Child welfare, safety bill approved by Senate committee
Rep. Nick Wilson, R-Williamsburg, speaks on House Bill 778 during Tuesday’s Senate Families and Children Committee meeting. A high-resolution photo can be found here.
FRANKFORT — A multi-pronged bill designed to boost child welfare and safety was unanimously advanced Tuesday by the Senate Families and Children Committee.
House Bill 778, sponsored by Rep. Nick Wilson, R-Williamsburg, seeks to strengthen protections for young people in foster care, boost coordination between agencies and codify bill language regarding ingestion of controlled substances by children.
“This bill is a product of the work we’ve done through the interim on the Families and Children Committee, in the interim committee meetings as well as roundtable discussions with members of the cabinet, members of law enforcement, many interested parties,” Wilson testified.
The first goal of HB 778 is to strengthen protections in the foster care and placement system. The measure includes four sections addressing this issue.
“Currently, when a child is in the foster care system and they turn 18, they have the decision to opt out or stay in the system. Sometimes, they give it a go as an adult and realize they want to opt back in. This makes the change where they can do that up to three times until they’re 20½ years old,” Wilson said.
The second part of the bill addresses placements of children, and it states that, “each placement shall meet the need of that individual child,” Wilson said.
HB 778 seeks to ensure that children in foster care are not placed with someone on the sex offender registry. It also calls for improving coordination between agencies.
Wilson said legislators met with those from the court system, schools, investigators and child advocacy professionals to craft the legislation, and further cooperation is addressed in the bill.
A large portion of the bill addresses “modern threats to the child’s safety,” and this includes dangerous substances children accidentally ingest. Under HB 778, child injuries caused by ingestion or inhalation of a controlled substance would be included in the definition of neglect, and neglect would be added to the child abuse statute.
“We’ve codified ingestion as a part of criminal neglect. We’ve added to the criminal statute of criminal abuse, and we’ve provided for a lot of trainings that are required for many different professions – social workers, child care centers, family home child care centers, urgent care centers, the Board of Medical Licensure, basically anyone we think needs to be aware of this situation,” Wilson said.
Committee Chair Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Paducah, serves on the state’s Child Fatality and Near Fatality External Review Board. He said, through work on the panel, he learned that the numbers of ingestion are “increasing dramatically” over the last 5-7 years and therefore the topic is addressed in the bill.
Sen. Keturah J. Herron, D-Louisville, thanked Wilson for his work on the bill, especially the provisions regarding young people aging out of the foster care system.
“We know that that’s a huge problem, that when we look at homelessness in our commonwealth, a lot of those young people are kids who have aged out of the foster care system. So, I hope that those changes will definitely provide better supports for those individuals, and I look forward to seeing the impact of that,” she said.
Carroll said he also appreciates the work that was put into the bill.
“It was nice to be able to work together on a bill and pull together several different topics that will be meaningful and put it all together in one piece of legislation,” Carroll said. “I know there were several folks involved in this, and it is a great product and I’m very honored to be a part of it.”
