LilMtnCbn
05-23-2004, 06:48 AM
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=250663&category=REG
IONOTHER&BCCode=HOME&newsdate=5/23/2004
Nobody's children
Locked in a colossal foster care system that struggles to reform, they want
someone to give them a real home
By STEPHANIE EARLS, Staff writer
First published: Sunday, May 23, 2004
They are New York's longest-waiting children.
They gaze out from the pages of the state Office of Child and Family Service's
adoption album. Their "narratives" -- the minibiographies that accompany their
photolistings -- only hint at the trauma they've endured.
There's listing No. E-859, a 13-year-old who dreams of a "forever family."
Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder, Asperger syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, he grins and
waves at the camera.
Dressed like a fairy princess, E-930 has not had a fairy princess life. She
needs a home that could handle her self-destructive aggression and temper
tantrums, where she can receive constant one-on-one supervision.
C-976 has been in therapy nearly five of her 11 years to deal with behavioral
issues like wandering off from adults, being disruptive in class and an
"oppositional attitude." She must be placed along with her three siblings.
These are just three of more than 700 children on the state's Web site, at
http://www.ocfs.state.ny.us/adopt, who have been freed for adoption but for
whom no families have been found.
For more than 20 years, New York has worked to reform its colossal child
welfare system, one of the largest in the nation. Last year's Adoption Now
Initiative is credited with increasing New York adoptions 15 percent and led to
a record 66 adoptions in Albany County in 2003. As the result of aggressive
efforts like this to shorten the time a child spends waiting either to be
returned to a birth parent or legally adopted, the number of children waiting
for permanent homes has dwindled to its lowest level in decades.
At the end of last year in New York, 5,169 children had had their parents'
rights terminated and were up for adoption. But most of these children already
were living in preadoptive homes or with foster families who had expressed an
interest in adoption, and were waiting for a clearing of paperwork and red tape
that historically had taken years to accomplish in the Empire State.
A core group of the state's most needy, most damaged and oldest orphans -- the
children featured in the adoption photolisting -- still face an average wait of
more than five years, if they're adopted at all.
New York's longest-waiting children are complicated children.
Most are older. Three-quarters are from outside New York City -- a geographic
area known as "Rest of State" to child welfare officials. Three-quarters are
over age 12 and nearly a third are between 15 and 20. Sixty percent are boys
and 40 percent girls. Seventy percent are minority.
Many have been in the foster care system for half a decade or more. Many have
experienced foster care and preadoptive placements that haven't worked out, and
they've returned to group, children's homes or other congregate care facilities
with one more failure under their belts.
"These kids feel they've committed the cardinal sin and were taken away from
their (birth) family," said Tim Selby, the clinical supervisor for residence
and community group care at Parsons Child and Family Center in Albany. "They
may not feel worthy of a second chance with a new family."
Some children, however, spend years without a single placement outside a group
home.
These are not easy children to raise. Damage can run deep.
"Can you reach them at 16? At 12? At 6 or at 3? Eighteen months might be too
old," said Dianne O'Connor, who with her husband adopted six children from the
child welfare system and fostered nearly 100 others. "These kids bring in a lot
of pain, and they dump it on you."
Experts estimate that around 85 percent of children in the foster care system
have mental health problems. Many are considered handicapped by the state
because of physical, mental or emotional conditions or disabilities.
Because of lives spent in and out of birth, foster or residential homes, almost
all children in child welfare suffer to some degree from attachment disorder, a
grab bag diagnosis that can manifest as everything from bossiness and defiance
to stealing, lying and lack of a conscience.
Wendy Decker of East Berne remembers how her daughter, Sara -- adopted at age
4, and suffering from attachment disorder -- refused to let Decker touch her.
The phase lasted two years.
"I felt rejected by my beautiful little girl I wanted to cuddle so
desperately," Decker said. "Now, at age 13, she loves to cuddle, but it took
time."
If they aren't adopted, children face becoming statistics of another kind. The
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that nearly 40 percent
of children in the foster-care system will eventually land on welfare or in
prison.
Recently, the state and the individual agencies charged with finding these
longest-waiting kids homes have begun to adjust the way they do business.
It will be a slow process.
"We've taken a hard look at how our system is treating adolescents and I think
in the end we've ended up thinking we've fallen very far short in terms of the
services we're providing for those kids," said Larry Brown, deputy commissioner
for child welfare for the state Office of Children and Family Services. Brown
spoke earlier this month at the annual state adoption training conference in
Albany.
Children may choose to remain up for adoption until they turn 21. Though it's a
controversial issue, teens may opt at age 14 to not be adopted, embarking
instead on an "independent living track" that's engineered -- but often fails
-- to prepare them for life on their own. In 2002, 1,281 New York children
"aged out" of the system -- by choice at age 18 or by mandate at age 21, though
relatively few children choose to wait this long. The state doesn't track their
long-term progress from that point.
"Being institutionalized, they protect you from real life. Then you turn 18,
they turn you loose and say 'Good luck. Wish you the best,' " said Lequan
Hemingway, a 17-year-old Albany teen who entered the foster care system at age
9. "Most of the kids I know (who aged out of the system) ended up in adult
group homes or jail."
Many go on to have children who wind up back in the system, a vicious cycle.
One of Carleen McLaughlin's adopted sons is the birth child of a woman who was
raised for 16 years in the Pennsylvania child welfare system.
"She was a product of the system," said McLaughlin, a single mom in Schenectady
who has adopted four special needs children. "Her son wound up in the system.
It was all she knew."
Such "emancipations" from the system bring lives without moorings, full of
struggles, said Susan Minahan, who runs an independent living program through
Equinox, a community services agency for people and families at risk. The
program, one of four like it in the Capital Region, is now serving nine teens
who graduated from the foster care system.
"What would it be like if all the people in your life that you feel safe with
-- your family -- just weren't there?" said Minahan. "These kids have nowhere
to go back to. When you have no family, your first instinct is to make one of
your own."
Sue Badeau, a national child welfare policy consultant, thinks the child
welfare system needs to provide a more compassionate and human touchstone for
young adults who have graduated from residential living.
"We need to make sure these kids who are on the verge of leaving the system
have more to turn to in their lives than more systems," said Badeau, the
project manager for a New York City project that aims to pinpoint, and remove
barriers that keep the city's longest waiting children from getting adopted.
Badeau also spoke at the recent adoption conference. "It can be done. There are
families and resources for every child."
The three-year "100 Longest Waiting Children" project began in 2001 and to date
has used $900,000 in federal grant money to try to place 100 of New York City's
children who have spent the most time in the child welfare system.
One goal of the project, aside from finalizing adoptions, was to allow social
workers to develop techniques that would help them place older children. As the
project draws to a close, nearly two-thirds of those 100 children have been
adopted, and New York City child care workers are planning to share their newly
learned techniques with the rest of the state.
But finding homes means finding adults who want to adopt. An aggressive
national ad campaign to find adoptive and foster parents is set to begin in
June, but the ads feature mostly younger children.
Finding homes for teens who have grown up in the system -- and convincing these
children to take yet another chance -- may prove much more labor intensive than
running ads or tackling bureaucracy. It may mean battling human nature, getting
inside the heads and hearts of kids whom other social workers might have given
up on.
"When you're in the system, all you know is the system," said Lequan. "All you
feel comfortable with is the system."
In New York City, project coordinators learned that finding adoptive parents
for "longest-waiting teens" meant individual attention -- sifting through
mountains of paperwork to find the people who have been important in a child's
life. In the city, one child who waited more than a decade for a home is now
being adopted by a security guard at his old junior high. Another was placed
with an older sibling who'd never before been considered as a resource.
Fear is another hurdle adoption workers struggle against: Adults considering
adoption but who don't think they're capable; foster parents who balk at
adoption, knowing they may lose some of the support and access to needed
services once they legally assume custody.
Families who adopt children from the foster care system often face a struggle
to get Medicaid coverage, to find out their children's medical backgrounds, to
get their kids the kind of medical and therapeutic services -- and the
education -- they had access to when children were wards of the state.
