Foster-Care Reforms Aid Adoption

The nation’s troubled foster care system is in the midst of a striking transformation that has driven up the number of foster children adopted in virtually every state, in many cases rising by 50% or more in less than two years.

Adoptions of foster children last year were roughly 40% higher than in 1995, increasing to more than 36,000, according to figures collected by the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC), an advocacy group based in St. Paul, Minn., and reviewed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

The rapid increase is the result of recent federal and state efforts to revamp a system that has trapped tens of thousands of children in foster care, often shuffling them between homes and institutions for years.

Those efforts represent a fundamental shift away from doing everything possible to return abused and neglected children to their birth parents and instead finding them a permanent, safe home.

That has led states to retrain social workers, follow strict timetables, hire more family court judges and push harder to find adoptive families.

Possible Side Effects

The results have been dramatic: In Illinois, adoptions in fiscal 1998 were double the average of the three previous years; the increase was 76% in Texas and 57% in Florida.

“For the first time, states are focusing on really putting their attention on permanent placement for kids,” said Michael Kharfen, spokesman for HHS. “This is the first real increase in kids being adopted out of the foster care system in the entire history of the program.”

Experts caution, however, that the pressure for increased adoptions may lead to more cases of ill-prepared families taking on emotionally troubled children.

Agencies historically have had a harder time placing minority children and those who are older or disabled.

The new survey did not collect information about the age and race of the children, but state officials and experts say the recent surge in numbers reflects adoptions of the children easiest to place, and it is likely to take much longer to find homes for those who remain in foster care.

The federal foster care program was created in 1980 to help states deal with abused and neglected children, and the system has grown to about 500,000 children. States began efforts several years ago to move children through that system faster, and a federal law with the same goal was enacted in 1997. Among other things, the federal law promised to pay states $4,000 to $6,000 for every child adopted over a baseline.

That created a substantial financial incentive--one that could amount to more than $9 million this year for Illinois, for example. But adoptions have increased so rapidly that the $20 million in that bonus pool appears insufficient, and the government may be forced to pay less than it promised, Kharfen said.

The intense focus on finding a permanent home for children also may have other unintended consequences, child advocates warn.

Karabelle Pizzigati, director of public policy at the Child Welfare League of America, said she feared caseworkers may err on the side of taking children from birth parents. In many states, she said, inadequate treatment services could make it difficult for drug-abusing parents to get help in time to keep their children.

Also, caseworkers may be pressuring foster families to adopt before they are ready or placing children with inappropriate families, she warned. In the past some families complained that they were not told the extent of the abuse their adoptive children had endured. When that history of abuse led to serious behavior problems in adolescents, some of the adoptive families said they were not able to cope with the children.

“The message to [caseworkers] is: ‘You’ve got to place these kids,’ ” Pizzigati said. But having young, often inexperienced caseworkers face shorter deadlines “is not a good mix for considering fully and deliberately all the options . . .,” she added.

A Sense of Urgency

But advocates are pleased that many more children who had been stuck in foster care are being adopted.

Illinois slashed the number of families each caseworker was assigned, added courtrooms dedicated to hearing these cases, began disciplining caseworkers who failed to show up at the hearings and offered financial incentives to the agencies handling adoptions to move children out of the system.

In Texas, 1997 legislation gave caseworkers just 12 months from the time they took custody of children to secure court orders determining whether the children would be returned home or placed for adoption. “You have to create a sense of urgency,” said Patsy Buida, adoption policy specialist in the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services. “Six months is nothing to an adult, but it’s an eternity to a child.”

In El Paso County, the average wait from the time children were legally freed for adoption until they were adopted dropped from 56 months in 1995 to seven months in 1997. Children’s Court Judge Patricia Macias said “it has shrunk to almost nothing” because the children are placed with potentially adoptive families as soon as they are removed from their homes, even if they may eventually return to their birth parents.

In Texas and much of the country, roughly two-thirds of the adoptions are by foster families with whom the children are already living. In many cases, officials said, the foster families simply hadn’t been encouraged to adopt in the past.

Richard Richardson, president of Children’s Services of Roxbury, a Boston social service agency, said he was given a quota--the number of children the state expected his agency to place for adoption. His quota was 23, double the number his agency usually would place for adoption. The agency didn’t give up on reunifying children with their birth families, but in many cases, he said, “you could go on talking about reunification forever and it’s not realistic.”

Joe Kroll, executive director of NACAC, said the steep rise in adoptions heightens the need for states to help newly created families with counseling, Medicaid for the children and other services.