INTRODUCTION
In January, as I finished giving testimony in our state legislature, the chair of the committee spoke up. She knew the dependency case involving my grandson had just ended. “Congratulations,” she said, “on finalizing the adoption of your grandson.”
“No,” I replied, “it wasn’t adoption, it was a guardianship.” And I thanked her for her work on HB 1747, a 2022 law that requires a court to rule out a guardianship before they can terminate parental rights.
Because of that legislation, which I had strongly advocated for, I was able to convince our state agency to allow me to resolve my grandson’s case with a guardianship rather than terminating the parental rights of my son Alexei. I was able to avoid adopting my grandson, which would have erased Alexei from the official record of his own son’s life.
In the hearing room in Olympia, I reflected on that legislator’s comments. I understood her confusion.
For so long in this system, success has meant finality, and finality has meant adoption.
But what I couldn’t possibly have understood in that moment, however, was how much more the idea of “finality” would soon mean to me. The next day I learned that Alexei was shot and killed by the Tacoma Sheriff’s Department while he was running away from a traffic stop. My world ended then. There are no words for it. I cannot make sense of the loss of my son, and I will not try to do that now.
But in this pain, I see this work of “child welfare” differently. It is clearer to me now that the current setup is for “finality,” this idea that things need to be concluded. That we can wash our hands of someone and believe we have done something good.
The United States does a lot of erasing: it erases people from their communities, from their connections, from their families. A central part of the American story is the legacy of erasing the bodies and identities of Black people. Adoption, too, is an erasure; it erases parents from their child’s birth certificate and replaces them with new parents.
Reimagining How Cases End & Families Evolve
Shrounda Selivanoff is the Social Service Manager at the Washington State Office of Public Defense Parent Representation Program. She brings a fierce and passionate voice advocating for systemic change for parents and their children involved with the child welfare system. She was previously involved with the child welfare system. Through life challenges, she has persevered. She continues to learn more about the child welfare system from the perspective of a kinship caregiver to her grandson.
Shrounda’s child welfare experience birthed an advocate seeking to destigmatize parents and elevate the need for our society to value families’ diversity and uniqueness. Shrounda’s work is focused on centering parents’ perspectives to support their families.
Shrounda relentlessly pursues policy and system change toward preserving and strengthening families with a North Star, empowering and valuing parents as partners, and keeping families together. She keenly understands the power and impact of preserving families and the critical need for individual and collective transformation.
Tara Urs, special counsel for civil policy and practice at the King County Department of Public Defense. Tara has led the department’s efforts to transform dependency law in the state, drawing on our attorneys’ expertise to challenge a system that harms children and families and disproportionately harms Black and Indigenous families.
She has testified countless times in the state legislature, argued before the state Supreme Court, including In re Dependency of ZJG and In re Matter of KW, and authored numerous amicus briefs on key appellate cases. Before joining DPD’s management team, she practiced family defense at The Defender Association Division and, prior to that, worked as a staff attorney at the Brooklyn Family Defense Project.
Tara received her BA from Wesleyan University and her JD from New York University School of Law, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow and winner of the John Perry Prize for Civil Liberties and Civil Rights. She clerked for Judge Deborah A. Batts, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York.
As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.
At the conclusion of a dependency case, no one can know what any parent and child will need from each other in years to come, what they have to offer each other, or how they will change. It is hubris to think otherwise. Even when a court cannot agree to return a child home, no one can predict whether the caregiver will someday fall on hard times and need the support of the parent or whether the child will need the comfort of someone who has overcome the challenges they are facing