Foster care system faces new troubles

CLEVELAND (AP) -- A feather duster in tiny hand, 10-year-old Curtis Schultz paused from helping his family pack to answer a reporter's question.
"Are you happy to be moving?"
At first, the developmentally disabled boy explained with the help of his mother, he was sad to be leaving the only home he's known since being placed in foster care as an infant.
Then he remembered the bigger back yard, the trampoline and all the rooms in the new home that he and seven siblings -- all adopted out of foster care -- will soon share.
Two big brown eyes began to sparkle, and a wide, contagious smile spread across his face. "Happy," Curtis said before dashing upstairs.
Curtis' happiness is what backers of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act envisioned when they passed it in 1997. Congress, led by Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio, passed the law as a way to rescue orphans who were lingering in the nation's foster care system.
Foster adoptions increased 64 percent nationwide, from 31,030 the year the law passed to 51,000 last year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They're up 43.5 percent in Ohio, where 15,746 children have new parents.
"No child should linger in the foster care system, because the government does not make a good parent. Children need permanency," DeWine said.
But for all the successes, there are challenges: Some states are complaining about not getting enough federal funding after receiving $160 million in adoption bonuses in the first five years.
Solution or diversion?
The program has sparked increasingly loud debate about whether government is too focused on money for adoptions -- critics call the incentives "bounties" -- and whether lawmakers are ignoring many of the problems that lead children to foster care: poverty, addiction and lack of affordable child care.
And unintended consequences haunt social workers: More strain on already overworked counties to find foster and adoptive families, and fears that government is taking some children from their birth parents too quickly.
"There's kind of the perfect storm," said Shay Bilchik, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Child Welfare League of America, whose members include public and private agencies. He believes the adoption law has the right goal but that lawmakers have put too little new money into improving the entire foster care system with things such as abuse prevention.
"There really wasn't this new era of federal-state partnership, of 'OK, we've got an ambitious goal here to make sure these kids do not wallow in the system. Let's invest, let's figure out what the state-federal share is here,'" Bilchik said. "I think that caused a big struggle."
DeWine said the law has done many good things, including an increase in adoptions, and a focus on permanency will pay off in the future.
"Children who age out of the foster care system face an uncertain future with too many of them ending up homeless or unemployed or incarcerated or physically or mentally ill," he said.
Funding changes
Until 2003, states that exceeded their previous year's foster adoption numbers received $4,000 for each additional adoption -- $6,000 for each special needs adoption. Ohio used its $4.9 million during that time mainly for incentives paid to adoptive parents and child welfare programs.
Since 2003, when Congress made it harder for states to get incentives by focusing on the more difficult adoptions of older and special needs children, states have received a total of just under $33 million, according to data from Health and Human Services. That's a 79 percent drop, and now some states are making ends meet by diverting welfare funds to foster care programs.
Ohio received $376,000 in 2004 and no bonus money last year, said Tom Roelant, assistant deputy director at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services' Office for Children and Families.
The state, like many others, has been using federal welfare funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to maintain adoption programs, including incentives for parents, by sending money to the counties, which run foster care at the local level.
But the welfare money is a budget stopgap.
"There's no question that counties would feel the strain if this money were to go away," Roelant said.
DeWine said states should never have depended on the adoption bonus and the problem is being reviewed. If necessary, changes can be made when the adoption law is up for reauthorization in 2008, he said.
"The whole point of the adoption incentives program was to induce states to increase the number of children adopted out of foster care, so the incentives weren't intended to supplant state funding, rather they were a reward for a job well done," DeWine said.
Jumping the gun
Critics such as Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, say using welfare-to-work money to pay for bonuses for foster care fails to address many of the problems that lead to children being neglected.
No one argues with removing youngsters from truly abusive situations, Wexler says, but he believes some children are removed too quickly from their birth parents, whose economic and social circumstances makes life especially challenging -- the single mother who can't afford day care and ends up with an irresponsible baby sitter, for example.
Paying states to find adoptive parents for foster kids has created what he calls "a child welfare system that has become the ultimate middle-class entitlement: Step right up and take a poor person's child for your very own."
He points to Kentucky, where the inspector general is investigating the process of terminating parental rights in the wake of allegations from some social workers and others that the Cabinet for Health and Family Services sometimes wrongly terminates those rights in an attempt to meet the federal mandate for placing more foster children in adoptive homes.
The investigation is ongoing, and the state had no comment on the status. When the probe was launched in May, Inspector General Robert Benvenuti III said he would pass any evidence of crimes on to prosecutors.
The cabinet also at that time started a Web site where social workers could anonymously report cases where they were uncomfortable with foster adoption decisions. Top administrators then review the cases.
Tom Emberton Jr., head of the cabinet's Department for Community Based Services, told The Associated Press the focus remains on finding safe, permanent homes for the state's 1,200 orphans. Officials first try to reunify the children with their parents or other family, but sometimes that is not possible, he said.
Emberton said the nation's child welfare system "is woefully underfunded, which leads to lack of resources to prevent child abuse and neglect," but the adoption law has helped Kentucky find adoptive homes for children who were considered unadoptable.
"Many children who once would have remained in foster care until their 18th birthday found 'forever families,'" Emberton said.