Who is Meet Shirley Berens! Queen of Child Custody Laws

In May of this year (2010), I cut the umbilical cord to the most beautiful grand baby anyone could ask for. Who knew that only a few months later, my daughter would leave Colorado and leave my little angel with me and my husband to care for! She eventually returned, only to digress and continue to not care for her baby and return to a life no child should live in.

After much searching for support groups, or the lack thereof, we found Shirley Berens, director of the Grandparents Resource Center in Denver, CO. She talked to us, and walked us through what steps to take and helped with all the paperwork to file for the court. We were granted permanent custody at the temporary orders hearing this month due to the serious nature of the situation. Without Shirley, we would be lying awake in bed every night worrying about losing our granddaughter to some life no one wants to contemplate. With Shirley, we can begin a new year with some peace of mind and see my little angel happy and smiling back at us!

God Bless,
Kevin, Deanna and Madison

When Shirley visited Cambodia last year, she thought it would be a good experience to get out of the United States for awhile. Little did she know that it would be a major education. The highlight of this trip was meeting another grandmother, Long Son, who had also been raising her grandchildren for years. The connection was profound and the inspiration to write this book.

Excerpt from the book's introduction: "It sure is hard to imagine how others in the world live, until you have a chance to experience their culture for yourself. Sometimes it takes a trip to some far off country placing yourself in an altered state of reality to put your own personal life into perspective, and either you get it, or you don't. Each chapter in your life seems to have something meaningful to teach you, all you have to do is recognize the "pearl of wisdom" when it falls into your morning bowl of "Cheerio's". Personally, I think, taking the time to reach out to others from different cultures, allows you to gain a different perspective on the way you look at life. My belief is we're all connected in some way. Of course, everyone is unique, but in the larger scheme of things, we share the same universe.

To read further, please visit the Grandparents Resource Center

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The Denver Post presented a five-part series of articles on the Colorado State foster care system in the year 2000. Patricia Callahan and Kirk Mitchell, staff writers for the Post, brought out many facts about the molestations, starvation, abuse and negligence that children suffer in the foster care system. The Post, and especially this team of writers deserve recognition for the bravery and diligence with which they worked for the cause of our fragile children in the foster care system.

For almost half a century, families have been crying out loud for change in the Human Services and Child Welfare systems. Families have agonized for many years, and are still distressed and afflicted by the ordeal that the legal system, child protective services, and the Department of Human Services are putting the children through. But nobody seems to really care about the well-being of our vulnerable children whose lives are "managed" in the foster care system, with the approval of the State's Child Welfare System and the Department of Human Services. Thousands of children are ripped of their individualism because the system sees that as being "in the best interest" of the child. Our children are suffering because no one seems to pay attention to the many concerns that the Grandparents Resource Center (GRC) has brought forward, year after year, about Colorado's state foster care system. The GRC is a Denver-based nonprofit corporation that serves grandparents raising grandchildren, and those seeking adoption or legal custody of their grandchildren who are currently in foster care, or in at-risk family situations.

While the focus of the Denver Post's five-part series was on private foster care agencies, it is vital to point out that the greater hell in which our at-risk children find themselves is in the state's own child welfare system. Children end up in the private foster care system because there's something inherently wrong with our nation's child protective services. Many families today do not trust "Social Services" (now known as Department of Human Services) because of the tyrannical nature of dealing with families and at-risk children. Families are torn apart by children being taken away and sold off to unrelated foster-adoptive families.

Officials of Grandparents Resource Center (GRC), a nonprofit corporation based in Denver, met with Colorado state officials, including the Lt. Governor, State Senators and Representatives, to discuss remedies for the abuse and molestation that our children suffer in the foster care system. Following this, and responding to other complaints about certain malpractices of the Department of Social Services' case workers and case managers in child placement procedures, a task force was launched to investigate and correct the problems. However, the task force participants were the same people whose departments were involved in the malpractices, so it is doubtful that any real investigations or progress will be made.

