Streamlining adoption best for kids and new families

Older children seeking adoptive homes -- especially those who have been bounced around the foster-care system -- deserve to have a loving family to call their own. But too often, court delays hamper the efforts to place children in permanent adoptive homes. The Expedited Adoption Committee, a project of the National Center for State Courts, is working to change court rules around the country so that adoption cases are given the highest priority on court dockets. No child should be kept from a waiting family because of a sluggish appeals court.
Wrong direction: But that's exactly what happened as courts have bent over backwards to unify biological families, even if that meant returning children to the homes in which they had suffered abuse or neglect. Originally, adoption law called for "reasonable" efforts to keep biological families intact, but too many agencies and courts perceived that goal instead as demanding all possible efforts for unification, even when such unification was clearly not in the best interests of the child.
The horror stories are legion. Children found themselves moved back and forth from family homes rife with violence and substance abuse to foster homes and back again, with no movement toward alternative permanent placement. Children were reaching adulthood still in the foster care system with no sense of family, with low self-esteem and with no direction for the future.
Too long: In a meeting with The Vindicator editorial board, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton, who was recently appointed chair of the Expedited Adoption Committee, said that one of the biggest problems was the amount of time it took appeals of adoptions or termination of parental rights cases to get through the appellate process. One local case was unresolved after four years. Four years may not be long for some lawsuits, but that's almost forever in the life of a child.
The Ohio Supreme Court has established new rules to shorten the time for adoption case appeals. All that is needed is for judges to obey the rules.