It took less than 24 hours for Jennifer Gardinier’s family to grow from three people to eight, with the youngest new member still in diapers and the oldest close to graduating high school.
Getting a state foster care certification that would allow the Weld County family to receive financial help would take significantly longer.
The children arrived at her home in Dacono in August 2023, and while the caseworkers were helpful in getting clothes, car seats and other items they needed immediately, the first check to partially offset the costs of feeding a much larger family didn’t come until November.
Gardinier and her husband Stacy, who have an 8-year-old daughter, agreed to serve as “kinship” caregivers to their former neighbors’ five children after Larimer County officials determined the kids weren’t safe with their parents. They still are caring for them more than a year later.
Almost half of children removed from their homes in Colorado now stay with other relatives, neighbors or friends of their families while their cases work through the system, and state officials hope a new law making it easier to get monetary assistance will allow others to step up.
Obviously, families shouldn’t take in children for financial reasons, but easing the path to get some help could mean that more kids have the option to stay with people they know and trust, Gardinier said. In her family’s case, they dipped into savings to make ends meet, because they knew the children well and wanted to help them move past the trauma they’d lived through, she said.
“It was tough, but we made it work,” Gardinier said.
Earlier this year, the Colorado legislature passed a bill allowing families that have a kinship relationship to a foster child, but haven’t undergone the full foster home certification process, to receive 30% of the rate the state typically pays foster families. Families that complete the certification process to care for a relative or other child they already have ties to are eligible for the full rate that the state pays to households willing to foster children they don’t know.
In the first six months of the year, an average of 2,949 children were in foster homes of some type on any given day in Colorado. More than half were with traditional foster families whom they didn’t know before placement, 24% were staying with kinship families who hadn’t completed certification and 22% were with certified kinship families.
Since the law took effect in September, uncertified kinship families can receive daily allowances of less than $20 per day for each child. The full rate paid to certified foster families ranges from about $42 to $65 per day for each child, with larger amounts allowed for teenagers than for younger children.
The new law’s fiscal note estimated it would increase the state’s costs by about $13.5 million, including payments to families and administrative fees. In 2023, the state spent about $68.7 million on payments to foster families, with about $9.9 million of that going to kinship families that completed the certification process.
In July 2026, uncertified kinship families will become eligible for up to half of the rate, said Jeannie Berzinskas, kinship care program administrator with the Colorado Department of Human Services.
“That’s going to have a significant impact on your ability to care for that child,” she said.
The new law also requires the department to look for ways to make it easier for kinship families to complete the certification process, without compromising children’s safety, Berzinskas said. While they don’t know what all of those changes might entail, ideas include reducing the minimum square footage that a family must have available per person and requiring fewer hours of training, she said.
Adults living in kinship homes have to complete background checks and get their home checked for safety hazards regardless of whether they get certified. About three-quarters of kinship families for children in the system haven’t gone through the certification process, Berzinskas said.
In certified homes, the parents have to undergo 27 hours of initial training and provide more information, including an overview of the household’s finances, health assessments of all family members and proof of citizenship.
County human services offices have an obligation to look for potential kinship placements before putting a child in an unfamiliar home, and about half the time they find someone who can care for the child immediately after removal from the birth family, Berzinskas said.
Some other children also ultimately end up with relatives or neighbors who needed a few days to prepare.
Staying with someone they already know well is less traumatic to children than having to move in with strangers, however well-trained and well-meaning, she said.
“It’s much easier for them to stay with grandma than to stay with someone they don’t know,” she said.
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.
Originally Published:
