Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / July 2009

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WHAT STANDS BETWEEN A
CHILD AND A LASTING FAMILY
A study is underway that looks at how to lower the barriers to
securing permanent homes for children in the foster care system. > By
Karen Loew
City Limits weekly #694
July 20, 2009

Foster care is meant to be a transitory status in a child's life, a
temporary if traumatic time during a parent's lapse of responsibility,
or between the guardianship of a birth parent and an adoptive parent.
For too many New York City youth, however, foster care stretches on
and on, depriving children of the "forever family" that child welfare
professionals say is their birthright. From parents to caseworkers to
Family Court judges, participants in the system all may propose
different explanations for why the median amount of time that NYC
children spend under the government's care is two years, according to
the state Office of Children and Family Services, or why 4.7 years is
the median time spent awaiting adoption specifically. Now a study by
the legal and advocacy group Children's Rights aims to provide a data-
based description of "obstacles to permanency": A definitive
explanation of why the "foster child" designation often lasts too
long.

"It's going to give data valuable to understanding child welfare
citywide," says Children's Rights Policy Director Julie Farber, who is
leading the study. "We'll be producing hard data on what people think
are the issues" – commonly expressed frustrations such as overloaded
caseworkers or time-wasting Family Court adjournments.

"This is a complex issue. There's not going to be one answer," Farber
said. The study "will give some hard data on all of these problems,
which will enable the advocacy community to focus attention" on the
problems identified. When the results come out this fall, "I think it
will be really informative and powerful," she said.

The study is analyzing the cases of 153 foster children around the
five boroughs who have had an unmet goal of reunifying with their own
families, or of being adopted, for two years or more. The city's
Administration for Children's Services (ACS) and 28 of its 33
contracting private child welfare agencies that administer services to
children and families are fully cooperating, thus providing the access
to ongoing cases among the city’s total foster care population of
16,400 children (nearly a record low). While the sample isn't large
enough to be statistically significant by borough, Farber said, "the
problems are significant enough citywide that this was an appropriate
approach." Those being analyzed were selected randomly from 3,883
cases that met the criteria at the 28 agencies. Because five agencies
chose not to participate, the total number of cases citywide that meet
the criteria (of unmet permanency goals for at least two years) is not
known.

Both Farber and ACS Commissioner John Mattingly find the collaboration
itself noteworthy. Children's Rights, after all, is well known in the
child welfare world for bringing the Wilder v. Bernstein lawsuit and
litigating the Marisol A. v. Giuliani settlement, two major civil
actions that have shaped the administration of child welfare in New
York City. "What's sort of monumental about this, is [Mattingly] was
allowing pretty much unprecedented access to an external entity ...
that's sued the city in the past," Farber said.

Mattingly also called the study "groundbreaking," both for the
participation of private groups, and the intention of his agency from
the outset to work with advocates in addressing the report's eventual
findings. "It will provide information to the public in order to get
thoughtful people thinking together about what it is we can do to
achieve permanency for kids in care," he said. "We should be able, at
the end of this, to stand up together and say: These are issues we are
all concerned about ... here's how we are going to work together to
make the numbers look different."

Ensuring that children have permanent, loving families is one of the
top three goals of ACS, he said, in addition to protecting children
and providing the kind of help to families that can keep them
together. “Too many kids sort of get stuck in care, and we’ve got to
deal with that,” Mattingly said.

As a major barrier to permanency, he mentioned the length of time
Family Court cases often take, rather than receiving a disposition
within 60 or 90 days. Jim Purcell, executive director of statewide
organization Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies – who also
backs the study as a potentially helpful tool – points instead to the
“perennial problem” of housing in New York City (if a parent is unable
to provide a big enough apartment for her children, for example) and
the traditionally high rate of caseworker turnover as culprits.

Harlem resident Robin Wiley, a parent who has tangled with ACS in the
past, shows the value of the study’s qualitative measures – in
addition to the quantitative data collection, focus groups were held
for discussions among parents, judges, lawyers and others – by
proffering an entirely different obstacle to permanency than the
professionals. At 51, Wiley is the mother of four children of whom she
is proud, with her youngest starting college this fall. But he was
removed from her at birth because of her drug problem, and it took
five years for her to get him back.

Wiley, a parent organizer with the Child Welfare Organizing Project,
said when her son was born 18 years ago, no one offered her help to
get clean; it took some time to find treatment. “I wanted help. But I
didn’t know how to ask for help without having my children removed,”
she remembers (and says help is much more available these days).

In her case, the obstacle to permanency was a lack of trust. “If we’d
been more open and honest, it would have been resolved earlier,” Wiley
said.

When it comes to foster care, “The shorter time is the better time.
But sometimes it doesn’t always work out like that.”