KENTUCKY — On this week’s program, we’re discussing a new Kentucky law that gives relatives who agree to take care of abused or neglected children more time to apply for foster care benefits.
State Sen. Julie Raque Adams, R-Louisville, was the primary sponsor of SB 151, during the 2024 legislative session in Frankfort. It passed both chambers and was signed into law by Gov. Andy Beshear, D-Ky.
But, it has since faced many questions, including about who is in charge of carrying out the law and who is responsible for allocating funding to implement it.
Sen. Raque Adams joins this segment to share the original intent of this legislation, the current status of the law and the impact it could have on Kentucky’s foster care support system.
“This was truly an organic bill that ended up becoming law. We have an extraordinary number of kids that are being removed from homes and put into foster care. What we wanted to see happen is to kind of change that trajectory, and we wanted these kids that were being removed from homes to be put into kinship or fictive care. What that means that difference between foster and kinship care is that that child is placed with somebody that they already have a relationship with, that they feel comfortable with. All the research shows that if a child is placed with a family member or trusted family friend, that their outcomes are so much better. So we needed to change the way we were thinking between foster and victim and kinship care, and so we did that through this bill. And so the other really important dynamic is that those families are now able to get support. And so we accomplished that, and it was statewide. The kinship community was thrilled, and so we really did a good thing, and the governor signed it into law, and so we thought that everything was going to progress according to the law,” explains Sen. Raque Adams.
In Oct. 2024, Auditor Allison Ball, R-Ky., launched an inquiry into the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services to see why the cabinet has not implemented SB 151 and if there is money to do so.
“Well, first of all, it’s been a real disappointment for me as the bill sponsor, and I know it’s been a disappointment for families across the Commonwealth, but I think we’re dealing with kind of two separate issues here. The first issue, which is more of a global issue, is that the governor has decided not to implement 20 bills that the legislature passed in this last legislative session. I don’t care if it’s a Republican legislature, a Democrat legislature, a Republican governor or a Democrat governor, that is an extremely dangerous precedent to set that a governor can unilaterally decide what bills he’s going to implement. When a law becomes a law, it’s a law, and so it is incumbent upon him to figure out how to make it happen. So that’s kind of the global issue right here, is that we can’t have we can’t set that precedent. Now, more specifically, to the kinship care bill, I still haven’t really felt that any of the dots have been connected relative to the lack of implementation. We requested that the Cabinet for Health and Family Services promulgate regulations. That hasn’t happened. We requested that the cabinet investigate fully with the federal government for funding sources. And that hasn’t happened. The only feedback we’ve gotten from the cabinet is that this is going to cost $20 million and that they don’t have the money to fund it. I don’t believe that you can come up with $1 figure for this bill when you haven’t even designed what the program looks like through regulations. So the two things don’t add up,” added Sen. Raque Adams.
In Oct. 2024, the office of Gov. Beshear sent this statement to Spectrum News 1:
“While the governor signed and supports the bill that would help our children and families, about $20 million would be needed to provide the services, and, on multiple occasions, the administration relayed this information to the bill sponsor, LRC staff and members of the General Assembly. Lawmakers had the opportunity to deliver the funding during the session but chose not to. It is simple: The state cannot implement programs and policies if we don’t have the funding needed to do so—and the Kentucky Supreme Court agrees.”
You can watch the full ‘In Focus Kentucky’ segment in the player above.