Adoption 2002: One Size Doesn't Fit All

Adoption Isn't the Only Answer

Related Resources

• Adoption & Alternatives
• Adopting Parents Center
• Becoming a Foster Parent
• Foster Children Have Right to Sue for Speedy Adoption
• Parental Rights

Elsewhere on the Web

• Adoption 2002
• Adoption and Safe Families Act 1997
• "DSS Snatched Child Prodigy; Searching for Another 'Adoption Bonus'?"
• The Foster Care Conundrum
"Six years ago, Congress passed a law designed to help kids move quickly out of foster care. It created a deadline for parents: clean up your act or lose your parental rights so your children can be adopted by someone else. Some say the law has helped to speed up adoptions, but critics claim that it is creating a whole new class of orphans, orphans whose parents are still alive." - WBUR Boston & National Public Radio

It wasn't a bad idea. As a matter of fact, it was basically a great idea. The goal of Adoption 2002, a program instituted under the Clinton administration and based on provisions of the Adoption & Safe Families Act of 1997, was to reduce barriers to adoption and to double the number of adoptions of children in foster care, from the 1996 number (27,000) to 54,000 in 2002.

Children are spending far too long in foster care following termination of their parents' parental rights before being adopted - the 2000 median being 14 months.
(Source: AFCARS Interim FY 2000 Report, August 2002)

BUT...

The program rewarded only adoptive placements with a bonus (or, as others have called it, a bounty) for each adoption over a baseline number, and no bonus for other types of placements (kinship care, guardianship, etc.) that could be equally if not more suited to the child and his/her family, thereby creating an incentive for states to push for adoption - perhaps even in cases where it might not have been best?

The Adoption 2002 initiative offered a "bonus of $4000 per adoption and $6000 per adoption of a child with special needs over the established baseline."
(Source: Follow the Money:The Financial Aspects of Adoption)

A basic premise of the program was that "adoption is generally considered the optimal form of permanence when the biological parents are unable to provide a safe, stable, and nurturing home."
(Source: Adoption 2002, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
The program didn't require a focus on children who had been waiting in the system the longest following termination of their parents' parental rights.
The program required no accountability for the stability of these adoptive placements. Are there any numbers that show how many of these adoptions dissolved, and how those numbers compare with adoptions from years not included in the bonus program?

Over the course of the program, a total of $82.7 million has been paid out:

Fiscal Year 1998 Bonuses - $20 million
Fiscal Year 1999 Bonuses - $19.3 million
Fiscal Year 2000 Bonuses - $11 million
Fiscal Year 2001 Bonuses - $17.5 million
Fiscal Year 2002 Bonuses - $14.9 million

In "Follow the Money" (see above for link), Madelyn Freundlich of Children's Rights, Inc. noted the following:

How States are Using Adoptive Incentive Payments
Post-adoption services
Recruitment of adoptive families
Legal services to expedite adoption
Contract enhancements for a range of adoption-related services
Training for adoption staff and mental health providers
Adoption awareness activities
Subsidy increases

Notably absent from this list is the hiring of additional staff for our notoriously overburdened and understaffed foster care system - often cited as the reason for a series of serious problems such as abused or killed foster children, "lost" children, inadequate follow-up, and poorly prepared paperwork.

To be fair, Adoption 2002 met its goals in terms of numbers, but as long as money needs to be doled out as a reward to states for timely and appropriate family solutions for our children in foster care, the goal of removing obstacles - to adoption or other placement alternatives - has not been met.

Reducing the time children spend in foster care is universally supported, without question. Going forward, as legislators consider this and other initiatives, this writer hopes we can learn from past oversights so that future programs will give equal weight to all permanency options and require accountability so that our children's lives become as stable, healthy, and loving as possible. One size (adoption) doesn't fit all.

More:
For a complete breakdown of individual state numbers, see the Fostering Results report from the Children and Family Research Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (in .pdf format).

Comments

This writer clearly doesn't understand the ramifications of "other options" for the lives of children in care. To suggest that they be treated equally with adoption is to suggest a horribly cruel situation, one in which our family finds itself now.

The state of Virginia is one of only five renegade states that doesn't list adoption as the second permanency goal (after return home). Forty-five states, three territories and the DC all comply with federal laws by bringing adoption in as the next goal after return to a parent.

This situation is a nightmare for children as local DSS agencies seek to kick kids out of the federally established and funded foster-to-adopt programs and dump children and their non-TPR'd parents on helpless relatives who've been "guilted" into taking on financial and legal burdens they can't begin to be equipped to handle even if they are "well to do."

The local agency we are working with insists that, because we are related to our foster child, they will not pursue termination of the parents' rights to free the child for adoption. Although I am licensed, they deliberately refuse to recognize her placement as in a foster home. They insist we just accept simple legal custody, shut up and go away or send her back into the system--to be adopted by strangers!!!

If we took legal custody, it would leave our "daughter" with no real permanency, no family she can legally call her own, no legal protection from the continued legal actions of her parents seeking return of custody, visitation etc., and us no resources financial or legal to protect her with. She would become ineligible for continued medical and mental health coverage, ineligible for her federally funded subsidy, etc., and we would be ineligible for family services to help our other children make the transition. This child is "special needs"--a 6 y.o. FAS case with an almost 20% chance of developing severe mental illness given her genetics. They don't care. They simply want to dump her out of the system with nothing.

Virginia has no kinship care program, no guardianship status let alone subsidized guardianship, not even formal permanent legal custody. Yes, all of this is in direct violation of federal policy and code BUT THE STATE OF VIRGINIA DOESN'T CARE AND CAN'T BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE LEGALLY.

Other options are NOT equal to adoption in desirability in any way, especially for children under the age of 12. To suggest other options should be treated equally is absurd and would codify deliberate cruelty. This is a life-and-death battle, literally, for the lives of kids who are at enormous risk. At the least, they need a real family, real permanency and commitment and guaranteed medical and mental health coverage. Except perhaps for the older teen, "other types of placements" that fall short of adoption and deny children the services and benefits they need are second-rate loopholes used by states to save money and should be treated as such under the law.

Posted by: Hadley at 01/03/2006 08:03 AM

View all comments (1)

Add Your Comments!

We want to know what you think. Your comments are important to us and the other readers. You are what makes this site special.