents as interested parties in cases when their grandchildren are removed from their homes. At present, grandparents only receive notice of and status to be heard in such proceedings when they request it.

Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, D-Wichita, who is sponsoring the bill, told the committee the legislation “is pretty simple, allowing grandparents to be notified without a lot of additional hassle.”

“We as a state want to keep families together and keep kids out of foster care,” Faust-Goudeau said.

She said the bill was the top priority of the “Silver Haired Legislature,” a group elected by seniors across the state to recommend bills and help guide state policies on the elderly.

Two members, including Silver Haired Legislature Speaker Jim Snyder, testified in favor of the bill. He said a study of 2006 data showed more than 17,000 grandparents were acting as primary caregivers, a number he said has undoubtedly grown during the current economic slump.

“It’s important that grandparents who are taking care of the children have the notification and the automatic status as interested parties,” he said.

Most of today’s testimony was from about a dozen grandparents, complaining of what they contend was abuse and dislocation of their grandchildren, who were placed in foster care or permanently adopted out in cases where the parents’ rights were terminated.

One woman testified that her grandchildren, 7 and 10, had lived with her for four months after being removed from her daughter’s home. She said she thought that was going well but state agents came and took the children from her, “forcefully, dramatically, hysterically.”

Her granddaughter “was screaming, hanging onto me for dear life,” the woman testified. “After they were taken from me, they put them in foster home, foster home, foster home … They’ve had a lot of psychological problems from the way they were taken.”

She said the granddaughter was later molested and got pregnant while in foster care after repeated complaints to the foster mother were ignored.

A grandfather testified that his two grandsons were healthy and doing well in school until they were returned to their father, a drug addict. Now, he said, their grades have fallen off and they are overweight from spending their days watching TV, playing video games and eating fast food.