State officials defend decision to require license for adoption group

By BETH SLOVIC, Chronicle Staff Writer

Before Jan and Craig Druckenmiller resigned themselves to canceling this year's Summer Miracles visiting orphans program, they put up a fight that led all the way to the governor's office.

The Druckenmillers' program brings orphans from abroad to Bozeman for four- to six-week home stays with area families.

In May, Montana's Department of Public Health and Human Services told the Druckenmillers they were acting as adoption agents and their organization had to be licensed as a placement agency.

With only weeks to go before the children were due to arrive, the Druckenmillers turned to Gov. Brian Schweitzer's family policy advisor, Anna Whiting-Sorrell.

They were hoping the governor's intervention could keep their program on track, Whiting-Sorrell said. But there was nothing she could do beyond guiding the Druckenmillers through the license application process, she said.

"This governor wants every law followed," Whiting-Sorrell said.

Since 2002, 49 orphans from Kazakhstan, Russia and the Philippines have visited the area with the help of the Druckenmillers' nonprofit Sacred Portion Children's Outreach. Forty of those children were eventually adopted by their homestay families or friends of those families.

All of these adoptions were handled by licensed child-placement agencies, Jan Druckenmiller said.

This year, the children were scheduled to arrive in July. But both of the licensed agencies Sacred Portion had worked with in the past -- Catholic Social Services and Lutheran Social Services -- said they were unable to help this time.

A Catholic Charities representative then contacted Montana officials, asking whether Sacred Portion could run the program without a licensed agency's help.

That's when the state started looking into Summer Miracles and discovered that the program was in violation of Montana's adoption laws, even as it was working with licensed groups.

Sacred Portion had been acting as an adoption agency, because the Druckenmillers were making decisions about potential matches, Kimberly Kradolfer, legal counsel for DPHHS' Child and Family Services Division, said. Among other things, they were keeping lists of potential adoptive parents, an act prohibited by Montana law.

Kradolfer said she had no doubt the Druckenmillers were well-intentioned. "We don't have any suspicions," she said, adding that the Druckenmillers were once her landlords.

But it was clear that the Druckenmillers, rather than the licensed agencies, had been acting as the "placement agency," she wrote in an e-mail to Whiting-Sorrell. "It is very clear that they are attempting to establish contact between orphans and prospective adoptive families."

To protect the children and the adoptive parents, the only option was for Sacred Portion to be licensed.

But doing so may take some time, so the Druckenmillers have had to postpone this summer's program.

That's unfortunate, but there's no way around the law, Whiting-Sorrell said.

"We wanted to make the system work for them" Whiting-Sorrell said. "But we were obligated to follow the law."

Beth Slovic is at beth@dailychronicle.com

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