The Arkansas House of Representatives passed two bills Friday to restrict the "re-homing" of adopted children, put tighter reins on adoption subsidies and require the Arkansas Department of Human Services to offer post-adoptive services to families.
Lawmakers have said they were led to create the legislation after the contention surrounding Rep. Justin Harris, R-West Fork, who re-homed his two adopted daughters -- ages 3 and 5 -- to a man who later pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting one of them.
Harris voted for both bills Friday, including House Bill 1676, which would make re-homing adopted children in the future a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Harris, who stepped down Monday as vice chairman of the House Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs Committee, declined to answer any questions about the legislation, saying his lawyer would issue a statement on his behalf.
When attorney Jennifer Wells was reached by phone Friday afternoon, she said she did not have a statement and would have to get back to reporters. As of 7 p.m. Friday, Wells had not responded to additional calls seeking comment.
The two bills -- HB1676, by Rep. David Meeks, R-Conway, and HB1648, by Rep. Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville -- were introduced the day after the Arkansas Times published a story detailing Harris' attempts to adopt, and then return, the two girls to DHS.
Both bills passed 88-0 in separate House votes and will head to the Arkansas Senate next week. If they pass the Senate and become law, Arkansas would be the sixth state in the country to prohibit or restrict the practice of re-homing.
Meeks' bill would make re-homing adopted children to anyone beyond certain family members an unclassified felony punishable by up to five years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine. The bill would not apply to biological children sent to live with nonfamily members.
The lawmaker said his bill defines re-homing as relinquishing responsibility and custody, but does not prevent adoptive parents from sending children to camp or other sleep-away situations. Alternate living arrangements also are allowed for children when the parents need major medical treatment or suffer severe injuries.
Meeks said DHS could find only nine instances of re-homing from the past few years.
Meeks spoke from the House floor, saying people have asked him,"What if I want to send the child to a church camp or send them for a couple of weeks to a relative or to somebody who isn't a relative? Well, this bill would allow that."
"Basically what this would do simply, is it would keep somebody who has adopted a child from being able to just to give it away to somebody else."
Meeks, who is a foster parent, said the bill will not be retroactive -- meaning it will not apply to Harris' actions.
HB1676 also adds language to make clear that, "Abandonment does not include a situation in which a child has disrupted his or her adoption and the adoptive parent has exhausted the available resources."
Harris has said he gave the children to a youth pastor and former employee, Eric Cameron Francis -- who's now serving 40 years for sexual assault-- only after DHS refused to take them and threatened him with a lawsuit.
The legislator, who owns a state-subsidized preschool called Growing God's Kingdom, said the two preschool-age girls had been scarred by past abuse and were too difficult to raise.
The West Fork lawmaker has been critical of DHS. According to Harris, the agency fought to prevent him from adopting the girls and then threatened him with abandonment accusations when he decided he no longer wanted custody.
Both HB1676 and Leding's HB1648 have language that requires DHS to offer post-adoptive services. Neither bill names the exact services that must be offered to individual families; the sponsors said they would leave that to child-welfare experts.
DHS spokesman Amy Webb said it is the agency's policy to offer supportive services for adoptive parents, but they are not now required by law.
"We've heard anecdotally that that is not always happening," Webb said. "This codifies for us in law, that yes, indeed, for sure, those appropriate services for individual families have [to be] offered. But it also puts some onus on the family to say have 'We tried everything' before they can say 'We're at our wits' end and we need to end this adoption.'
"Post-adoption services are a bucket of potential services that people may use," she added, explaining the change for the agency. "We wouldn't have to offer everybody the whole bucket, but we would have to offer from the bucket."
If the bills pass through the Arkansas Senate and are signed into law, Webb said the agency will begin looking at the rule-making process to incorporate the mandated changes. What that process will look like is still uncertain, she said.
Leding said lawmakers felt more comfortable leaving some of those decisions to experts.
"Honestly with the limited time we had left in session, I would dare say all but a small handful of legislators even knew about this issue until very late. So it's probably not a smart idea to have us try to figure out what the best policies are in such a limited time," Leding said.
"This is a far more complicated issue than a lot of people might think, and we want to make sure even though we were up against the clock in the closing weeks of the session, that we got a good policy in place, not just a policy in place. I think you will see legislators and many other people following this process through the interim," he added.
The bills passed the House two days after Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced plans for an "independent review" of the state's child-welfare system, a probe that would look beyond questions about re-homing and examine a range of DHS services, policies, and personnel, he said.
It's unclear who will be chosen for the task.
On Friday, gubernatorial spokesman J.R. Davis wrote in an email that the review is still in its formative phases.
"Our office is conducting a search on who has the right expertise and availability," Davis wrote. "Our goal is to have a person or team selected for this task next week along with a scope of review."
Webb said the agency will make it a priority to cooperate with the governor's review, providing whatever records or information are needed. She said the agency has made improvements to its child-welfare division over the past couple of years.
"We welcome this," she said. "We think in the end it's going to be beneficial and show the public there are a lot of things we're doing right... and maybe they will have suggestions and other areas where we may be struggling that we need look at. We want to know if those areas exist."
Leding's HB1648 also will take care of one of the governor's additional priorities arising from the re-homing issue -- safeguards on how adoption subsidies are awarded.
The bill would require adoptive parents to sign a statement agreeing that the children will be in their primary care.
That statement also requires parents to notify DHS if the children leave their care, other than for a short time. Providing false information under that provision would be a misdemeanor.
"That was one of the governor's priorities when we first met to discuss those bills," Leding said. "It does allow some discretion for parents of adoptive children to maintain the subsidy if the children are removed from the home for a temporary basis. DHS wanted the discretion to allow that subsidy to continue in those instances instead of having to stop and restart it. But this creates a better framework to handle subsidy issues."
Harris received monthly $820 checks from the state. After he gave the girls to the Francis family, he continued to collect the subsidy, but says he then forwarded the money to the people who were raising his children. Harris "re-homed" the children to two families after he gave them up; he has produced five checks showing that he forwarded the state subsidies to the girls' subsequent caretakers.
In related news, House Speaker Rep. Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, confirmed that he had named Rep. Charlene Fite, R-Van Buren, to replace Harris as vice chairman of the the House Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs Committee. Fite did not return a call for comment late Friday.
In a letter to Gillam on Monday, Harris had requested his removal from the post. Under House rules, Harris will continue to serve on that committee.
Gillam said Monday that he also would grant Harris' request to step down from the House Joint Performance Review Committee, which does periodic and random performance evaluations of specific governmental programs and agencies -- some of them operated by DHS. Gillam had not named a replacement as of Friday, and the committee is not scheduled to meet for a few weeks.
Metro on 03/21/2015