Foster Child Adoptions

We are a nonprofit foster care and adoption agency helping abused children, with over 90 years of experience serving Southern California. We also have one of the largest child abuse prevention programs in the country. Your July 13 article, “Orange County to Speed Foster Child Adoptions,” went to the heart of our mission. The emerging adoption strategy is the aggressive effort needed to help children who have been let down by their families.

The new California legislation giving courts and other public agencies the right to deny or limit family reunification is built on common sense from the child’s vantage point. Reunification can now be denied if birth parents cause the death of one of their other children, abandon a child in a life-threatening situation, have had other children permanently removed from them, or are chronic substance abusers and fail to seek treatment. By freeing these children earlier, it increases the likelihood of adoption and provides hope.

There remain three challenges: 1) How can we get families to adopt these children? 2) How do we create a nurturing, stable, cost-effective means to raise children for whom we cannot find homes? 3) Most importantly, can we launch an effective strategy to prevent child abuse, so that we can keep thousands of children from falling into an uncertain adoption or institutional lottery?

ALEX MORALES, Exec. Dir.

Children’s Bureau of Southern

California, Los Angeles

It was with extreme dismay that I read about Orange County’s cutting from one year to six months the time that it spends trying to reunite parents with children who have been placed in foster care.

Five years ago, I was accused of child abuse and my son was taken away. It took the courts nine months to find me innocent and return my child. If the new time limit had been in place then, my son could now be in the care of strangers instead of living with his daddy. The system is drastically in need of a fix. This isn’t it.

MICHAEL DARE

Hollywood