The day state officials handed Riley a large black plastic trash bag that smelled like lemon is seared into the former Oregon foster youth’s mind.
“I will never forget my first trash bag,” Riley recently told state lawmakers.
“The day I was handed the trash bag was the day I lost every last bit of who I was,” Riley told members of the Senate Committee on Human Services.
People who've been through foster care systems, like the Oregon Department of Human Services, are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions later in life, according to a new study.
Bradley W. Parks / OPB
Kids placed in the Oregon child welfare system often experience well-documented trauma in a complicated system. The idea to give them a piece of luggage so they didn’t have to throw their belongings in a trash bag as they moved from placement to placement seemed like a small but meaningful -- and presumably -- easy fix.
That’s what Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, thought too when she first introduced Senate Bill 548 during the 2023 legislative session to eradicate the practice and provide a duffel bag for each of the 4,500-plus children placed in state care.
The practice of having to put their belongings in a trash bag, “demeans a child and makes them feel as though they and their belongings are worthless,” Sollman said during a legislative hearing last week.
But it turns out, it wasn’t as easy as the state senator thought. Despite already passing a bill requiring the state agency to give kids in foster care a duffel bag, the law was not always being followed. Sollman said advocates were regularly hearing from caseworkers that they were not able to find duffel bags for kids.
“It’s been perplexing to me that a state I love and an agency that we trust to care for our children facing so much trauma just couldn’t get it,” Sollman said.
Sollman said she had hoped to avoid introducing another bill.
But, she told lawmakers, instead of working to ensure the practice was eradicated, state human services officials asked questions like: where the duffel bags would be stored and voiced concerns that they would have to hire someone to order the duffel bags.
“I said, ‘how about you use the same person who orders the trash bags instead,’” Sollman said.
The latest measure, Senate Bill 1016, makes the language more explicit: it prohibits the use of garbage bags all together, no exceptions. The new law, if passed, would also require the Department of Human Services to give regular reports on the matter to state lawmakers.
Jake Sunderland, a DHS spokesman, said since the 2023 legislation passed, the department has reduced the use of large plastic bags to transport a child’s belongings. Sunderland said out of the more than 17,000 moves, only 17 times did agency officials rely on a plastic bag since the law was enacted. Some of the reasons, he said, were that the foster youth’s items were unsanitary (lice, mold or soiled), the duffels weren’t large enough to carry all their items so a trash bag was also used, or once an ice storm prevented the pickup of luggage.
Sollman told OPB the issue is trash bags should never be used at all.
Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, who sits on the Senate Human Services Committee, said it was “ridiculous” the agency simply didn’t follow the first law that was passed. He suggested the head of the agency, Fariborz Pakseresht, should come to the committee and explain “why they didn’t get this right and didn’t follow the law.”