"A lot of our parents make commitments to their kids when they're very, very
little, without anticipating the extent of their needs as they grow," said
Suzanne d'Aversa, program director of the Post Adoption Resource Center,
coordinated through Parsons Child and Family Center. "Adopted kids will have
varying needs in life. A lot have had drug exposure in utero. That's one thing
at 3, another at 13."
Only three federally funded post-adoption resource centers provide services to
all of upstate and western New York. There are 10 in New York City. A lack of
post-adoption support has been repeatedly cited as a significant reason foster
families don't adopt the children in their care. And advocates say the lack of
such services contributes to "displacements," in which a child who has been
adopted is returned to the child welfare system after living in a family home
-- sometimes for years -- as someone's son or daughter.
"When parents don't know how to cope, kids go back into the system," said
Decker. "Families are losing their kids and kids are losing their homes. It's
infuriating."
Funding for post-adoption services is not a permanent part of the state budget
as it is in 27 other states. However, for the first time in years, New York
state has applied for $28 million in federal funding from the Promoting Safe
and Stable Families program for adoption and child welfare services, including
post-adoption services.
The money could serve as fresh funding to pursue "creative new ideas" to get
more kids adopted and make sure the ones who are stay in homes, said Karen
Schimke, president of the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy in Albany.
But it won't.
"With the state facing a projected 2004-05 budget shortfall in excess of $5
billion," wrote budget director Carole Stone in a letter to Judith Ashton, a
child care advocate and head of the Ithaca-based New York State Citizen
Coalition for Children, "it is necessary to use these additional federal funds
to help support the state's existing reimbursement program for child welfare
services."
Ashton, and other child care advocates, are disappointed.
New York, she said, is "increasing the number of adoptions here through a
variety of programs, but how are you going to support those families after
adoption if you're not going to use the one resource that presents itself?"
In the meantime, while budgets are argued and balanced and tactics are
formulated, more than 700 waiting children continue to be raised by a system
that consistently falls short on the one promise made to them, and to society.
"Either we get these kids back to their parents or we get them adopted," said
Ashton. "If that doesn't happen, the system has failed."
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
IONOTHER&BCCode=HOME&newsdate=5/23/2004
Nobody's children
Locked in a colossal foster care system that struggles to reform, they want
someone to give them a real home
By STEPHANIE EARLS, Staff writer
First published: Sunday, May 23, 2004
They are New York's longest-waiting children.
They gaze out from the pages of the state Office of Child and Family Service's
adoption album. Their "narratives" -- the minibiographies that accompany their
photolistings -- only hint at the trauma they've endured.
There's listing No. E-859, a 13-year-old who dreams of a "forever family."
Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder, Asperger syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, he grins and
waves at the camera.
Dressed like a fairy princess, E-930 has not had a fairy princess life. She
needs a home that could handle her self-destructive aggression and temper
tantrums, where she can receive constant one-on-one supervision.
C-976 has been in therapy nearly five of her 11 years to deal with behavioral
issues like wandering off from adults, being disruptive in class and an
"oppositional attitude." She must be placed along with her three siblings.
These are just three of more than 700 children on the state's Web site, at
http://www.ocfs.state.ny.us/adopt, who have been freed for adoption but for
whom no families have been found.
For more than 20 years, New York has worked to reform its colossal child
welfare system, one of the largest in the nation. Last year's Adoption Now
Initiative is credited with increasing New York adoptions 15 percent and led to
a record 66 adoptions in Albany County in 2003. As the result of aggressive
efforts like this to shorten the time a child spends waiting either to be
returned to a birth parent or legally adopted, the number of children waiting
for permanent homes has dwindled to its lowest level in decades.
At the end of last year in New York, 5,169 children had had their parents'
rights terminated and were up for adoption. But most of these children already
were living in preadoptive homes or with foster families who had expressed an
interest in adoption, and were waiting for a clearing of paperwork and red tape
that historically had taken years to accomplish in the Empire State.
A core group of the state's most needy, most damaged and oldest orphans -- the
children featured in the adoption photolisting -- still face an average wait of
more than five years, if they're adopted at all.
