Andrea Sanders is the Commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services. She grew up in Brandon as one of four kids in her family. She was adopted at birth into her family through Canopy Children’s Services along with her older brother. She attended Ole Miss and Millsaps before continuing her education at Tulane completing a masters degree in social work. She worked for about ten years in mental health services for children and adolescents, as well as hospital administration in psychiatric hospitals.
In 2005, she got her law degree and worked for 10 years in McComb for two circuit judges before moving into private practice. She then moved to Jackson becoming a lawyer at the Department of Human Services working primarily with the early subsidized child care program. There, she was part of a group of employees that noticed irregularities and ended up turning in evidence to the governor. The governor then asked her to take this position as commissioner in November of 2020.
What does your role of commissioner look like day to day?
I’ve had a lot of learning to do because running a state agency is not necessarily intuitive. It has a healthy variety of keeping up with a budget; understanding how federal funding works; and working with policymakers, legislators, the governor’s office, and other agencies that provide services to families and children. We’ve been building a lot of foundations of an agency as this is basically a new agency that has been carved out of another agency out of the Department of Human Services. We’ve been getting a lot of the foundation in place that every agency needs, and we are really focusing right now on building a stable workforce.
Our role is to investigate when there’s an allegation of abuse or neglect in someone’s home, and then we have to gather evidence there and share it with the court for a decision to be made about whether to remove a child or not. That’s a terrible decision to make. It causes trauma to every child who’s removed from their home. So, you have to weigh the odds: Is the child at more risk by staying in their home or are they going to suffer more trauma? We have to decide which outweighs the other. Without a stable workforce that is temperamentally fit for the work, it is difficult. This work is really not something for everyone. It’s really a special calling, but they also need to be educationally prepared and compensated well to do the work.
Our focus now has really been on recruiting intentionally, trying to improve retention of employees, and really supporting and resourcing them to do the work that they’re asked to do, which also involves different defining their roles within the court system. I work very closely with the court system across the state — individual judges and the administrative office of courts — as well as advocating for our staff and the families that we serve.
We’ve recently been able to increase salaries to close to what we consider market rate for the southeast, and that’s going to be a big game changer. We’re in the process of implementing that, and that’s a restructure basically for the entire agency. So, it’s taking a little time to process that change for everyone, but that’s exciting news we’ve recently gotten.
November recently became Adoption Awareness Month – why is this important?
Adoption is one form of permanency for children. When children do have to be removed from their home, it creates its own trauma. So, getting them into a permanent situation as efficiently as possible is really what is best for the child and best for the state. That might mean back to their own biological family, if that can be done safely, or to relatives or community members so they can stay in their own school district. When those avenues don’t work, we want to get the pathway to be as streamlined as possible to get that child into a permanent family based setting. Adoption is one of those ways that we do that.
Raising awareness about it is really important because the longer children are staying in state custody, it is not a good substitute for family. Adoption is a way of providing them the best opportunity to succeed in life. We like to raise awareness because we need for people to recognize these kids have been through a lot, and they need to be embraced by their communities, their school systems, and churches. Families who adopt children really sacrifice a lot, and so they need a lot of support.
We also need families who are willing to take children. Primarily, we have a shortage of families for older children and teens. It breaks my heart because they’re old enough and cognizant and aware that, not only were they unable to get back to their home family, they’re still not really wanted by anyone. We’ve partnered with Wendy’s Wonderful Kids and the Dave Thomas Foundation this past year, and we’re using the structure that they developed to identify people that are close to that child. So, if you take a 13-year-old child and start looking closely at where they had connections to people in their past, such as distant relatives or maybe a coach or a teacher that was special to them, then they start really working to find that connected person and develop a web of people who might really be interested in adopting that child instead of a random search for who wants a 13-year-old boy. It is intentionally looking for those people who already have a reason to be connected to that child. That program is relatively new, but it’s had a lot of success in other states. We’re very excited to bring that approach to Mississippi.
