When Johnathan Schumm and his wife, Allison were arrested in Shawnee County, the storyline revolved around a pair of foster parents and a terrible crime that had occurred in their home.. A city council member was being charged with “torture or cruelly beating a person under 18 years old”, and it was instantly statewide news.
http://cjonline.com/news/2015-11-20/jonathan-schumm-topeka-city-councilman-appears-court-handcuffs-notes-childrens
The statement by a city official didn’t say when and where the warrants were served. On jail records, the Schumms list 2713 S.E. Michigan as their home address.
Jonathan Schumm, 34, was arrested in connection with one count each of aggravated battery and abuse of a child, and four counts of endangering a child, a jail official said.
The bond for Jonathan Schumm is $35,000 cash or surety bond, a jail official said. He was booked in at 6:57 p.m. Thursday.
At 7:04 p.m. Thursday, Allison Schumm, 32, was booked into jail in connection with the same offenses as her husband, a jail official said.
Allison Schumm’s bond is $20,000 cash or surety, the jail official said.
Today, though, the Kansas Health Institute went behind the scenes to blow the doors off a problem that wasn’t addressed in the original reporting. The Schumms, who had provided a home to 16 children through foster care services had undergone a court proceeding in 2014 to remove a young child from the only home she had ever known.. the couple who cared for that child? A married lesbian couple.
http://www.khi.org/news/article/topeka-child-abuse-case-prompts-new-questions-about-gay-adoptions#sthash.Dp1jJdM6.dpuf
The 2014 custody case pitted a lesbian couple from Wichita, Lisa and Tesa Hines, against Jonathan and Allison Schumm of Topeka for custody of the Hineses’ foster child, 10-month-old Isabella, who had been in their care since she was 5 days old.
Kari Schmidt, Lisa Hines’ attorney, said she was “heartbroken” when she learned the Schumms had been arrested.
Looking back, Schmidt said she was concerned about the Schumms’ ability to care for another child when the court approved their adoption of Isabella. At the time, the couple had 14 children — 10 adopted and four biological — in their 2,220-square-foot home, a number that disqualified them from acting as foster parents for the baby but not from adopting her. They now have 16 children.
Schmidt’s clients were both licensed social workers and were raising no other children.
Writers Andy Marso and Jim McClean deliver a sensational, almost tragically unbelievable story of a child torn from custody of parents and placed into a home that had already shown signs of stress.
http://www.khi.org/news/article/topeka-child-abuse-case-prompts-new-questions-about-gay-adoptions
State officials pushing for Isabella’s placement with the Schumms seemingly ignored some warning signs, including previous allegations of abuse.
Asked for comment, Theresa Freed, a spokesperson for DCF, said the agency is prohibited from talking about specific cases.
The child, who was originally in a home that had wanted to seek adoption but had been stymied by the refusal of recognition by Kansas provided not only a stable home, but two well trained financially stable providers. For the state of Kansas, though, that wasn’t enough.
While anecdotal data doesn’t always tell the whole story, for a child the anecdotal data is the life she will live from now on, and the life she was deprived from parents who loved her.
Meanwhile, in the state house, Kansas Senator Mary Pilcher-Cook continues to work on making sure that Gay & Lesbian couples are given less options to consider becoming foster parents.
The question before Kansas DCF seems to be at what point is that preference dangerous for the child?
UPDATE: this diary was accidentally published earlier long before it was finished as a “first draft”, unfortunately, I was out and about and didn’t realize this had been moved from the queue to published in time, and as a result many staging errors (incomplete sentences, etc.) existed which I had intended to address later. Having just come home (9:30PM CST) I’ll try to finish that out; my apologies for those errors; had I realized this diary would go live earlier rather than sit in a queue for me to fix..
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