New York's longest-waiting children are complicated children.
Most are older. Three-quarters are from outside New York City -- a geographic
area known as "Rest of State" to child welfare officials. Three-quarters are
over age 12 and nearly a third are between 15 and 20. Sixty percent are boys
and 40 percent girls. Seventy percent are minority.
Many have been in the foster care system for half a decade or more. Many have
experienced foster care and preadoptive placements that haven't worked out, and
they've returned to group, children's homes or other congregate care facilities
with one more failure under their belts.
"These kids feel they've committed the cardinal sin and were taken away from
their (birth) family," said Tim Selby, the clinical supervisor for residence
and community group care at Parsons Child and Family Center in Albany. "They
may not feel worthy of a second chance with a new family."
Some children, however, spend years without a single placement outside a group
home.
These are not easy children to raise. Damage can run deep.
"Can you reach them at 16? At 12? At 6 or at 3? Eighteen months might be too
old," said Dianne O'Connor, who with her husband adopted six children from the
child welfare system and fostered nearly 100 others. "These kids bring in a lot
of pain, and they dump it on you."
Experts estimate that around 85 percent of children in the foster care system
have mental health problems. Many are considered handicapped by the state
because of physical, mental or emotional conditions or disabilities.
Because of lives spent in and out of birth, foster or residential homes, almost
all children in child welfare suffer to some degree from attachment disorder, a
grab bag diagnosis that can manifest as everything from bossiness and defiance
to stealing, lying and lack of a conscience.
Wendy Decker of East Berne remembers how her daughter, Sara -- adopted at age
4, and suffering from attachment disorder -- refused to let Decker touch her.
The phase lasted two years.
"I felt rejected by my beautiful little girl I wanted to cuddle so
desperately," Decker said. "Now, at age 13, she loves to cuddle, but it took
time."
If they aren't adopted, children face becoming statistics of another kind. The
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that nearly 40 percent
of children in the foster-care system will eventually land on welfare or in
prison.
Recently, the state and the individual agencies charged with finding these
longest-waiting kids homes have begun to adjust the way they do business.
It will be a slow process.
"We've taken a hard look at how our system is treating adolescents and I think
in the end we've ended up thinking we've fallen very far short in terms of the
services we're providing for those kids," said Larry Brown, deputy commissioner
for child welfare for the state Office of Children and Family Services. Brown
spoke earlier this month at the annual state adoption training conference in
Albany.
Children may choose to remain up for adoption until they turn 21. Though it's a
controversial issue, teens may opt at age 14 to not be adopted, embarking
instead on an "independent living track" that's engineered -- but often fails
-- to prepare them for life on their own. In 2002, 1,281 New York children
"aged out" of the system -- by choice at age 18 or by mandate at age 21, though
relatively few children choose to wait this long. The state doesn't track their
long-term progress from that point.
"Being institutionalized, they protect you from real life. Then you turn 18,
they turn you loose and say 'Good luck. Wish you the best,' " said Lequan
Hemingway, a 17-year-old Albany teen who entered the foster care system at age
9. "Most of the kids I know (who aged out of the system) ended up in adult
group homes or jail."
Many go on to have children who wind up back in the system, a vicious cycle.
One of Carleen McLaughlin's adopted sons is the birth child of a woman who was
raised for 16 years in the Pennsylvania child welfare system.
"She was a product of the system," said McLaughlin, a single mom in Schenectady
who has adopted four special needs children. "Her son wound up in the system.
It was all she knew."
Such "emancipations" from the system bring lives without moorings, full of
struggles, said Susan Minahan, who runs an independent living program through
Equinox, a community services agency for people and families at risk. The
program, one of four like it in the Capital Region, is now serving nine teens
who graduated from the foster care system.
"What would it be like if all the people in your life that you feel safe with
-- your family -- just weren't there?" said Minahan. "These kids have nowhere
to go back to. When you have no family, your first instinct is to make one of
your own."
Sue Badeau, a national child welfare policy consultant, thinks the child
welfare system needs to provide a more compassionate and human touchstone for
young adults who have graduated from residential living.
