VICTORIA MARTINEZ
News Editor

Evander Daniels died in an Aberdeen foster home on June 8, the 13th child this year to die in the care of the province.

In most years, 15 to 20 children die in care in a full year. Social Services Minister Donna Harpauer claims that many of the deaths of the past six months were due to preexisting conditions. The nature of these conditions cannot be released in order to maintain protect the privacy of those children.

Daniels’s death is not included in those numbers. An autopsy by the province’s chief coroner revealed that the 22-month-old child drowned in the bathtub with scald-type burns on “all of his body but the diaper area” a media release from the Sturgeon Lake First Nation revealed. The cause of the burns and their connection to the death has not been determined.

The child was in the care of a home in the Sturgeon Lake First Nation, on a farm near Aberdeen. He was scheduled to be placed in the care of a biological aunt in Prince Albert. This is the second death of a foster child in Sturgeon Lake this year. The other child, Daniels’s cousin Anthony, broke his leg while unsupervised shortly before his death.

Saskatchewan children’s advocate Marvin Bernstein announced that the advocacy office will hold an independent investigation Jan. 1, 2011 on the Sturgeon Lake deaths. Until then, the office will be collecting reports from Social Services, the police, and coroners in preparation. Saskatoon RCMP estimate it will take six to eight months for an investigation to be completed.

Daniels’s foster home supported four other foster children, as well as one biological child. The foster children have been removed from the home, but the couple’s biological child remains with them. No more than four children should be in a single foster home.

Foster care in Saskatchewan has been in critical condition for some time, with overcrowding in foster homes rampant throughout the province. According to Bernstein’s 2009 report on overcrowding, 259 of 1,067 foster children in the Saskatoon area lived in homes with more than four other children.

Since that report, Social Services has managed to reduce the number of overcrowded homes, though the situation is still in need of improvement.

“Many of the broader findings and recommendations addressed everything from a fundamental lack of financial and human resources in the child welfare system, to a call for the Ministry of Social Services and Government of Saskatchewan to make children and youth a priority,” said Bernstein in a media release this year.

The Sturgeon Lake cases are not isolated as possible cases of abuse. There is a 20-year history of allegations of abuse, with no evidence of Social Services intervention in the foster care. The systemic changes suggested by the advocacy underline just how serious the foster care problem is in Saskatchewan. This year, Social Services has indeed initiated what Bernstein calls a “comprehensive restructuring.”

The problem for First Nations groups is especially striking. In the Child Advocacy’s 2009 report, four cases of foster care deaths were investigated in depth. These were two accidental, one non-accidental and one suicide death. Of these four cases, three of the children were male and three were First Nations.

Restructuring becomes especially important as the number of children in care of the province continues to rise and resources are spread thin. The rampant overcrowding in homes is evidence of core problems in foster care.

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image: Flickr