DCFS foster kids to see parents after months apart. It’s about time.

Throughout Chicago and across Illinois, many fathers will enjoy quality time with their children. For one group of parents, though, Father’s Day will be different.

Since March, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has enforced a blanket ban on all in-person supervised visits between parents and children in foster care, imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Parent visits with children have been relegated to online sessions. The ban has affected more than 11,200 parents of children in foster care, according to the Shriver Center on Poverty

Law.

That’s the bad news: For months, foster kids have had no physical contact or inperson visits with their parents and even siblings in some cases. A check-in via the internet, when possible, is not the same.

Here’s the good news: Following a June 15 commentary in the Chicago Tribune questioning the harsh practice of banning contact, DCFS is changing course. DCFS says on its website in-person visits will resume June 26, and will be allowed every other week. Sibling visits with children in foster care will resume July 15.

This is a ban that should not have lasted nearly this long and especially when the state leaders enforcing it — that would be Gov. J.B. Pritzker at the top — have been out and about in public, and in some cases large groups, with masks. Safe for them but not kids in foster care or their moms and dads?

The agency explained that the measure, initially, was aimed at keeping children healthy. At the same time, however, DCFS allowed in-person contact between agency caseworkers and parents, as well as between caseworkers and foster families, and service providers and foster families, according to the commentary written by Laura Matthews-Jolly, who serves as a guardian ad litem for foster children.

The safety measures that the agency will require during in-person visits beginning June 26 — the use of face coverings, hand washing, social distancing — could have been employed before, and could have allowed parents to spend Father’s Day with their children, if possible.

We’re glad DCFS will be lifting the ban. But it lasted much longer than it should have.