"We need to make sure these kids who are on the verge of leaving the system
have more to turn to in their lives than more systems," said Badeau, the
project manager for a New York City project that aims to pinpoint, and remove
barriers that keep the city's longest waiting children from getting adopted.
Badeau also spoke at the recent adoption conference. "It can be done. There are
families and resources for every child."
The three-year "100 Longest Waiting Children" project began in 2001 and to date
has used $900,000 in federal grant money to try to place 100 of New York City's
children who have spent the most time in the child welfare system.
One goal of the project, aside from finalizing adoptions, was to allow social
workers to develop techniques that would help them place older children. As the
project draws to a close, nearly two-thirds of those 100 children have been
adopted, and New York City child care workers are planning to share their newly
learned techniques with the rest of the state.
But finding homes means finding adults who want to adopt. An aggressive
national ad campaign to find adoptive and foster parents is set to begin in
June, but the ads feature mostly younger children.
Finding homes for teens who have grown up in the system -- and convincing these
children to take yet another chance -- may prove much more labor intensive than
running ads or tackling bureaucracy. It may mean battling human nature, getting
inside the heads and hearts of kids whom other social workers might have given
up on.
"When you're in the system, all you know is the system," said Lequan. "All you
feel comfortable with is the system."
In New York City, project coordinators learned that finding adoptive parents
for "longest-waiting teens" meant individual attention -- sifting through
mountains of paperwork to find the people who have been important in a child's
life. In the city, one child who waited more than a decade for a home is now
being adopted by a security guard at his old junior high. Another was placed
with an older sibling who'd never before been considered as a resource.
Fear is another hurdle adoption workers struggle against: Adults considering
adoption but who don't think they're capable; foster parents who balk at
adoption, knowing they may lose some of the support and access to needed
services once they legally assume custody.
Families who adopt children from the foster care system often face a struggle
to get Medicaid coverage, to find out their children's medical backgrounds, to
get their kids the kind of medical and therapeutic services -- and the
education -- they had access to when children were wards of the state.
"A lot of our parents make commitments to their kids when they're very, very
little, without anticipating the extent of their needs as they grow," said
Suzanne d'Aversa, program director of the Post Adoption Resource Center,
coordinated through Parsons Child and Family Center. "Adopted kids will have
varying needs in life. A lot have had drug exposure in utero. That's one thing
at 3, another at 13."
Only three federally funded post-adoption resource centers provide services to
all of upstate and western New York. There are 10 in New York City. A lack of
post-adoption support has been repeatedly cited as a significant reason foster
families don't adopt the children in their care. And advocates say the lack of
such services contributes to "displacements," in which a child who has been
adopted is returned to the child welfare system after living in a family home
-- sometimes for years -- as someone's son or daughter.
"When parents don't know how to cope, kids go back into the system," said
Decker. "Families are losing their kids and kids are losing their homes. It's
infuriating."
Funding for post-adoption services is not a permanent part of the state budget
as it is in 27 other states. However, for the first time in years, New York
state has applied for $28 million in federal funding from the Promoting Safe
and Stable Families program for adoption and child welfare services, including
post-adoption services.
The money could serve as fresh funding to pursue "creative new ideas" to get
more kids adopted and make sure the ones who are stay in homes, said Karen
Schimke, president of the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy in Albany.
But it won't.
"With the state facing a projected 2004-05 budget shortfall in excess of $5
billion," wrote budget director Carole Stone in a letter to Judith Ashton, a
child care advocate and head of the Ithaca-based New York State Citizen
Coalition for Children, "it is necessary to use these additional federal funds
to help support the state's existing reimbursement program for child welfare
services."
Ashton, and other child care advocates, are disappointed.
New York, she said, is "increasing the number of adoptions here through a
variety of programs, but how are you going to support those families after
adoption if you're not going to use the one resource that presents itself?"
In the meantime, while budgets are argued and balanced and tactics are
formulated, more than 700 waiting children continue to be raised by a system
that consistently falls short on the one promise made to them, and to society.
"Either we get these kids back to their parents or we get them adopted," said
Ashton. "If that doesn't happen, the system has failed."
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