How will your agency be raising awareness throughout this month?
We have done a lot of social media and getting information out to the public, but we are also holding three different adoption gatherings for families who’ve adopted children in Mississippi over the last year and are forever. We want adoptive families to bring their children with them — biological or adoptive. We’ve gotten a proclamation from the governor’s office, and we’ll read that at each of the celebrations. The first one was this past weekend on the coast. The second celebration is on Saturday, November 12. It’s in Jackson at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. The third one is in Tupelo on November 19 at Ballard Park. These are for children who’ve been adopted successfully. We have really launched what we call a Commitment to Permanency. We’re calling it Paving a Pathway to Permanency. As an agency and with our community partners, we are going to double down on navigating ways we can work with the systems for our over 1,000 children who have a permanency plan of adoption in Mississippi. The court system being the primary system, as well as prosecutors and parent representatives, to start clearing a path to permanency for children through the legal system.
Our kickoff for that campaign is Home for the Holidays. We are intentionally looking at about 246 children who are legally free for adoption and living with their family that wants to adopt them. So, our pitch between now and the end of January is to get these children through the court system and into their permanent home. We’re working with lawyers across the state that have agreed to do the work. Pro bono, large firms have signed up and said that they will provide attorneys pro bono, and we are also increasing the fees that we can pay when we don’t have enough private or pro bono attorneys. Additionally, we have communicated with numerous judges — Chief Justice Mike Randolph has been extremely supportive and is working with us to make sure that we have ample docket space. He’s prepared to bring in or appoint special judges if needed but, quite honestly, we’ve had so many judges step up and say they want to help that I wonder if we will actually need those special judges at least in this first phase of the campaign.
What is the Adoption Excellence Award your agency recently received?
The Children’s Bureau is the oversight Federal Agency for Child Welfare Services, and it’s a subsidiary of the greater Health and Human Services Agency for Federal Health and Human Services. They give out 10 awards each year for excellence and adoption services. They look at data and metrics, they take nominations, and they review applications. Our adoption department won one of those awards this year and the director, Marcus Davenport, will be traveling to DC with a couple of employees to accept that award on November 14th.
What did it mean to your adoption department to win this award?
This is kind of thankless work sometimes, and we don’t get a lot of happy, feel good moments. What we’re doing is hard work in people’s family settings and it’s rewarding, but it’s not always rewarded. So, this award is coming at a really good time when we’re trying to focus on moving children to permanency. I’ve really increased expectations in the agency, and I push really hard. I expect excellence. I’ve also gone to bat and really tried to raise salaries and tried to improve the culture in the agency, but getting this kind of external recognition just means a lot to all the staff. It is a public and national recognition of the work that they do.
How can people get involved to help with your mission always, but especially throughout this month?
Particularly lawyers can help us, but we are always looking for good families to foster children. When a child comes through our agency for adoption, the path they have to go through to be adopted is through fostering because we are working with children who have, by definition, suffered some sort of neglect or abuse by their custodian. So, the path to adoption is a little bit different. We have to have a lot of safeguards to make sure that they go into a better situation than they came from. So, for families to foster, there’s a six month minimum requirement that they foster and then, depending on where the case is in the court system, they’re eligible to adopt or can become eligible to adopt. We need good families, but we also need churches and church communities who want to support families who want to foster. Fostering is one of the most difficult jobs I can think of. We’re asking people to love children like they’re their own temporarily. Ideally 75 to 80 percent of our kids can go back to their current families if we provide the right support or alleviate a temporary situation. Many of our removals are often for neglect and a lack of having certain basic things in the home, which can range from just not having food or electricity. Ideally, the thing to do is to try to help that family get what they need, get back on their feet and parent their children. But if they can’t, adoption is the other alternative and supporting those families. There’s a big need in the state for families to step in and foster or adopt. People just need to contact our office if they are interested in fostering or adopting. Visit our website at https://www.mdcps.ms.gov.
