This post is written by the Stability, Permanency, and Adoption MSW Intern, Andrea Brubaker.
This past September, Senator Dave Camp (R-MI) introduced the Promoting Adoption and Legal Guardianship for Children in Foster Care Act. The bill would certify the continued funding for the Adoption Incentives program, prioritize increasing adoption rates, and create a legal guardianship category within the eligibility requirements. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) introduced a discussion draft of the Strengthening and Finding Families for Children Act. The draft presents similar alterations but would distribute funds slightly differently.
In bringing these pieces of legislation under the microscope we can track some of the progress in the incentives programs over time, giving us a better understanding of the shifts in priorities and how past legislation has been interpreted. This information would be helpful in assessing the impact and reality of the execution of current legislation.
This post will provide a historical view of past legislation to give a deeper understanding of the areas that similar policies have focused on. In my next post I will touch on the two bills and provide a comparison of their points.
Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997
As the need for permanency among children in foster care has grown and with considerable research showing that lack of permanency has a detrimental impact on child psychological, social, and physical development, policy makers have prioritized this national issue.
To begin, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (AACWA) of 1980 provided funding for families adopting out of the foster care system via adoption assistance payments. In 1997, President Bill Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) as an amendment to Title IV-E. The act would serve to rectify misinterpretations of the previous legislation.
Prior to ASFA, terminating parental rights was difficult even in cases of extreme child abuse (see Practice Notes) and many felt the AACWA kept children in foster care too long with reunification efforts taking so long that children experienced foster care drift instead of permanency. In response, the ASFA requires that states create a permanency plan for children who have been in foster care for a year, and petition to terminate parental rights if 1) the child has been in foster placement for 15 of the past 22 months, 2) the court deems the child abandoned, or 3) the parent has committed other offenses such as attempted murder of his/her child, voluntary manslaughter of a child, or felonious assault to a child (see Center for the Study of Social Policy).
Although “reasonable efforts” had been defined within the AACWA, some believed that the term was misinterpreted. Without a clear definition of what constituted “reasonable efforts” on the part of social workers, agency workers, and the courts, it was believed that many children were reunified with biological parents not yet able to care for them, at the expense of the child’s health and safety (see Center for the Study of Social Policy). To correct and clarify the definition of “reasonable efforts,” the ASFA includes a safety measure within the definition to ensure that children are returned to safe homes upon reentry. Critics of the ASFA have spoken out saying that the bill puts more weight on the past relationship between the caregiver and child and deemphasizes the change process for parents and their likelihood of healthy caregiving in the future.
The ASFA addresses the need to lower the number of children in foster care, and prioritizes permanency placement for children in safe homes that would nurture their emotional, physical, and social development via incentives. The ASFA incentives gave multiples of $4,000 for every foster child adoption for the state that exceeded the base (or average) number of foster child adoptions in that state for the fiscal year. It gave multiples of $2,000 for every special needs adoption in the state that exceeded the base number of special needs adoptions for the fiscal year.
Lastly, the ASFA provides for some pre- and post-adoptive services for families. States must provide semi-annual data to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Recording System (AFCARS) for eligibility assessment in order to receive funding.
The Adoption Incentives program has been reauthorized twice and the current legislation would reauthorize and change the program for a third time. Tomorrow I will go into more detail about the current legislation.
