Statement of Thomas Atwood, President and Chief Executive Officer, National Council for Adoption, Alexandria, Virginia

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support
of the House Committee on Ways and Means

May 23, 2006

Chairman Herger and Members of the Subcommittee:

My name is Thomas Atwood, president and chief executive officer of the National Council For Adoption. On behalf of the National Council For Adoption (NCFA), I thank you for the opportunity to testify on the subject of improving child protective services, in the context of congressional consideration of the reauthorization of the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program. 

The National Council For Adoption is an adoption research, education, and advocacy nonprofit whose mission is to promote the well-being of children, birthparents, and adoptive families by advocating for the positive option of adoption. Since its founding in 1980, NCFA has been a leader in advancing adoption and child welfare policies that promote adoption of children out of foster care, present adoption as a positive option for women with unplanned pregnancies, reduce obstacles to transracial adoption, make adoption more affordable through the adoption tax credit, and facilitate intercountry adoption.

NCFA applauds the Human Resources Subcommittee’s ongoing attention to America’s foster care and child welfare system.  The Chairman’s and Subcommittee’s leadership in addressing this issue has helped to make important changes in child welfare policy, and to prepare the way for other needed reforms that we hope will be forthcoming.  We also enthusiastically thank Congress for its efforts to improve judicial processing of permanency decisions for children in foster care, by recently authorizing funding for case tracking and for the training of child welfare judges and court administrators, in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.

Preserving and Increasing PSSF’s Flexible Funding

Other than national security and the rule of law, it is difficult to find a more worthwhile use of the federal budget than to fund policies that effectively promote safe and stable families for vulnerable children suffering neglect and abuse in their homes. When the family and the community cannot protect these children, it is a clear role of the government to do so. These young victims of neglect and abuse often must be removed from their families and households, and put in state care for their own protection. They are America’s social responsibility, especially those whose parental rights are terminated, and they deserve America’s best efforts to secure for them the loving, permanent families all children need.

The Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program (PSSF), Title IV-B Subpart 2 of the Social Security Act, is an important part of the federal government’s efforts to protect America’s vulnerable children in at-risk families, both in and out of foster care. PSSF’s purpose is “to enable States to develop and establish, or expand, and to operate coordinated programs of community-based family support services, family preservation services, time-limited family reunification services, and adoption promotion and support services to accomplish the following objectives:

“(1) To prevent child maltreatment among families at risk through the provision of supportive family services.

“(2) To assure children’s safety within the home and preserve intact families in which children have been maltreated, when the family’s problems can be addressed effectively.

“(3) To address the problems of families whose children have been placed in foster care so that reunification may occur in a safe and stable manner in accordance with the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.

“(4) To support adoptive families by providing support services as necessary so that they can make a lifetime commitment to their children.”[1]

This hearing on the reauthorization of the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program takes place in the context of an ongoing policy discussion regarding the need for foster care financing reform. As you know, the largest piece of child welfare funding, Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, is largely restricted to foster care maintenance. The inflexible nature of IV-E funding limits states’ ability to target resources toward prevention, rehabilitation, parent recruitment, and adoption support services. Across the political spectrum, there is widespread consensus about the need for states to be able to direct their federal financing more flexibly toward other child welfare strategies besides foster care maintenance. There have been several recent proposals to increase funding flexibility that would improve upon the current policy. NCFA encourages the Subcommittee to continue to lead in addressing this broad reform agenda.

The widespread consensus on the need for flexibility suggests that when reauthorizing PSSF, Congress should be careful to protect the current flexibility in PSSF funding specifications. Although it is a relatively small amount of money compared with Title IV-E, Title IV-B is the most flexible source of funding for child welfare. States are allowed to direct PSSF funding where it is most needed, as long as the funded program serves the purpose outlined above. PSSF funding is directed toward programs that are under-served by other child welfare funding streams. PSSF objectives describe many of the very programs, which NCFA and other flexible-funding advocates seek to support through financing reform. Although Congress may wish to add new service standards for states, it would be inconsistent with this consensus on flexibility to impose specific directives on how states spend this one small source of flexible funding. Notwithstanding the current tight budgetary climate, we urge Congress to continue to increase PSSF’s flexible funding, even to full appropriation of the discretionary funds, as President Bush’s Administration has previously advocated.