The federal government has awarded states huge amounts of dollars in grants as a bonus for getting foster children adopted. Since then, it seems that many county social workers have been looking for opportunities to professionally loot children away from their families. In some cases, it appears that families are falsely accused of some wrongdoing, during which time the children are placed in foster care. Later an attempt may be made to terminate parental rights of the family, adopt the children out, and make money from the federal bonus for adoption. This has become a new way for State and County Human Service agencies to make money off our fragile children, at the cost of the humiliation, the horror, and the dehumanizing experiences that they put the children through.

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This woman is tenacious and unrelenting. When faced with the challenge of the Social Services dysfunctional system that most of us would have walked away from, she dealt with it and never gave up.

She is planning to retire in about a month from Qwest and is still working toward finishing her Phd in Philosophy.

Despite all the problems she encountered over the years raising her daughter's sons, Shirley still communicates and includes Natalie (her daughter) into her life as much as she can. Natalie, Shirley and Ronal(now an adult!) are in the above picture.

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The concept of placing at-risk children with suitable biological relatives (Kinship Care) was originally introduced to grandparent families ten years ago, by the Grandparents Resource Center. At that time, the idea was also proposed to the Department of Social Services. But our state's Social Services department failed to collaborate with GRC in implementation of Kinship Care.

Since its founding in 1989, Grandparents Resource Center has served many families in the provision of Kinship Care support services across the country, but mainly in the Denver Metro area, through Family Group Conferencing. Family Group Conferencing is one of GRC's programs, which brings parents and family members together to discuss a suitable temporary or permanent placement of children in at-risk situations within the family. This is to avoid the involvement of social services, which almost always leads to the placement of children in foster care.

Six years ago, Phil Hernandez of the Denver Department of Human Services and Shirley Berens, President of Grandparents Resource Center, met to examine the concept of Kinship Care and to work on actually implementing it. The impetus for the consideration of the GRC's concept was a New Zealand group of social workers who came to Colorado by the invitation of the Department of Social Services, and emphasized the importance of Kinship Care placement. As a result, Grandparents Resource Center became a consultant to the Colorado Department of Human Services Kinship Care Committee. GRC is also the one of the nation's expert consultants on Kinship Care to the American Humane Association and American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) in Washington, DC. GRC has many TV programs about the issue of Kinship Care with the Department of Human Services, state senators and state representatives. Very few states in the nation consider child placement with relatives as the first and best option. If no suitable relative is available, only then is foster placement considered. But Colorado, now known as one of the nation's worst states on the issue of foster care, has still not fully implemented the concept of Kinship Care. Just a few counties in the state, including Douglas, El Paso, Gilpin, and Jefferson counties, have slowly but progressively embraced effective Kinship Placement alternatives for at-risk children.

Denver County Department of Social Services, under the former leadership of Phil Hernandez, was in the lead to fully implement Kinship Care placement as a better alternative to foster care, with appropriation of funds to support Kinship Care families. But under new management by Chris Veasey, things have taken a turn for the worse, with previously certified Kinship Care providers being disqualified, and the children taken away put into foster homes. Adams, Arapahoe, and Larimer counties are notoriously the worst counties in the Denver Metro area when it comes falsifying child welfare reports and forcibly taking children away from their families and placing them in foster care.

GRC has worked with more than 350 families involved with false child welfare accusation in these three Colorado counties.

Funding in the Name of Kinship Care
The Denver Post laments over the $367 million dollars that the State of Colorado "doles out" to private foster care agencies it doesn't control. But there is more. Recently, the Denver Department of Human Services solicited agencies that provide Kinship Care support services to apply for funding that had become available. At the time, no agency in the State other than the GRC was providing Kinship Care support services, but many agencies responded. Today funds are doled out to all these other agencies, including Catholic Charities, which the GRC had approached two years prior in an attempt to forge a collaborative effort. At the time, Catholic Charities was not interested. But now, since there is free money to be made in the name of Kinship Care support services, agencies like Catholic Charities are suddenly there in line.

