By admin on March 16, 2010
[from the Children's Welfare League of America, Children's Monitor Online 3/14/10]
Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) sponsored a briefing on Thursday, March 11, on his legislation, the Every Child Deserves a Family Act. The bill, H.R. 4806, prohibits states from discriminating in the placement of foster and adoptive children on the basis of sexual preference and allows federal funding to be cut off if such discriminatory practices are in place.
As part of the briefing, participants heard from several panelists including Martin Gill, an adoptive parent, who along with his partner of more than eight years has been raising two foster children since 2004. In 2008 a Florida court granted the adoption after hearing that it would be in the two children’s best interest. The state of Florida went to court to challenge the adoption and Gill is currently involved in a lawsuit against Florida’s law that automatically denies adoption by gays and lesbians. Gill was featured in the November/December edition of CWLA’s Children’s Voice magazine. Currently Florida is the only state with a statutory prohibition on adoptions by lesbian and gay parents. Gill told how the state had asked to place two foster children in his care six years ago in an emergency. The court case is scheduled for a late August hearing in an appeals court with the case expected to land in the Florida Supreme Court. CWLA weighed in on the earlier case through the filing of an amicus brief.
In addition to Gill, the panel included Leslie Cooper from the American Civil Liberties Union, who has been involved in the suit; Charlotte J. Patterson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia; Gary J. Gates, senior research fellow at the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law; and Uma Ahluwalia, director of the Department of Health and Human Services for Montgomery County, Maryland. Ahluwalia talked about the practice in both Montgomery County and the state of Maryland where such discrimination is not practiced. The other panelists refuted some claims that there is psychological and other forms of harm to children placed with gay or lesbian couples, and used research to argue that there is a potentially large pool of prospective adoptive parents available among couples who are gay or lesbian if discrimination is not practiced. Through the end of FY 2007 there were 133,000 children in the foster care system nationally awaiting placement in an adoptive home.
Posted in Federal Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged adoption, cwla, every child deserves a family act, gay, hr 4806, lgbt, permanency, pete stark
By Dana Mandolesi on February 4, 2010
[from Dana Mandolesi, HEY Project Manager]
As part of the requirements to receive federal funding for foster care and supportive services for families, Child Welfare Services (CWS) must complete a tri-annual System Improvement Plan (SIP). The SIP consists of a multi-tiered review and analysis of current practices and a commitment to implementing new evidence based practices and phasing out older initiatives that do not have proven successes in serving foster youth and their families.
As part of HEY’s work to help connect and convene systems, I attend the Core Team Meetings for the SIP. The Core Team is made mostly of people that work for CWS, but community partners, contracted agencies and other concerned community members are invited to attend. At today’s meeting, the Team focused on one specific issue that San Francisco needs to improve: timeliness to adoption and concurrent planning.
When trying to improve ‘Timeliness to Adoption’, CWS means they are trying to reduce how long a youth is in foster care before they are adopted. This is a difficult statistic, because San Francisco, like most places, primarily is interested in reunifying youth with their own parents – letting them go home. However, for some youth, reunification is not an option, and adoption is the second best choice. The problem arises when CWS focuses all their energy of reunifying a youth with their parents – but that reunification doesn’t work out. The youth is left in some type of foster care for all that time, and then the process has to start over to find a suitable adoptive family.
As a response to this problem, CWS wants to improve ‘concurrent planning’. Concurrent planning means planning for two case scenarios at the same time: possible reunification and possible adoption. This way if the youth cannot reunify with their parents, they can immediately transfer their focus to the already developed adoptive plan – and the youth can leave foster care much quicker.
During the Team meeting today, CWS talked about developing milestones to implementing many initiatives to support concurrent planning and successful reunifications. First, every program and initiative needs to have good and better data reporting, so the results are recorded appropriately. Second, San Francisco does have some programs that have shown to reduce time in foster care, and those need to be systematized and supported throughout all cases and workers in CWS. Third, initiatives and practices that have evidence to support their usefulness or success rates should be discontinued and replaced with practices that have been proven to improve outcomes for adoption and reunification.
Today, the Core Team talked about multiple existing initiatives that work to improve timeliness to adoption, and new evidence practices they are considering implementing. Among some current promising and successful strategies were:
- A program to recruit and train potential foster and adoptive families through the San Francisco Unified School District
- The development of materials and brochures about services for families pre- and post-adoption
- Training foster parents to be mentors for biological parents
- Reducing reassignment of Child Welfare Workers
Among some new programs that have proven success records in other places were:
The Core Team meets again in 2 weeks, and the topic will be ‘Reentries into Foster Care’. Stay tuned for an update.
Posted in Featured Content, Local Foster Care Policy Updates, Trends To Watch | Tagged adoption, child welfare services, cws, data, evidence based practices, foster care, foster youth, reunification, san francisco, sip, system improvement plan
By Shavonte Keaton on November 10, 2009
On Thursday October 29th I attended a forum entitled Beyond Marriage: Recognizing Alternative Family Relationships presented by the LGBT Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Human Rights Committee. The event consisted of 4 panelists who worked in the field of advocating for alternative family rights. They included Judy Appeal, Executive Director of Our Family Coalition, Samer Danfoura, Attorney, Cathy Sakimura, Staff Attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Melanie Rowen, Staff Attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The forum was a place where the public and panelists could engage in a discussion on how to recognize alternative kinship structures among people who are not related by blood or legal adoption. Within that there was a specific focus on including the experience of emancipated youth, seniors, those estranged from their legally recognized families and members of the LGBT community. I was asked to attend on behalf of HEY to lend to the discussion my experience of being an emancipated foster youth and how this in itself was a type of alternative family, and how many foster youth are in families where they have chosen the kinship or the family is created without any blood relationship. The discussion talked about a variety of issues ranging from benefits of alternative families to obstacles like visiting someone in the hospital or being recognized in a will or legal proceeding. There were three key questions asked to the panelists and audience to facilitate discussion. The three questions were 1.) What kinds of non-spousal alternative families exist? 2.) What obstacles or legal hurdles exist for these relationships and 3.) What can be done to support alternative families through legal and other means? These questions really helped us explore what it means to be in an alternative family and kept the conversation informative and engaging. I walked away with a better appreciation for alternative families and a way to help all foster youth who feel that they don’t have a family or belong to a family give voice to the many meaningful relationships they create themselves, and how that itself is a family!
Posted in Trends To Watch | Tagged adoption, alternative families, gay, kinship, lesbian
By Dana Mandolesi on November 5, 2009
There are 130,000 children and youth waiting to be adopted. National Adoption Month urges Americans to “Answer the Call” to adopt children and youth from foster care.
Visit the 2009 National Adoption Month website (www.childwelfare.gov/adoption/nam) at Child Welfare Information Gateway, a service of the Children’s Bureau, to find answers to your questions and to access adoption information and resources, including:
• A calendar of activities for each day of the month—in both English and Spanish
• Targeted resources for professionals, families, and teachers
• Publications from AdoptUsKids
• A new Proclamations section, which includes Presidential and State acknowledgments of November
as National Adoption Month
Posted in Federal Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged adoption, national adoption month, november
