June is National Reunification Month, and the North Dakota Department of Health and Human Services is recognizing its efforts to reunite children and their families.
Dean Sturn is Permanency Administrator with HHS’s Children and Family Services Section. He says there are countless scenarios that lead to a child being unable to remain with their family.
"It could be any scenario that you could imagine where the child is not safe in that home - because of behavioral or mental health issues in the home, it could be because of chemical dependency issues, it could be because of behavioral issues going on. It could be because of homelessness, and the family can't ensure the safety of that child."
Sturn says a wide misconception is that the moment anything might happen, children are taken from families where safety cannot be guaranteed and placed into foster care. But Sturn says removing a child from their family unit is always a last resort, and when they must be removed, priority is given to nearby kin. He says the number one goal is to always restore the family unit.
"From a foster care perspective - know that that's not all the children we are talking about - at any given time in North Dakota, there's about 1,450 kiddos in foster care. So when I look back in my stats for 2022, we have 460 of those children successfully reunited with their families of origin. Some remained in foster care, some remained placed with relatives. Some might have entered a formal guardianship, and some might have even entered into an adoptive relationship because there was no way that family could have been reunited."
Sturn says when a child is placed in a formal out-of-home care arrangement, HHS does everything it can to “wrap the family and the child in services” to give everyone the best tools to resolve the issues at hand. Reunification Month recognizes behavioral health specialists, courts and judges, foster care providers, tribal nations, human service zone partners and other community partners that work toward that main goal of reunification.