Diane Baird labeled her method for assessing families the “Kempe Protocol” after the renowned University of Colorado institute where she worked for decades. The school has yet to publicly disavow i…
Diane Baird had spent four decades evaluating the relationships of poor families with their children. But last May, in a downtown Denver conference room, with lawyers surrounding her and a court reporter transcribing, she was the one under the microscope.
Who hired and was paying her in the case that she was being deposed about? The foster parents, she answered. They wanted to adopt, she said, and had heard about her from other foster parents. . As intervenors, they can file motions and call witnesses to argue that they’ve become too attached to a child for the child to be reunited with their birth family, even if officials have identified a biological family member who is suitable for a safe placement.
Baird is so consistent in this view that she sometimes copies and pastes from her own past evaluations.
Baird, despite not being a child psychologist, achieves credibility with these officials — and with judges — in part via the impressive label that she uses for her methodology: the Kempe Protocol.CU’s Kempe Center, widely considered the birthplace of the modern U.S. child welfare system, is where this all began.
Yet when attorneys for poor birth families wrote to Kempe in late 2022 saying that Baird and experts she has trained “are doing real damage to families, and they are doing damage in the name of the Kempe Center,” a CU lawyer responded by declining the advocates’ request that the center “publicly disavow this protocol and correct the record.
Still another staffer wrote that past cases of hers similar to the one we wrote about “continue to haunt me.” Drawing from the foster parents’ version of events, Baird routinely reports to the county or testifies in court that visits with the birth family have been detrimental to the child, and, accordingly, she recommends that the foster parents keep the child indefinitely or permanently, on the basis of attachment theory. She has called just this amount of evaluation “the Kempe Protocol” in several cases we reviewed.
In interviews and emails with ProPublica, Baird said that she is simply opposed, in almost all cases, to rupturing the current healthy attachment of any child under 3 with that child’s foster parents, even if a birth family member is available and family and cultural heritage stand to be lost forever.
“Kempe is such a weighty voice that no judge is going to be like, ‘Oh, Kempe is wrong,’” said Melissa Michaelis Thompson, executive director of the Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel, Colorado’s public defender agency for indigent birth parents. Thompson said that her attorneys around the state keep seeing versions of the Kempe Protocol being used in their cases.
Stephanie Riggs, the biological grandmother in the Huerfano County case — “huerfano,” ironically, means “orphan” in Spanish — had been doing everything she could to bring her granddaughter back from foster care. She was working nights to be able to travel to visit the baby girl during the day. She’d dug into her limited budget to get a crib, a dresser and baby clothes, bookshelves and baby books, and a play carpet and a toy box.
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