Preference to relative caregivers for a child in foster care
Applied in 11 court decisions — leading case Ellis v. Arkansas Department of Human Services (2016)
Most recently applied in Dakota Carlile v. Arkansas Department of Human Services and Minor Child (October 2025)
Acts 2011, No. 591, § 1.
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
In all custodial placements by the Department of Human Services in foster care or adoption, preferential consideration shall be given to an adult relative over a nonrelated caregiver, if:
(1) The relative caregiver meets all relevant child protection standards; and
(2) It is in the best interest of the child to be placed with the relative caregiver.
Current official text: Arkansas General Assembly. Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Arkansas statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.