School programs help kids, grandparents navigate guardianship
As attorneys quarrel and judges declare a sentence, the ones who watch the proceedings — those who oftentimes don’t know what’s going on until they are given a synopsis devoid of judicial jargon — are the ones who are left behind. When a parent is incarcerated, what happens to their child?
According to Siena Sanderson, the director of the Nurturing Center, most of these children find themselves being raised by their grandparents or other family members. According to the National Institute of Justice, the national average of children with at least one parent in prison is around 11 percent. At Enos Garcia Elementary, almost 14 percent of students enrolled here have at least one parent in prison, “that we know of,” Sanderson added.
Without proper support, children who grow up with a parent in prison are more likely to become offenders themselves. According to the National Institute of Justice, one study found that children of one or more incarcerated parents are six times more likely to be incarcerated. However, the article also said this outcome is difficult to predict, as other studies show that children with an incarcerated mother are more likely to participate in criminal activity, as opposed to children with an incarcerated father.
“That is why the Nurture Center is here in a school,” Sanderson said. “Because we wanted to be able to be up-close and personal with these kids who are experiencing this level of trauma, so we can at least have a fighting chance to make a difference in these children’s lives.”
The Nurturing Center is a subdivision of Taos Behavioral Health that provides a physical space at Enos to provide children with social support. According to Sarah Bradley, the principal at Enos Garcia, the Nurturing Center focuses on guidance so teachers can focus on teaching.
However, the issue doesn’t just exist at Enos Garcia; staff at Nurturing Centers at Ranchos Elementary and Peñasco Elementary see a simi
lar level of need for their programs. The Nurturing Center is not just a space for students to find safety and support, but it’s also a place where grandparents go to receive assistance navigating the bureaucratic landscape of kinship guardianship.
Guiding grandparents
Candy Allen, the Grandparent Program director for the Nurturing Center, has helped 61 families jump through the legal hurdles of becoming kinship guardians in the past 18 months. This endeavor consists of a dense, 60-page packet of legal information that those with no knowledge of legal terminology can have a very difficult time with.
“The process of kinship guardianship is not that easy,” Allen said. “You purchase a package of documents and, if you’re not used to working with the law, it’s very confusing. I just talked to a grandmother and asked her if she had the documents, if she had started filling them out, and she said, ‘I got them and I looked at them, and I just started to cry, and I haven’t looked at them again.’”
June and Robert Trujillo are grandparents currently raising three of their grandchildren, the first of whom they gained custody over when they were both 45 years old. They recalled the early stages of the process, Robert noting they were preparing to hire a lawyer before Allen and Sanderson helped them with the legal documentation and acquisition of supplies like diapers, baby clothes and a walker.
The Nurturing Center did all of this for free, whereas a lawyer would have been expensive, Robert added, especially on top of the cost of raising a child. Seven years later, they’re a functioning family, but it’s taken a toll on the Trujillos.
“Instead of me being able to be a grandma and spoil my grandkids and have a great time with them and not worry,” June said, “now we have to be the disciplinarians, make sure they’re getting their nutrition, make sure they’re getting their schoolwork done, make sure they’re growing into good human beings.”
The Trujillos give their grandkids a life full of adventure, taking them fishing and camping, ending a long week with a movie night while they munch on popcorn. According to Robert, the older two of their grandkids calls them “grandma and grandpa.” The youngest calls them “mom and dad.”
A community-wide issue
Robert, who worked as an educator in Taos for 25 years, saw the problem of children being raised by grandparents first-hand. Ever since he began teaching and coaching in 1994, he recalled, he would see children at sporting events who were always in the care of their grandparents. According to him, it’s only gotten worse since then.
Jeanette Vigil is a 57-year-old grandmother raising her grandkids, in addition to other adopted children. In total, Vigil and her husband are currently raising seven children. While Vigil said she’s happy to provide these children with a home, it’s been a very difficult journey for her.
“They don’t have the additional support of a grandparent anymore,” Vigil said. “I’m a parent now. I do parenting things. I take care of correcting behaviors, I’m cooking all the meals, I’m there 24/7 for them. I’m not the grandparent that gets to pick them up on the weekend and say ‘Hey, let’s go shopping!’ I’m not the grandparent that gets to go, ‘Yes, you can spend the night’ if they want to. So, they’ve lost [their] grandparents.”
However, Vigil is determined to provide her children with a fulfilling life, signing them up for extracurricular and athletic activities. In addition to chores and maintaining animals, the family enjoys the occasional dance party.
“I want them to be just successful adults, just being able to pay their way in society,” Vigil said. “And if they choose to have children, to be able to know that they’ve got to raise those children, and that that’s the best thing in life is watching your children grow and become successful adults, and whatever you want to be, as long as you’re doing something, is being a successful adult.”
‘Children can be resilient’
While she’s raising these children, Vigil is simultaneously working fulltime at Enos Garcia as the Native education tutor and taking classes at UNM to become a teacher. She also works alongside the Nurturing Center, a program she sees a lot of hope in.
“It’s kind of like a home environment,” Vigil said. “They have tea parties, they have different things, so it’s taking them out of the classroom and putting them somewhere positive, giving them that positive feeling. I think it would be beneficial for all the schools, even the high school.”
“We need to acknowledge the fact that children can be resilient, particularly if they have support and trusting adults,” Sanderson said. “For us, that’s really key, is having a place where children feel there are trusting adults, and that is what the schoolhouse should be.”
According to Vigil, the Nurturing Center provides grandparents with continued support, hosting a Grandparents Night, where kinship guardians can mingle and share their experiences. Efforts to help children and their guardians alike are being made. There is currently a piece of legislation, Senate Bill 31 in the New Mexico Senate, that aims to provide financial support to kinship guardians throughout the state.
Financial support is vital to this issue, not just since grandparents might already be living on fixed incomes, but because children are expensive, both because of supplies needed for their development and because of the activities they’re so often a part of. To Sanderson, it’s an injustice that the enrollment fee for athletic programs can be so costly, especially in light of the recent fee increase for little league participants in Taos.
However, the root of the problem, to Sanderson, lies in the lack of a comprehensive service for families dealing with incarceration of one or more members.
“The problem is that the court feels that their jurisdiction has nothing to do with the children; it has to do with the criminal,” Sanderson said. “The reality is we’re leaving all these children in the wake of the crime, and we’re not addressing that.”
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization geared toward criminal justice reform, most incarcerated parents grew up in “struggling households” and spent time in foster care, public housing or were homeless. Thirtytwo percent of them had an incarcerated parent at one point in their lives.
“We’re not just talking about a defendant,” Sanderson said. “We’re talking about a whole family because no defendant is without family. Every defendant has a mother and a father and, oftentimes, children of their own. We can’t keep looking at it as only the defendant; we have to look at it in terms of ‘what’s the whole family look like, and how do we support the whole family?’”