Conclusion
I would agree with the late Dr. Martin Luther King in that in order to rectify and correct a corrupt system like the child welfare system as it stands now, it is necessary to completely demolish and rebuild the system. The current child welfare bureaucracy that puts our children in jeopardy of further abuse, molestation and starvation needs to be shut down completely, and people who genuinely care about children's welfare should be recruited to replace the employees who are only concerned about.

The ultimate direction for fixing our current foster care woes is to dismantle the foster care system and replace it with Kinship Care placement. Kinship Care should be the primary focus in child placement options for the good of children's welfare. Foster placement should be considered only as a last resort. There are certainly many blood relatives of children in foster care who have been fighting the child welfare system to obtain custody of their children, but the Department of Human Services has notoriously blocked all chances for custody. These close relatives are willing to raise their at-risk children in loving home environments, to protect, love, nurture and help them grow into responsible and useful citizens of our country. Relatives certainly provide better and safer havens for their children than foster "parents". Our legislators have been urged to consider the Kinship Care option, as a means of properly protecting our children, and ensuring their ultimate well-being.

This story will touch your life in many positive, meaningful ways. Between the powerful lessons on personal traits, safety, finances, daily life, and emergency situations, you will surely come away infused with invaluable methods, techniques, and information, some of which may even save your life or that of a loved one. Secondly, current and parents-to-be come away with a central, compact, and carefully thought out tool to aid in molding their children. Thirdly, you will be empowered with the motivation and confidence to help improve your own life.

My organization has been working with grandparent families for 16 years; providing support services to those raising grandchildren, helping them to adopt their grandchildren and obtain custody, or reestablish lost visitation privileges with grandchildren who have been placed in foster care or who are living in at-risk situations. The GRC has worked with over 8,000 families in the Denver Metro Area in the last 16 years. We have helped grandparents successfully negotiate placement of their grandchildren in their own homes. Not once in the history of our service to grandparents has there been a failed placement or an accusation of child abuse in a grandparent's home.

My own grandchildren were physically abused by their foster parents and foster family during the eight years they were in foster care. In my attempt to work with the system to remove my own grandchildren from foster care, I was subjected to 5 psychological evaluations, denied rights of visitation and spent over $75,000 in legal fees. After eight long years of legal battling, I was able to obtain custody, and I have now adopted my two grandsons.

No doubt you have read or at least heard of the sometimes inhumane conditions in which our at-risk children live in foster care. Having suffered so much humiliation myself at the hands of our State Child Protection System, I cannot believe that foster parents are not required to submit to a thorough background and welfare check before being certified as foster care providers. If the system spent half as much time qualifying new foster parents as they did investigating me, I do not think our children would end up with the kinds of foster parents that are all too frequently brought to light by the media.

My oldest grandson, now 17, was in foster care for 8 years. His foster mother often bragged about how her foster children paid for her farm house in Ft. Lupton, Colorado. She received more than $8000 each month in tax-free child care subsidies from the State in exchange for housing eight foster children. For her, it was an easy way to get rich; for some of us, it appears to be exploitation of the system and of society's most vulnerable children who need love, care and nurture.

My grandson has just recently become comfortable enough to tell us how he was abused by his foster parents and by the older foster children in the absence of the parents. The abuse continued when he was institutionalized at the Cleo Wallace Center in Westminster, Colorado, and he was never taught any social skills, or how to read or write.

My younger grandson, now 14, was also in foster care. He had been placed in foster care at the age of 13 months, and remained there until he was 4 years old. He was also terribly abused by his foster mother, who blatantly told me that my grandson was going to pay for her new van and her newly acquired home. I fought for years to prevent her from adopting my grandson. I acquired pictures depicting the physical abuse my grandson suffered at the hands of his foster mother. The photos of his bruised little body helped me with my petition to the court and I succeeded in obtaining custody of him. Despite the evidence of the foster mother's abuse of my grandson, she is still a foster care provider for a private child placement agency in the State of Colorado.

When I got the boys back from foster care, the younger one had speech problems, and the older one was very destructive and always getting into trouble at school. Today, the younger one is on the honor roll at his school, and has received "citizen of the month" awards several times. My older grandson is in residential treatment, partly because the system failed to help him with his mental problems.