Supporting Adoptive Families through Post-Adoption Services

A crucial part of serving the “adoption promotion and support services” aspect of the PSSF purpose is post-adoption services. There are several reasons these services are a vital part of promoting safe and stable families and enabling adoptive parents to “make a lifetime commitment to their children.” First, every family faces challenges, but families who open their hearts and homes to children with a history of abuse or neglect often find themselves facing special issues. Many need extra support to: understand and anticipate the challenges they may face; obtain counseling or therapy for the child and family, in order to deal with emotional, behavioral, or mental health issues; have a respite from the stress of their special needs; and share and relate with other families who have been, or are going, through similar situations.

There is an even greater need for post-adoption services today because of the substantial increase in the number of adoptions out of foster care, over the life of the PSSF program. In each of the last five years for which the Department of Health and Human Services has reported numbers, more than 50,000 children have been adopted out of foster care, compared with 31,000 in 1997, the first time PSSF was reauthorized. Moreover, older children adopted out of foster care, and their families, tend to have a greater need for services. With the greater concentration of older children we are presently experiencing in care, and with the extra efforts being made to place them for adoption, the need for post-adoption services will continue to grow.

The failure to provide post-adoption services can be a significant disincentive to adoption. When prospective parents consider the challenges they may face, they will be less inclined to adopt if they feel they cannot rely on the additional supports they may need. Foster parents considering adoption would like to be able to count on the necessary support services they are utilizing in their foster care of the child. Indeed, too many parents report feeling abandoned after they adopt from the public system, while most parents whose families receive services report finding them beneficial.

To varying degrees, states have employed a diverse assortment of post-adoption services, including:

• Education, training, and print and electronic resources on issues related to the adoption and parenting of children who have experienced abuse, neglect, and/or multiple placements
• Information about available services and subsidies for adoptive families
• Referrals to medical professionals, mental health professionals, counselors, education specialists, legal and advocacy services, and support groups
• Peer support groups of adoptive parents and families, for parents and teens
• Mentoring, “buddy” families
• Respite care, which provides temporary child care, inside or outside the home, to relieve parents and children from stresses resulting from special needs
• Recreation opportunities, camps for children, family retreats
• Ongoing case management
• Crisis management, crisis hotlines
• Screening, assessment, and treatment for at-risk children, and assistance in interpreting clinical information
• Family and individual counseling to address behavioral and emotional issues
• Mental health counseling for children with clinical conditions
• Residential treatment
• Drug treatment programs
• Registries, reunion counseling and assistance

To summarize this list: education and referrals, support groups, respite care, treatment and counseling, and crisis management would seem to be essential concepts that a state’s post-adoption services program should serve.

States are providing post-adoption services using various offices and personnel. Some states use the same public-agency workers who oversee the adoption placements to serve the child and family post-adoption, too. Some states assign these services to a specialized post-adoption services office and staff within the public child welfare agency. Other states provide post-adoption services by working with networks outside the child welfare agency, such as private adoption and social service agencies, schools, community health centers, and child care agencies.[2]

Congress is wise in providing for post-adoption services in the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program. These services not only promote healthy children and families, they also save taxpayers’ money by minimizing dissolutions and re-entries into care, which are more costly than the investment. Experience since PSSF’s 2002 reauthorization, however, suggests that present need for post-adoption services is much greater than what current funding supports. A 2002 study reported that total federal and state spending (not including Title IV-E Adoption Assistance) on all adoption promotion and support services in FY 2001 was the modest amount of $205 million.[3] What we hear from the field is, therefore, no surprise. Directors of private agencies that work with the public child welfare system frequently report to NCFA that there is very little funding available for post-adoption services, and that what there is often gets spent before the fiscal year is over, thus leaving programs on hold for months. By increasing the availability of post-adoption services, greater flexibility for Title IV-E funding and appropriating more of PSSF’s discretionary funding would substantially improve the lives of many children and their adoptive families.

Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Concurrent Planning

In recent years, many in the child welfare system have made concerted and thoughtful efforts to enable parents to rehabilitate themselves and reunite with their children, with some success. Promising family support, preservation, and reunification strategies include: individualized case planning; immediate, in-home crisis intervention; more effective family conferencing and counseling; placing children within their own communities; greater communication between children, families, child welfare workers, attorneys, and the court; inter-agency “wraparound” services; and real accountability in substance abuse and counseling requirements.[4]

The Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program provides funding, though not enough, for services intended to enable parents to reform themselves and their households, in order to: (1) prevent children from needing to be removed in the first place and (2) enable the children to be safely returned to the family if they are removed. Many child welfare policymakers and advocates have rightly and persuasively argued that federal foster care financing should be made more flexible, so that states can direct more of their funding toward preventive and rehabilitative programs, such as those funded by PSSF. NCFA finds some arguments for financing reform somewhat heavily weighted toward prevention and rehabilitation, at the expense of adoption promotion and support services. But we concur with the idea that vulnerable children and at-risk families would be well served by an increase in the availability of funds for these services, in order to support, preserve, and reunify families, whenever such a goal is realistic and safe.

As the child welfare system focuses more on prevention and rehabilitation, it is prudent to note that an excessive attachment to the idea of family preservation was one of the problems that necessitated the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. At that time, some child welfare workers and judges, in effect, treated family preservation as a higher priority than the best interests of the child. Today, there seems to have been a genuine and widespread paradigm shift: Although there are exceptions, child safety, permanence, and well-being take priority over family preservation, throughout most of the child welfare system. Adoption is widely recognized as generally the best solution for children, when the court determines that their parents’ parental rights must be terminated due to neglect or abuse.

This historical perspective is therefore not meant to suggest that increased funding of preventive and rehabilitative services will lead to the reinvigoration of an ideology that raises family preservation above child safety, permanence, and well-being. But it is a reminder that child protection workers should err on the side of child safety when determining whether the “family’s problems can be addressed effectively” with the child in the home (see PSSF objective 2, above). This history also reinforces the importance of concurrent planning. While it is appropriate in many or most cases to favor reunification as the initial case goal for a child needing state protection, alternate permanency plans, usually including foster care to adoption, should be considered and developed from the outset of the child’s entrance into care. Concurrent planning not only provides a timely, healthy permanency option for the child when reunification is not possible, it also advises parents of the seriousness of their situation and the expectation that they must rehabilitate, in order to maintain their parental rights and reunify with the child.

Parent Recruitment: A Crucial, Neglected Strategy

Adoptive and foster parent recruitment would seem to be a vital part of the “adoption promotion” that is called for in PSSF’s purpose statement. Yet none of the four objectives contained within that statement address this crucial strategy for promoting safe and stable families. Adoptive and foster parent recruitment is a seriously under-funded and neglected program in America’s efforts to ensure loving, permanent families for the 518,000 children in foster care, 118,000 of them waiting to be adopted. Parent recruitment is as important a priority as prevention, rehabilitation, and post-adoption services, and another compelling reason for greater flexibility in foster care financing.

There are enough prospective parents in America to care for this country’s vulnerable children. With 55-million married-couple households in America according to the 2000 census, there are more than 450 married couples for each child waiting to be adopted, and millions of qualified singles who could foster parent or adopt as well. There are three places of worship for each child waiting to be adopted, and all of America’s major faiths exhort their believers to care for orphans. Effective outreach to communities of faith is a key strategy in recruiting families to serve at-risk children in many ways.

