Support means Bristol can stay with family
This story is one of a series written in connection with our 2024 Signature Report, A season of hope: Growing the role of families, which focuses on the importance of kin for children in foster care.
“It takes a team to raise Bristol. It takes a family.”
Brenda Checklenis, Bristol’s grandmother and caregiver, says this while watching the 8-year-old bounce around the living room. Beyond keeping up with a second-grader’s energy, Checklenis relies on a support team to help her manage Bristol’s complex medical needs.
Bristol’s health challenges have been with her since 2016, when she was born with gastroschisis, a condition in which her intestines were growing outside her body. Checklenis and her husband, Craig, have been raising her since she was a baby, as Bristol’s mother dealt with substance use issues.
Caring for Bristol is an all day, every day routine of medical care. Supplies arrive every Wednesday and go into a hall closet that’s filled, top to bottom, with what it takes to keep Bristol alive and in good health. As for that support team? Much of that comes in the form of Callie Drefs.
“Callie lights up a room when she walks in!” says Checklenis.
Drefs does that and much more. Over the past three years, she has served as a nanny, playmate and medical assistant. “Miss Callie,” as Checklenis calls her, has become family.
Support for Bristol doesn’t end there. California’s Department of Social Services has a program called the Kinship Guardianship Assistance Payment (Kin-GAP) Program. Kin-GAP works as an alternative to traditional foster care, placing children with relatives, who are in turn supported with a monthly stipend to help cover expenses.
Angie Schwartz, deputy director of the Children and Family Services Division at the California Department of Social Services, understands the critical role of support for kinship families. That’s why funding for kinship families has been receiving a lot of attention in California recently.
“This is an area of ongoing reform,” Schwartz says. “We amended our law [in 2017] so that relatives would get the same level of funding support available as nonrelative foster parents. Before that, most relatives in California — even if they met all the same standards as nonrelatives — often didn’t receive any funding. As a result of the law change, families are eligible for anything that a nonrelative family home is eligible for.”
Do those supports mean the state spends more money? Not in the long run, according to Kim Johnson, former director of the California Department of Social Services.
“At the macro level, there are benefits to the state of California as it relates to costs associated with youth in care, because this approach is leading to better outcomes,” says Johnson, now secretary of the state Health and Human Services Agency. In other words, funding to support children in kinship placements means spending a lot less to provide for the needs of children and youth who experience poorer outcomes from non-kinship placements.
Most importantly, that funding means that families like Checklenis’ can get what they need to take on the additional responsibilities, and joys, of raising a child like Bristol. And for Checklenis, that means she can focus on her long-term goals for her granddaughter.
“She’s where she needs to be — she’s home,” says Checklenis. “My hope for her future is that she’s able to have a full life, a fulfilling life; to be an adult.”