In wake of Sabrina Ray and Natalie Finn deaths, Iowa vows to fix its broken adoption and foster care system

LEE ROOD   | The Des Moines Register

Baby Elijah landed on Tanarra Gray’s front porch in Des Moines in 2013, when he was about 2 months old.

Then only 22, Gray tried to help the baby’s troubled mother, a friend at the time, raise him. But that woman struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and eventually disappeared from her son’s life.  

Gray figured the process of adopting a boy she loved and who loved her wouldn’t be complicated.

She was wrong.

It took four years for Judge Arthur Gamble to finally sign an order this month paving the way for Gray to adopt Eli. Now 26, Gray still has to wait out a 30-day appeal period — after Eli’s fifth birthday in January — for their adoption odyssey to end.

“They’ve let me keep him, but I’ve had no rights until I became a guardian last year,” Gray said. “He’s been with me technically since birth.”  

Becoming the foster or adoptive parent of a child in Iowa requires a mountain of work, not to mention heaps of patience and perseverance.

Prospective parents are questioned about everything from how they discipline and show affection to whether they’ve filed for bankruptcy or had anyone in their home who has been accused of sexually abusing children.

Yet, as Iowans have learned in the past year from the facts surrounding the child abuse of Natalie Finn of West Des Moines, Sabrina Ray of Perry, Krystal Bell of Ankeny, and Malayia Knapp in Urbandale, some adults who seek to foster and adopt will go to great lengths to keep authorities from discovering how abusive they are.

How Iowa can better screen would-be parents and keep watch on children whose parents want to avoid detection promises to be a major issue for state legislators and Iowa’s Department of Human Services in coming months.

"This is not a time for tweaks,” said state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, a Wilton Republican who chairs the House Government Oversight Committee. "This is a time for significant reforms."

But the mix of proposals also comes at a time when veterans of Iowa’s child-welfare system say state social workers are juggling too many cases and resigning from stress or fear that more children will fall through the cracks.

Cory McClure, a family practice lawyer in Des Moines, said those caseloads need to be reduced and more Iowans with good homes need to step up if the state wants to better protect at-risk kids.

"It’s a tough gig, so we don’t always get the best people every time,” said McClure, who started a mediation program in the Polk County Attorney’s Office to try to safely reunite more at-risk children with their families.

McClure said public “blood lust” over recent high-profile abuse cases is real, but state leaders and Iowans failed those children, too.

“We don’t really want to pay as a society to help abused and neglected kids. We just don’t,” he said.

Kauffman said he hopes to reconvene a joint government oversight committee meeting in the first weeks of the legislative session to hear from the independent consultant hired to review the Department of Human Services' practices and policies.

That consultant released a report Friday that found that morale is poor among social workers. While Iowa's Human Services enjoys a largely stable workforce, turnover and caseloads are higher in Polk and Linn counties, home of the state's two largest cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.

Staffers complain that their training is insufficient and that the state has long expected them to do more with less.

Legislators have said they want to hear from Human Services chief Jerry Foxhoven, who replaced retiring director Charles Palmer after the public learned that a second Iowa teen with whom child protective workers had been in contact, Sabrina Ray, had died from starvation.

In the meantime, a flurry of measures is being developed for discussion at the Statehouse:

• Hearing complaints from mandatory reporters about Human Services’ disparate responses to child abuse reports, Prevent Child Abuse Iowa would like to see a review of the state’s mandatory reporting law. Director Liz Cox says some 400,000 professionals in Iowa are mandatory reporters under state law, but calls to Iowa’s child abuse hotline from some of them, like school personnel, often are treated differently from those from police.
• Because several recent high-profile victims of abuse were said to be home-schooled, the agency also is pushing to resume annual registration of home-schooled children with their public school district.
• Democratic Sen. Matt McCoy and state Rep. Marti Anderson are working on a foster care and adoption bill of rights, similar to a 2010 Pennsylvania statute, that includes mandated medical and dental exams for adoptive children and requires coordination of homeschool educational plans with school districts through a homeschool provider.
• McCoy, a ranking member of the Senate’s government oversight committee, also is drafting two pieces of legislation that would prohibit private homeschool instruction if parents are receiving adoption subsidies, and require that Human Services workers, not private agencies, screen foster and adoptive parents. “These are children at risk,” McCoy said. “The state has a special legal responsibility to protect them.”

Kaufmann said he wants to ensure that Iowa law mandates that children whose parents receive subsidies are being seen regularly by doctors and dentists, who are mandatory reporters.

Testimony in Nicole Finn's trial for murder this month also has some people thinking about whether the state needs to do more to allow authorities to check on children without warning.