Recruitment techniques can be: general, which uses a mass media approach with broad, positive messages crafted for a general audience; child-specific, which presents a particular child through the media or is aimed at relatives or people who already know the child; or targeted, which focuses on children and youth with a specific type of need, for whom particular prospective-parent demographics might be developed.[5] Some recruitment techniques state agencies have been using are:

• Photolisting books, print materials
• Internet listings, such as www.AdoptUSKids.org and other agency listings
• Press kits, public service advertising
• Media programs and campaigns, such as “Wednesday’s Child”
• Booths and displays at local events
• Recruitment of family members
• Engaging adoptive and foster parents to recruit other parents
• Public-private partnerships with private agencies
• Outreach to faith-based communities, such as One Church-One Child
• Concurrent planning
• Family group decision-making and mediation
• Youth involvement in identifying adults with whom they have developed emotional attachments
• Permanency teams for youth, consisting of youth, caseworker, and significant adults in the youth’s life, such as relatives, former foster parents and counselors

States are still learning how to recruit adoptive and foster parents; more experience and study will improve our understanding of what works. To give parent recruitment the priority it deserves, states should assign the responsibility for leading their recruitment efforts to a specific high-level manager and office.

Parent recruitment is critical in permanency planning for all children in foster care, but it is especially urgent – and challenging – for older children. In the most recent year for which we have statistics, 19,000 youth aged out of foster care without a permanent family to call their own. We must overcome the attitude of hopelessness that can undermine the prospects of older youth in foster care. If child welfare workers believe that adoption or guardianship is impossible for a particular child, then it will be. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure that ends in disaster for young people. Some states are developing creative programs to help transitioning foster youth make permanent connections and healthy transitions to adulthood, and to enable their peers still in care to achieve permanency before they too age out.

Parent recruitment is an area where public-private partnerships can flourish. The public system already turns to private agencies to assist with services such as home studies and post-adoption services. Through public-private partnerships, private adoption agencies can also assist the already stretched public system by recruiting and training parents, and matching children with families. It is no secret that public agencies have a reputation for bureaucratic non-responsiveness, which discourages some prospective parents from inquiring about the process, or persevering in it. Using private agencies as contacts with prospective parents can help overcome those concerns and facilitate a smoother process.

Prospective parents need leadership and encouragement in order to recognize their callings to adopt or foster parent. They also need education and training to prepare for the challenges they may encounter in parenting a child with special needs. Public-private partnerships, public communications, educational seminars, intensive casework, and the requisite agency staff to carry out these tasks are needed to recruit parents, process their inquiries and applications, and prepare them for their child. Financing policies must be reformed to allow the resources to flow to these vital responsibilities.

Mr. Chairman, I respectfully I suggest that raising recruitment to the level of priority it should be will take leadership from the top. We can and must inspire an attitude of hope throughout our child welfare system that all children are adoptable. We can and must inspire our fellow Americans to live up to our country’s responsibility to these children at risk.

In conclusion, Chairman Herger and Members of the Subcommittee, the National Council For Adoption applauds and shares your commitment to ensuring that America’s children are raised in safe, loving families. We look forward to continuing to work with you and the Subcommittee to promote safe and stable families for America’s vulnerable children. Thank you very much for allowing me to testify.

[1] U.S. Code 42, chapter 7, subchapter IV, part B, subpart 2, §629.  See also the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Amendments of 2001, Public Law 107-133 (2002).

[2] Steve Christian, NCSL Legislative Report, “Post-Adoption Services: Issues for Legislators,” Volume 27, Number 17, November 2002.

[3] James Bell Associates, Analysis of States’ Annual Progress and Services Reports and Child and Family Services Plans (1999-2001): The Family Preservation and Family Support Services (FP/FS) Implementation Study (Arlington, Va., 2002).

[4] NCFA’s primary focus is adoption, so we leave a more detailed reporting of preventive and rehabilitative programs to other witnesses.

[5] Casey Family Programs National Center for Resource Family Support, “Individualized and Targeted Recruitment for Adoption,” March 25, 2003.