Funding problems in the state Division of Child and Family Services have become so grave that a group of adoptive parents say a special legislative session is needed to cure the department's ills.
The situation will reach critical mass at the end of the month when government allocations for severely abused adoptees are cut off. Even their own mothers described the neglected children as the worst of the worst, who commit the most obscene and socially inappropriate offenses imaginable.
"If we don't get them treatment now, they will be in prison later," said SAFF Care (Safe Adoptive Families for Children at Risk Emotionally) co-founder Challi Allred.
They vandalize homes, molest other children and beat family members. Adoptive parents report waking at night to find them standing bedside with scissors in hand.
Products of severe abuse and neglect, many were born to drug addicts and have been subjected to unspeakable nightmares at the hands of their biological parents. About 200 to 300 such children are in the DCFS system and rack up about $17,000 each in therapy bills a year.
Besides the intense psychological treatment, adoptive parents spend many of their waking hours keeping the children from self-destruction. It's a burden so great that the state had previously promised to pay counseling costs until the children turn 18.
In addition to the stop-payment on the therapy check, DCFS also is cutting monthly stipends to $250 a month — in some cases almost a 50 percent drop.
Sunday members of SAFF Care and other concerned residents chastised the state for rescinding the promise and initiating cutbacks. The group gathered to encourage Gov. Mike Leavitt to mandate a special legislative session so lawmakers can declare the DCFS situation an emergency and dip into the seldom used "Rainy-Day Fund," a budget surplus account that accumulates yearly.
After Sunday's rally, however, Leavitt spokeswoman Vicki Varela said the chances for a special session are extremely slim.
"I don't know all the options that are available, but it would be very unlikely that they would go into the rainy-day fund," she said.
Without a special session, many adoptive parents, like Kristi Hutchings, who left her $40,000-a -year job as a legal secretary to take on 9-year-old Jacob, are left in a catch-22. On the one hand, Hutchings won't be able to afford her son's therapy bills. She could return Jacob to state care for therapy, but that would only further the child's already deeply rooted sense of abandonment.
The other option would be for Hutchings to go back to work and pay Jacob's bills herself. But finding a sitter for the child, who is considered too violent for day care, isn't easy.
E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com