The social worker in the Finn case and police obtained a court order allowing them to enter the home, but the worker notified the adoptive mother days before they would be coming in August 2016.

Iowa law doesn’t require authorities to give any warning.

That visit, after numerous reports of suspected abuse, yielded little. Nicole Finn was prepared and had instructed her teenage children to shower and clean up.

Natalie Finn died of starvation 2 months later.

Ensuring subsidies support children

Iowa spends $159 million each year on subsidies to help families meet the special needs of adopted children.

The subsidies are mandated by federal law to prevent children from languishing in foster care.

But some bad actors are enticed by those subsidies, which mirror foster payments and, in Iowa, can amount to about $12,000 annually per child.

To gain some sense whether children are being adequately cared for, states such as New York  have considered measures that require child welfare agencies to check on adopted children whose parents receive the subsidies.

Iowa also has no system in place to stop subsidy payments after abuse is confirmed. Some child advocates have said continuing payments in such circumstances amounts to bad policy, as well as poor financial stewardship.

While Human Services officials have claimed in oversight hearings that the rate of reported abuse in Iowa foster homes is relatively low, a bevy of research shows children often are re-abused in both foster and adoptive homes.

One recent study by the Children’s Law Center in New York found that about a fourth of broken adoptions there were caused by parental abuse and neglect.

Legal advocates say the state faces liability for placing children in unsafe homes. 

In a rare move, one of the teens in Iowa who made headlines this year after surviving confinement and years of abuse following her adoption at age 10 has sued her former adoptive mother — and the state — for negligence.

Malayia Knapp’s lawyer, Jennifer Hall De Kock, said the young woman’s adoptive mother and her mechanic husband went from living in a home valued at $13,000 to one worth over $288,000 after they took in Malayia and her five siblings.

“I do believe she targeted these children,” De Kock said.

De Kock noted that the Knapp family was under the observation of numerous mandatory reporters while they were fostering and adopting.

“An active foster license was renewed while (a sister) ran away in 2014 and after she had reported abuse to police," she said. "There was no investigation.”  

Malayia Knapp told Watchdog in January that her adoptive mother confined, starved and abused her children. Mindy Knapp was convicted of assault in one such instance.

Malayia has since agreed to work with legislators on the foster and adoptive bill of rights, as she seeks justice for herself and her siblings in civil court.

"There are foster kids all over this country who are rooting for Malayia," De Kock said. "They look at her as someone who has shined a light on what they’ve been through."

De Kock said she believes the blame for recent cases rests as much with state leaders, who have passed "draconian" budget cuts in Human Services, as with others.

"The DHS workers I know are decent people, who are stretched and overextended and practically traumatized themselves," she said.

"I think we as Iowans have a responsibility after these cases to say: ‘Enough. There will be no more Sabrina Rays. There will be no more Natalie Finns. That means we have to have enough DHS workers and resources to properly oversee these children."

Wanted: Parents motivated by love

Would-be foster and adoptive parents are recruited and screened by an organization called Iowa KidsNet, under a state contract with Four Oaks and Lutheran Services in Iowa.

The contractors receive performance payments for exceeding targets that include finding more families to foster and possibly adopt children coming into care with special needs, such as sibling groups or those with difficult behaviors.

At least one-third of children in foster care nationally have physical or mental disabilities. Those children are far more likely than others to be physically abused, sexually assaulted and neglected, experts say.

Providing a permanent home to a traumatized child carries challenges and risks that prove too much for some parents.

Yet some, like Gray, go above and beyond to try to care for a child.

The Des Moines mom said she hopes state leaders don’t make the adoption process more difficult for people like her, because it’s already challenging and stressful.

Gray, who works at a car rental agency while taking business classes at Des Moines Area Community College, said she can scarcely afford what she’s spent trying to give Eli a permanent home.

Because she sought a private adoption and did not gain custody of the boy through foster care, she receives no subsidies to help support Eli.

Gray and her fiancée have spent thousands paying for six home visits, for two lawyers for Gray and Elijah and for running legal ads to try to locate Eli’s birth mother and father.

That process, and trying to serve the parents with papers seeking guardianship and adoption, took almost four years, she said.

Court records show the boy’s birth mother has been arrested for drug use, theft and prostitution.

Eli goes to play therapy to help with separation anxiety from the instability he endured when his birth mother was in and out of his life, Gray said.

No matter what’s in store, she said, she would never turn back.

“I can’t live without him,” Gray said. “He tells me all the time he needs me to fight his monsters. But because of him, I have become a better person.”