Adoption Takes a Private Turn in Kansas

An album of old photographs and a woolly, white bear named Snowball are the closest things Kristina has had to a family for the last five years.

Most of the photos are of her mother, who gave her the bear five years ago, right before she disappeared. There’s also a picture of her 14-year-old brother, who has been adopted. They have no contact.

Having lived with 10 foster families already, Kristina no longer bothers to unpack the stuffed toy. At age 11, she knows she is running out of time.

“I only have so many more years to grow up with a family,” she said.

Worried about children like Kristina, who spend years bouncing from foster home to foster home, Kansas’ Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services decided to let someone else try to place its children.

On Oct. 1, Kansas turned 799 children waiting for families over to Lutheran Social Service, becoming the first state in the nation to hire a private organization to handle all state adoptions. The state also recently privatized foster care and services designed to keep troubled families together.

Lutheran Social Service has 13 subcontracts with nonprofit agencies that form a statewide network dedicated to matching children and permanent homes. The organization had helped Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services workers with certain adoptions before October, but now it has full responsibility.

Six months after the program began, adoption officials from 12 other states traveled to Lawrence to learn about it at a Family Builders Network conference.

Bernice Karstensen, executive director of the Lutheran agency, said the program is doing well but is constantly adapting. It has recruited hundreds of new families through promotions, but it still needs more black families and families willing to adopt teenagers.

The program is struggling to place the children it inherited from the state system, but adoption officials believe the new system is becoming faster, more efficient and easier on children because workers can focus on one goal: finding permanent homes.

That’s not easy, considering almost all of the children have physical, emotional, mental or learning problems. Many have been abused.

The state pays the Lutheran agency $13,556 for every child with no prospects, distributing 50% at referral, 25% when the child is placed with a family and 25% when the adoption is legalized.

The agency is expected to meet five goals:

* Place 70% of all children within 180 days of referral for adoption.

* Finalize 90% of adoptive placements within a year.

* Have 90% of all families report satisfaction with the adoption process.

* Place 65% of each sibling group with the same adoptive family.

* Make sure that 90% of children move to foster families no more than twice as they await adoption.

In the first six months, 45% of all children wereplaced with an adoptive family and 59% with their siblings. Only two children have experienced more than two moves. Although that doesn’t meet the specified outcomes, Karstensen believes they will be met soon.

The private agencies make monthly reports to the state. If Kansas isn’t happy, it can refuse to renew Lutheran Social Service’s contract.

Sandy Moshier, an agency social worker, teaches a 10-week class to prospective adoptive parents. She is open and honest with them from the start: For a young child with mild health and mental problems, she tells them, the waiting list is long.

Her job is finding people who can adopt entire sibling groups. She teaches prospective parents how to help children deal with being taken away from their natural parents and how to cope with a child’s anger and pain. She tells them they must realize the children’s birth parents are not bad people, they just have made bad choices.

She recently told a new class of 26 eager prospective parents--12 couples and two single women--that she is looking for families for special-needs children.

“We are not looking for children to fill your homes,” she said.

Moshier and her husband have six children--three birth children and three children adopted through the state agency. . They also have been foster parents to about 20 children.

An employee of the state agency who transferred to Lutheran Social Service, Moshier believes that state workers did all they could to find children homes, but they got bogged down in foster care and family preservation.

“Basically, adoption got put on the bottom of the pile,” she said.

Because the Lutheran agency works with churches, news organizations and other adoption providers--and because it begins looking for a home for a child as soon as the rights of one parent are terminated--Moshier says it will eventually find permanent homes faster.

“I guess, in all honesty, I don’t know that it’s happening more rapidly at this point, but I certainly see the potential,” she said.

The Lutheran agency and its subcontractors have added a computer database that matches children with potential families, a media campaign that features children in newspapers and on radio and television stations statewide, and access to available kids’ biographies through the Internet.

“Frankly, there were some [state agency] workers who labeled children as unadoptable,” Moshier said. “Lutheran Social Service believes every child has a right to a family, and I believe there are families out there if we can make the right connections.”

Kristina is skeptical. After several years of working with state social workers, she says the Lutheran agency’s employees seem too rushed.

And she’s lived through several disappointments. In the last five years, she has had several adoptions fall through, including one by her last foster family.

“It seems like I’m just passed on from home to home,” she said.

For information about adopting a child through Lutheran Social Service, call 800-210-5387. Website address:

https://skyways.lib.ks.us/kansas/kfk/