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Lawmakers move to help KY grandparents. Why can’t they support families more often? | Opinion

Lexington Herald-Leader - 2/15/2023

In 2021, Harriet Cloud got a call that her daughter had been arrested and her two children were about to be put in foster care.

She packed up and came to Lexington from her home in Breckinridge County to take care of the two boys and her great niece who was living with them. She rented an apartment and since then has been taking care of three teenagers, one of whom is autistic. Her daughter is serving a seven-year prison sentence.

Cloud is a retired nurse who was living on Social Security and some savings. The Kentucky Transitional Assistance program gave her $411 a month to take care of the three children under what’s known as Kinship Care Program. She spends almost $1,000 a month on groceries alone, but makes too much from Social Security to qualify for federal food stamps.

“I’m living on credit cards and loans and trying to keep a step ahead of them every month,” she said in a recent interview.

But on Tuesday, Cloud and some 58,000 other grandparents raising children for a second time around got some great news. For the first time in 27 years, their monthly payments will go up from an estimated $200 a child per month to $500 directly out of federal funds.

New regulations were approved by the legislative Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee and should be finalized later this week. The money will come out of a federal block grant known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Norma Hatfield, the president of the Kinship Families Coalition of Kentucky who’s been raising two grandchildren in Elizabethtown for the past eight years. “The bottom line is it’s going to help kids and families in Kentucky and that’s what really matters.”

Eric Friedlander, Secretary of the Cabinet of Health and Family Services, said he’s not sure why it’s taken so long to get here, but “this is what we should be doing, taking care of people.”

Kinship care has become common across Kentucky and the rest of the country in the midst of the opioid epidemic that has taken so many parents’ lives and sent even more to prison. It’s better for children to live with family members than to go into Kentucky’s already overburdened foster care system, but as Hatfield says, “there just aren’t enough supports” for many kinship carers who are already retired and living on fixed incomes.

Why has this issue not been at the top of legislative and executive branch agendas for the past 27 years? Well, it’s probably not sexy enough, not as cool as closing drag shows, banning books and worrying about what pronouns people use.

As an example, I’m going to pick on new Senator Lindsey Tichenor, R-Smithfield, not because she’s the only one focused on unimportant things, but because she is just starting in her legislative career as a member of the Committee on Children and Families. She has already filed some bills, including a “don’t say gay” bill that must have been cribbed from QAnon pamphlets, and one that bans drag shows. They are dumb and unconstitutional and a total waste of time for everyone. What if, and just hear me out here, Tichenor used her new power to figure out why it’s so hard to raise children in Kentucky — not because a child might have to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, but because their grandparents don’t have enough money to buy healthy food and adequate clothing?

In the meantime, let’s herald this good news and give Frankfort credit where it’s due. And let’s hope legislators can continue to work on the real, substantive problems that plague our state instead of political phantoms that haunt some feverish brains.

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