SPRINGFIELD — Four years ago, the General Assembly unanimously approved a law aimed at ending a routine indignity faced by foster children who, lacking luggage of their own, sometimes moved from home to home with their belongings in a trash bag.
As a result, the Department of Children and Family Services was required to“ensure” that children being removed from their homes or placed in a new foster care setting have “appropriate baggage and other items,” according to the law. While follow-up legislation to strengthen the law has flagged in recent years, a pair of Democratic lawmakers earlier this session introduced a bill to strengthen the law — and a formalized process for keeping track of times when DCFS falls short.
The legislation, House Bill 10, would add the luggage mandate to the Illinois Foster Child and Youth Bill of Rights and require DCFS to purchase luggage the agency can’t otherwise provide through donations from nonprofits or grants. It would also clarify that once a foster child has been given luggage, it belongs to him or her and the agency can’t reclaim it.
The bill would also require DCFS to record and report instances where the agency failed to provide the luggage and to file an annual report providing an explanation for the times a trash bag was used to move the belongings of a foster child.
But HB 10 isn’t moving forward this year. Its sponsor, Rep. Margaret Croke, D-Chicago, said after she filed the legislation, DCFS informed her that the agency was largely in compliance with the 2021 law. Croke said she and advocates want to keep a focus on the agency to ensure full compliance.
“These bills are supposed to be conversation starters,” she said. “It’s a problem that the department knows that I’m now paying attention to. And if it persists, then we’re going to have to figure out some different ways of solving it.”
There are more than 18,000 youth in Illinois’ foster care system. While roughly half of them live with extended family, others are placed in a variety of foster settings over the course of their time in the system, requiring numerous disruptive moves. Even before lawmakers took up the 2021 law, several nonprofits had begun filling the gap, collecting secondhand backpacks, luggage and cash donations for those items to distribute to DCFS.
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“At the end of the day, DCFS is responsible for everything that happens to a child, for making sure the child is safe, for making sure the child has an appropriate placement, for making sure that the child isn’t treated like garbage by giving them garbage bags for their possessions,” said Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, who represents several thousand children in abuse and neglect cases.
Foster children owning their luggage would be a seemingly small change but a powerful one, said Richard Blackmon, director of education and pathways at Court Appointed Special Advocates of Cook County. CASA supports court-appointed volunteer advocacy for children who have been neglected or abused.
“Some baggage that young people in care have is emotional, mental and psychological,” Blackmon said. “Just having the security of knowing that ‘I have a place to keep my clothes, I have a place to keep my personal hygiene items’ — which is what we use luggage for — could make that burden of the transfer of placements a lot easier and a lot less complicated.”
DCFS said it currently provides children entering their care or switching placements with a duffle bag that they can keep — abiding by key provisions of the current law. But supporters of HB 10 said the legislation was necessary to inform children of their rights and gain a fuller accounting of how DCFS has responded to the existing mandate.
Per a 2021 law, the Department of Children and Family Services is required to “ensure” foster children have “appropriate baggage” during a move from one placement to another – instead of moving their belongings in trash bags or pillowcases. Though the agency is not in perfect compliance, DCFS now gives out duffel bags like this one in addition to donated luggage and backpacks collected by nonprofits. (Photo provided by DCFS)
The agency already records court-approved transportation of a child as a “significant event,” which requires a special report, but it does not record whether the child has luggage.
Golbert said he was unaware of any children currently using trash bags as luggage in Cook County but emphasized the importance of recordkeeping.
“Unless you add on reporting and record keeping requirements, it’s often not clear whether it’s actually being complied with or not,” he said.
The 2021 law requiring DCFS to “ensure” foster children had “appropriate baggage” during a move from one placement to another amended a part of existing state law aimed at maintaining “normalcy” for youth in care, including stipulating that kids are entitled to participate in extracurricular activities. But advocates say HB 10’s addition of a luggage mandate to the Illinois Foster Child and Youth Bill of Rights would have been extra meaningful.
“Putting the right to have appropriate luggage whenever moving on the Youth Bill of Rights is going to make sure that not only are the workers reviewing this every year with every child, so the worker is aware that they need to prioritize this need, but that the caregivers are aware as well,” said Madalyn Steege, program supervisor at Brightpoint, a children’s home and aid organization serving Illinois.
Brightpoint’s foster care services provide case management and support for families in an effort to move towards reunification. The bill of rights is reviewed with a child when they move to a new home or, if they remain in the same home, on an annual basis, Steege said.
“Every time that we can put a piece of information in kids’ hands about what they’re entitled to demand, I think that’s a very important thing to do,” said Heidi Dalenberg of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “We need to empower kids to ask for things that they’re not getting that they are supposed to get.”
The ACLU has a long history of pressing for reforms at DCFS; Dalenberg is director of the ACLU’s Institutional Reform Program Project, which seeks systemic change at the agency.
Blackmon recalled instances where foster children have arrived at CASA using “trash bags, milk crates, anything they can really get their hands on, particularly depending on the type of circumstances being moved from” to carry their belongings. CASA then provides them with luggage.
“These young people need the same thing that I would provide for my children,” Blackmon said. “If all of my children have suitcases and luggage in case we have to move, or in case we go on a trip, or in case we change our location, why do we expect anything less for children in state care?”
Erin Drumm is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
