Countywide : Adoption Week Finds Local Youths in Need of Homes

If there is one thing Bonnie Reeder has learned, it’s that it helps to have youth on your side when you’re trying to find a new home.

Every year, the supervisor of Ventura County’s adoption services program and her staff place about 60 children of all ages in homes. But the ones wearing diapers are usually the first to get adopted.

“When you are searching for a home for a 9-year-old, it’s harder than finding one for a 2-year-old,” she said.

Sunday is the beginning of National Adoption Week.

Reeder estimates that 60% of all children up for adoption in her program are older than 4, and some are as old as 12. For those older children, the best chances of finding a permanent home are with temporary foster parents who might end up adopting them.

Still, Reeder said, very few teen-age children get adopted.

“Twelve is kind of the cutoff,” Reeder said.

“And that’s too bad, because they are the most precious and needy kids.”

The county is now working with 23 children.

Fourteen have been placed in foster homes and nine are on a foster home waiting list.

About half of those on the waiting list are between 6 and 10, and seven are from an ethnic minority group.

Nearly 80% of all children waiting to be adopted have been taken from their birth parents by the state court system because of abuse or neglect, Reeder said.

Many of these children came from homes where the parents used drugs or were convicted of crimes.

Although the prognosis for older children looks grim, Reeder said she thinks that fewer children will linger in foster homes as more families learn to adopt older children of different races.

Twenty or 30 years ago, large numbers of children went without homes.

Now, because of an increase in abortions and a trend toward single-parent families, fewer children are put up for adoption.

And Reeder said her agency has an above-average placement rate.

Parents who already have adopted are invited, along with their children, to a picnic at Crestview Park in Camarillo on Sunday in celebration of the national week.

For more information, call 654-3429.