During my struggles with the system to obtain custody of my two boys, I was forced to quit my job at U S West, because the Department of Social Services made it so hard for me to keep a job due to the required family probation plan. I had to become an expert in the field of troubled children just so I could qualify to even have visitation rights to see my grandchildren. For two years, I was video-taped during every single visitation. The tapes were turned over to the social workers assigned to my two boys so they could review and analyze every single move I made with the children. On one occasion, one of the social workers told me, "If you miss one visit with your grandchildren, we will take away your rights of visitation." A couple of times they did withhold visitation, once because I disagreed with allowing a foster mother to adopt my grandson, and another time because I petitioned to adopt both my grandchildren.

Shirley is instrumental is starting a new book and quilt that is gaining nationwide attention. "Grand Hands and Hearts Across America" will be stories of grandparents raising and being denied rights to see their grandchildren.

Anyone interested can prepay or email grc4usa@aol.com their interest in getting the book. The cost will be $22.00 and all proceeds go towards helping grandparents get custody or visitation of their grandchildren.

During this ordeal, my late father, then alive, had been very ill. He was barred from seeing his own precious great-grandchildren. During his last days, his doctors wrote a letter on his behalf to the supervisor of the social workers in charge of my grandchildren's placement to allow him to see his great-grandchildren before he died. The supervisor denied the doctors' request. My father died on "Grandparents Day" in 1994 without having seen his great-grandchildren for the prior 4 years. He had attended all the hearings at the courthouse, but because the social workers claimed he was a violent man, he was always accompanied by an armed guard. This was a man who never had a police record for doing anything wrong. He was a good man, a veteran of WWII who worked all his life to provide for his family. The only war he fought and lost was against the Department of Human Services. It is very sad that a great father, grandfather and great-grandfather died with a sorrowful heart, due to not being allowed to see his own great-grandchildren.

A Destructive System
Our system is very cruel to families in the name of what they call "the best interests of the child." There seems to be an incredible lack of compassion toward families in our State's Department of Human Services, but yet, it continues to receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal funding to place our children in foster homes that abuse, starve, molest and torture them. These foster parents don't seem to be held accountable for their inhumane activities toward our most vulnerable children unless a child dies while in their care. The Denver Department of Human Services a great number of foster parents has criminal records. One social worker who works for the Denver Department of Human Services said that persons with criminal backgrounds make good foster care providers because they understand the children's problems. It is somehow assumed that all foster children are problem children. Officials fail to see that the conditions of foster care make the problems worse. Our children are being punished for their parent's negligence in parental responsibilities, and are continuously being sentenced to the "living hell" of the foster care system. Foster parents are not encouraged to bond with the children, so the basic needs of children for a sense of identity and belonging is denied them.

A Grandparent's Legacy:
Your Life Story in Your Own Words

This grandparent's memory journal takes you on a journey that will become a cherished family memoir. Designed in a 12-month format, each month features 12 intriguing questions with space to write a personal answer. Questions explore family history, childhood memories, lighthearted incidents, cherished traditions, and the dreams and spiritual adventures encountered in a lifetime of living. The written words become windows to a grandparent's heart.

Many decent grandparent families have called my organization for assistance. They have expressed dissatisfaction over the conditions in which their grandchildren live in foster care, and have expressed the desire to obtain custody or to adopt, but have been disqualified by the system as unsuitable placement options. I must say that the one and only Child Placement Agency that has been very supportive of my original concept of Kinship Placement was Synthesis, Inc. Pam Hoggins, the Director of Synthesis, Inc., has worked with my organization in placing grandchildren who were in foster care with suitable relatives. Pam gave relatives of youngsters in foster care an opportunity to become certified by her agency as Kinship or Relative foster parents.

Young Kimberly Thomas of Denver Public Schools says, "When I was in foster care, I didn't have any friends. I always had to be looking over my shoulders to make sure no one was watching how I was brushing my teeth. I didn't wear shoes most of the time when school was closed. Sometimes, I wanted to kill myself. But now that I'm with Grandma, I feel I'm in heaven. We go to church, we go to the park. We cook together, and have fun telling each other stories. My grandma loves me dearly, and she has given me hope to live. She is my angel who delivered me from foster care."

As the originator of the idea of Kinship Care in the State of Colorado, I worked with Carol Wahlgren and the State Kinship Care Committee for two years, from 1997 through 1999. She was then the director of the Kinship Care Unit of the Colorado Department of Human Services. Carol acknowledged that "in all the years we have tracked more than 500 placements with relatives, we have had only had 5 incidents of failed placements. These were mainly due to lack of information, follow-up and other support services." According to Carol, "only one of the failed placements was considered an abuse case".

More than 60,000 grandparents in Colorado are raising grandchildren. Many of them are full-time primary caregivers of their grandchildren. Five million of America's children are being raised today by their grandparents, with 2.8 million residing in grandparent-headed households in all fifty states (U.S. Census Bureau). If it were not for grandparents, the system would have at least twice the amount of children in Youth Detention Centers or in prison.

The Grandparents Resource Center works with entire families to create nurturing assets for the children in the family who may be at-risk. Without any funding, but with volunteers and staff (mostly provided by Seniors Inc.), whom we train, we help and provide support systems for grandparents to successfully raise their grandchildren. We support grandparents as they provide their grandchildren with stability, love, care, nurture, a good home environment and the family security they do not have in foster homes.

Financial Subsidies for Grandparents Raising Children
It seems to me that much of the money the State Department of Human Services gets annually ($300,000,000) goes to deepen the pockets of some elite individuals in the Child Welfare system, with the obvious $367 million poured into the private foster care system. Yet, the child welfare system fails to provide grandparents with the necessary financial support they need to care for their grandchildren, while foster parents receive an average of $900 per foster child per month from the state. In some cases, foster parents receive as much as $1,200 to $1,500 a month for foster children with special needs. Grandparents who are lucky enough to qualify for adoption subsidies receive only the minimum, and are spending their life savings to make ends meet. Currently, grandparents who are certified Kinship Care providers in Denver County get $369/mo. in kinship subsides for the first child, and then $99 per month for each child thereafter. Besides receiving a gross amount of money for foster children, foster parents get other benefits such as a clothing allowance, respite care, and recreational allowances from the system that grandparent/kinship care providers do not receive. Foster parents get free food from the food banks while grandparents practically have to starve the fourth week of the month just to make their house payments or pay utility bills.

The Failure of Foster Care System
Child Welfare statistics show that 70% of juvenile delinquents are teenagers who come out of foster care systems. Very few grandchildren that have been raised by their grandparents end up in prison. Many of the great leaders and statesmen of our country have been raised by their grandparents. The foster care system needs to be abolished, and the Child Welfare funds awarded to grandparents or other suitable family members raising children who love and care for their own blood, who can help them become better human beings and responsible and useful citizens of our country.

Since it is obvious that our state and some county Departments of Human Services cannot and are not able to work diligently with at-risk families and the most vulnerable members of our communities, I would recommend that organizations like the Grandparents Resource Center, the Northeast Parkhill Grandparents Association, the North Huron Counseling Center for Grandparents, and other community family agencies be given the opportunity to serve and support families for the good and moral well-being of our children.

One organization that families trust in Colorado is the Grandparents Resource Center. However, due to lack of funding, the GRC is unable to serve the increasing number of grandparent families who call on us for help. Even parents who are in jail call on us to support their parents in taking care of their children while they are serving their time.. Should their children suffer the consequences of their parents' delinquency and negligent behavior? Certainly not!

It is time for our state officials and all those who have the well-being of our children at heart to rise and defend the future of our innocent children who have become victims of our foster care systems.

Grandma, Tell Me Your Memories

Anyone working on their family history will delight in either of these two books. It presents questions to be answered by Grandpa and Grandma for every day of the year. When the questions are all answered, the family historian will have a wealth of information for research and hundreds of anecdotes for the family tree. At the next family reunion encourage everyone to buy and complete the appropriate book in the series for themselves and let the historian add it to the tree.

Grandpa, Tell Me Your Memories