Added: 06/23/2007 |
Recent Foster Care LegislationWhile foster care programs are administered by state and local agencies, they receive a large portion of their funding from the Federal government. This means that local legislation controls the details of the administration of the foster care programs and Federal legislation sets the broad outlines and goals of the program. The most recent foster care legislation from the Federal Government is the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.
About every ten to twenty years or so the Congress of the United States passes legislation to correct what they view as inequities in the way that families and children are affected by the foster care system. For example, in 1980 Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act that directed State child welfare agencies receiving Federal funding to make it a priority to re-unite families where possible. In 1997 Congress decided that too often states were erring on the side of trying to re-unite families at the cost of keeping children in the foster care system for too long. As a result Congress passed the most recent foster care legislation, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) to try to correct that perceived problem.
While re-uniting families was still a priority for Congress, they also realized that there were some family situations that were never going to be safe enough for a child to return to that home. With this in mind Congress identified two specific situations where courts and local child welfare agencies no longer needed to attempt to re-unify families; first where a sibling had already had parental rights terminated, and second where there was a conviction for sexual assault on a minor.
The other thing that disturbed Congress was the length of time that a child could remain in the foster care system. With this in mind they instituted the so called “15 of 22 Rule”; if a child had been in the foster care system for 15 of the last 22 months, the states were required to file a petition asking the courts to terminate parental rights, thus making the child eligible for adoption. Congress did provide for some exceptions to this rule; for example if the child was in the care of family members while in the foster care system, the rule did not apply. This most recent foster care legislation also provided financial incentives to help the child welfare agencies find adoption placements for these children.
In 2001 the Subcommittee on Human Resources from the House Ways and Means Committee asked the Government Accounting Office to look at the changes in the foster care system since the 1997 legislation had been enacted. In June of 2002, the GAO submitted their report to the sub-committee.
The report noted that while there was a 57% increase in the number of children that were adopted out of the foster care system between 1997 and 2001, there had been a trend of increasing adoptions before the AFSA legislation was adopted. Of the 741,000 children in the United States that left foster care in the period of 1998 to 2001, only 17.3% left through adoption. Of the remaining number, those that returned to their families, about 30% of the children were subsequently returned to the foster care system.
While the GAO report noted that the data was not adequate to make comparisons to the rules prior to AFSA, they did conclude that the rules and incentives put into place by AFSA appeared to have positive results for many of the children covered by the foster care system. It is also easy to conclude that the recent foster care system changes were not adequate and that the system still needs some work.
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