A team of more than two dozen members is working to better protect foster youth in the Land of 10,000 Lakes by granting them a tailor-made bill of rights.
The youth advocates, law school students, foster parent representatives and state officials have hosted public meetings in the Minneapolis area since April as part of the endeavor, sifting through reams of feedback from young people statewide who have grown up in government custody. So far, there are seven pages of proposed rights to draw from — everything from a fair complaint procedure to cellular communication rights.
“Understanding your legal rights, whether it’s about the care you receive or your connections to loved ones, helps Fosters and their supporters advocate more strongly for a better experience in foster care,” Minnesota’s Assistant Foster Youth Ombudsperson Hannah Planalp said in an email.
As a former foster youth and representative of the Office of The Foster Youth Ombudsperson, she described how critical it is to have these rights be “clear and comprehensive.”
“I know how powerful it would have been if, when I was trying to get support as a teenager, I could have pointed to a document that clearly defined my legal protections and the care I should have been receiving,” Planalp said.
The group working on the draft bill of rights meets again next month. The goal is to pitch the final bill to a lawmaker, who will introduce it as legislation in January, when the next session begins. But members say they will take the time needed to ensure that as many foster youth as possible contribute to the drafting.
Speaking on behalf of herself and Misty Coonce, Minnesota’s ombudsperson for foster youth, Planalp said that direct input is needed above all else. “We need the perspectives of those who are more recently in foster care than us” she said, “to lend their expertise about what is missing.”
If enacted next year, Minnesota would become the 16th state, including the District of Columbia, to enact a bill of rights for foster youth, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The effort follows a series of significant steps in this increasingly progressive state to better serve young people removed from their parents due to abuse or neglect.
Last month, Gov. Tim Walz signed the African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation. Lawmakers also have pledged financial support for all foster youth to attend college, and created the state’s first-ever Department of Children, Youth and Families.
Tess Register, a law student at the University of St. Thomas, also noted the importance of getting the bill language precise and concise enough to genuinely assist the kids who need it. She had a clear statement on what the group working on drafting the bill is aiming to avoid: “Vague statutory terms.”
“You can’t educate or advocate for your rights if you don’t know what they are.”
— Rosemary Maher, Law Student and former foster parent
Currently, the rights of Minnesota’s foster youth are scattered among various statutes and regulations, most of which ensure their safety, access to education and that their “basic needs” are met.
Rosemary Maher, a former foster parent and a student at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, launched the idea of the bill of rights, and received early support from the ombuds office. Her early research included a 50-state survey to examine what types of bills existed elsewhere. California, Michigan, West Virginia, Oregon, and Florida had particularly comprehensive versions.
“We also reached out to ombuds people in other states to get their feedback on what’s worked and what hasn’t so that we can make our bill as strong as possible if and when it does pass,” Maher said.
She noted that following the opening of the new ombuds office, the state is well-positioned to enact the change.
“You can’t educate or advocate for your rights if you don’t know what they are,” she said.
Organizers held the first planning meeting in April, which was attended by social workers from Hennepin County, representatives of the youth-led group Foster Advocates, the Department of Human Services and the Quality Parenting Initiative Minnesota. Through a series of public meetings and surveys, foster youth were asked what they would like to see included.
A strong, widely agreed-upon theme was having the right to lodge complaints about treatment in foster care without fear of being ignored or dismissed outright. Another was the right to privacy, even in group settings or family homes with multiple foster children. Youth said they wanted to be assured that the foster homes they’re sent to are properly supervised, as well as having the right to accessible therapy.
The most commonly raised concerns are now being prioritized for possible inclusion in the final bill proposal. Maher said the document can’t be “too lengthy nor too vague.” Legal advisors cautioned against making the wording sound mandatory or too imposing, which could bog down the bill’s passage by requiring that new laws and regulations be passed to conform. Including words like “may” instead of “shall” are key so the bill can be enforceable.
“That conversation of ‘may’ versus ‘shall’ is true for every bill, including our own foster care bill of rights,” said Luciana Svidler, director of policy and training for the Children’s Law Center of California. “Every word matters — that’s how you’re going to argue in court.”
California’s version
There are 14 main elements in California’s foster youth bill of rights — first enacted in 2001 — which can be found on posters wherever children in that state are placed.
They span the smallest to the most profound challenges in foster care, from the right to a storage space to the ability to “have social contacts with people outside of the foster care system,” and to be called by your chosen name and gender pronouns. Foster youth have the right to confidential communications, to send and receive unopened mail and to access “computer technology and the internet, consistent with the child’s age, maturity, developmental level, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression.”
Svidler said the aim is to remind youth of these rights at “every intersection of life they come across.” By law, California social workers and probation officers must speak with foster youth about their rights every six months and every time their placement is changed.
A bill of rights for foster youth was recommended for widespread distribution by the federal government in 2011, when President Obama signed the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act. It recommended that rights within state child welfare systems be established with several key provisions: regular contact with parents, siblings, and family members; frequent meetings with caseworkers; access to legal representation, participation in school activities and clear procedures for filing complaints and enforcing these rights.
Those provisions are expected to be included in Minnesota’s foster youth bill of rights.
Law student Register is helping to refine the proposed legislation, though she conceded the number of pages to sift through has increased since her group sought broad feedback.
“For now, our working draft includes excerpts from existing statutes and regulations that support each right, which has definitely inflated the page length,” she said in an email. But she noted that’s not a bad thing, particularly because it means more foster youths’ voices will be reflected in the final version.
“Rather than prioritizing a particular time frame to bring this bill to the Legislature, we are prioritizing centering the voices of foster youth.”
