CASA celebrates family reunification

SANDPOINT — Jan remembers vividly the lowest ebb of her fortunes and the moment that turned out to be a high water mark of her fate. She remembers, because they share a precise moment in time.

“The day I got arrested seemed, at the time, like it was the worst day of my life,” said the young woman who asked to remain anonymous. “As it turned out, it saved my life.”

On the day of the arrest, she was the mother of infant children. She was also addicted to methamphetamine and became involved in selling the drug. Thus began a heartbreaking journey through the child protection system.

“I helped put my kids in the car and I watched them being driven away,” Jan said. “For two-and-a-half months, I had no idea where they were.”

The children were placed in foster care, Jan was sentenced to 13 days in jail and mandatory drug treatment, all the while agonizing for more than two months over the whereabouts of her babies.

While Jan at first saw nothing but devastation, a battery of agencies and volunteers already had moved into high gear to put her family back together. The network that moves to help save a child can include law enforcement, teachers, social workers, judges, probation officers, the Idaho Department of Health & Welfare, as well as concerned members of the general public. The same network works even harder to get that child back home through reunification.

“Our role is about building a relationship, starting a conversation and providing resources,” said Stacey White, child welfare chief for Region 1 Family & Community Services through Health & Welfare. “It’s not about taking children away.”

“Reunification isn’t about any one agency — it’s about community,” added Rob Braniff, child welfare chief for the department’s Region 1 office of Family & Community Services. “It’s one big team that works together in this community to preserve families.”

This Friday, June 15, the team behind reuniting these families will celebrate success on that front during Family Reunification Day, scheduled to take place from noon-2 p.m. The event will start with a mayoral proclamation at the Bonner County Administration Building that currently serves as the temporary courthouse, followed by a guest speaker and a group walk to nearby Lakeview Park.

Sponsored by Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children, Family Reunification Day is designed to shed light on what goes into getting children back home. Bonner County was selected as a “pilot county” to launch the first-ever Family Reunification Day event.

“There’s a lot of awareness and community buy-in for the program in this county,” said Sandra Gunn, executive director for North Idaho CASA. “And awareness brings more volunteers.”

When Judy Labrie, of the First Judicial District CASA program, came to the job in 2006, she encountered a stressed system with only seven available volunteers. For the first year, she personally managed the cases of more than 90 children who had no assigned CASA volunteer. Starting in 2007, North Idaho CASA began offering regular training sessions, increasing the number of local volunteer advocates to a peak of 34 last year.

CASA, Labrie said, is just one thread in the larger fabric of reuniting families.

“One of the things we want to do is let the public know how many services go into a successful reunification,” she said, adding that area foster parents and organizations such as Kinderhaven are important parts of the process, which, in the end, “is really about the parent.”

Magistrate Judge Debra Heise — whose sentence initially sent Jan to jail and ultimately saved her life — agreed that success relies on how hard parents are willing to work to change their lives.

“I think parental motivation and parental love can move mountains,” she said.

There currently are 39 children in state custody in Bonner County, another 12 in Boundary County. In total, Health & Welfare has 117 “open cases” in the two northern counties. The statistics for successful reunification are impressive, Braniff pointed out.

“In Bonner County, 75 percent of kids reunify — and they reunify within 12 months,” he said. “Twenty-seven percent of our cases are ‘in-home’ cases, where the kids don’t have to be removed. We get in there and identify safety issues right away.”

“Child protection law mandates reunification,” said CASA’s Labrie. “It’s built into the plan. And there’s huge effort on the department’s part to make that happen.”

“That is our primary focus,” said White, explaining that Health & Welfare facilitates group meetings between the families involved and the support network behind reunification. In many cases, the process resembles an intervention, where grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles are drawn into the task at hand. “We ask the family to develop a plan so that the child can stay home and be safe. What we see is that family can motivate family better than the department can.”

“Family Reunification Day celebrates the fact that families can build that support system and put things back together,” said Gunn. “I would invite the public to attend and help us celebrate families.”

“Parenting is hard,” Heise said. “And the lack of a support system makes it even harder. The children in our county have an advocate through CASA.”

 As do the parents, Jan shared. When she was encouraged at one point to put her children up for adoption, both her probation officer and CASA volunteer advocate encouraged her to stay the course and do the hard work of turning her life around as the way to get her children back home.

“You have to take ownership for your own mistakes — you can’t blame anyone else,” she said. “I realized that the moment I lost my children.”

Jan’s path to reunification included what she calls her “graduation” from incarceration, drug treatment and family counseling. In several months, she will complete her second year of college education and walk in another graduation ceremony, this time with a nursing degree in hand.

“Her situation at first appeared to be very bleak,” said Labrie. “But it has turned out to be a remarkable survival story.”