TURNERS FALLS — Grandparents raising their grandchildren were advised about the importance of understanding the legal system and commended for their dedication during an event held by The United Arc on Thursday.

The advocacy organization’s Grandparent and Kinship Care Resource Center offers twice-monthly meetings, home visits and check-in calls for Franklin County grandparents who are raising their grandchildren, and there are plans to hold regular events to discuss relevant topics.

Alexandra Flanders, who recently became a Franklin Probate and Family Court judge, told the grandparents in attendance that their dedication does not go unnoticed.

“The court is aware of all the work grandparents do and is so grateful to all of you for stepping up,” she said.

Flanders explained that the terms “guardianship” and “adoption” are often used interchangeably, though there are significant differences. Guardianship, she said, is a temporary legal authority over an individual, while adoption is permanent and means parents can no longer file a court action to regain custody. Guardians also cannot authorize extraordinary medical procedures or antipsychotic medication without specific court authorization. All this ends when the young person turns 18, she mentioned.

Flanders also noted that biological or adoptive parents have a constitutional right to parent their children, while grandparents do not.

“For a child with disabilities, it’s a little bit more of a complicated picture,” she said. “If the child themselves will not be able to make decisions for themselves once they hit 18, that’s a whole separate process for regaining guardianship. You’ve got to do another [court] petition in order to get guardianship of an adult.”

In the event that a guardian grandparent dies, Flanders said, the adults who previously had custody of the children typically regain custody “if there were no other arrangement made.”

“There are ways in which a parent or … a grandparent can designate someone in their will,” she added.

Flanders was joined at The United Arc on Thursday by speakers Sabrina Feliciano, with the U.S. Social Security Administration; Jo Ann Onduso, a licensed social worker with the Community Action Family Center; Matthew Sheridan, vice president of Greenfield Savings Bank; and Hidy Goguen-Osorio, a branch manager with the bank.

Feliciano stressed that obtaining a Social Security card “is so very important” for a variety of purposes, such as opening bank accounts, filing taxes, registering savings bonds and getting medical benefits. Obtaining a Social Security card for a child requires the adoption decree, guardianship documents, an amended birth certificate and a way to identity the child.

“From what I’ve seen, the easiest [identification] to obtain is a medical record or a school record,” she explained. “Either one of those documents would have to have the name and date of birth of the child. If it’s a medical record it would have to have a medical record number and if it’s a school record it would have to have the school ID on it.”

Information from the U.S. Census Bureau a few years ago reported there were 2½ million grandparents raising their grandchildren, and this figure had increased by 30% over the past decade. Research shows that a variety of factors — including addiction, serious mental and behavioral illness, financial insecurity, incarceration and death — contribute to the creation of grandparent and kinship families.

Addressing the grandparents caring for their grandchildren, Onduso, the social worker at Thursday’s event, said trauma can result from abuse, neglect, the effects of poverty, being separated from loved ones, bullying, witnessing harm to a loved one or pet, natural disasters and unpredictable behavior due to addiction or mental illness.

“And what we know is that you are not in this room because everything was going fine with your child … and so you are also experiencing your own trauma,” she said.

For more information about meeting times and resources for grandparents raising grandchildren, call The United Arc at 413-774-5558.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com.