After a year’s worth of pilot programs, policy changes and new laws, the number of Illinois children in foster care recently reversed course and fell below 50,000–a landmark figure that had symbolized what critics said was the worst system in the country.
And Jan. 1, a new state law, coupled with a recent federal law, will attempt to accelerate that trend, resolving the uncertain futures of foster children by more quickly terminating their birth parents’ rights, thus freeing them for adoptions or other permanent placements.
The question now, though, is whether Illinois’ most recent efforts to increase the number of those permanent placements will keep pace with the number of children who need them–or whether, as one social worker put it, the efforts will merely create a generation of legalized orphans with neither birth nor adoptive parents.
Under Illinois’ new Permanency Initiative, the courts no longer will wait for caseworkers who do not show up for hearings or for parents sentenced to long jail terms. Some of the bureaucratic steps required to end parents’ rights will be streamlined and accelerated. Children whose cases once dragged on for years now will have a “permanency goal” declared within 12 months, or almost immediately in cases of severe abuse or abandonment.
Jess McDonald, director of the state Department of Children and Family Services, said his goal is to nearly triple the number of adoptions, to 6,000 by June 1998 from 2,229 last fiscal year. Six months into the new fiscal year, 1,382 children have been adopted.
“But if we more than double it, that’s still fantastic,” McDonald said.
The new laws signal a dramatic shift from the long-held philosophy of family preservation, in which a child is thought to be best off with his or her biological parents. The hanging of 3-year-old Joseph Wallace by his mother in 1993 was the case that most starkly brought questions about family preservation into the public spotlight.
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Derelict parents, overloaded caseworkers, a tangled court system and few adoption incentives conspired over the last decade to create a foster care system so bloated that the rolls of Illinois children with uncertain futures grew each year.
Not only did the state’s foster care system become a semipermanent dumping ground for unwanted children. It became the shame of a nation: Cook County children languished an average of five years, far more than any in other urban areas.
By 1996, the number of abused and neglected children in state care had topped 50,000, and the DCFS annual budget was at more than $1 billion.
After more than a decade of often double-digit increases, however, the number of cases last summer began to decline. In November, the caseload dropped beneath 50,000.
But some are skeptical about the latest changes.
“Just because you terminate a parent’s rights sooner doesn’t mean the kids aren’t going to languish,” said Johnny White, president of the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers. “For the younger children, they will find permanent placements, but for older children, permanency becomes more difficult because their behaviors become more difficult.
“The issue that’s driving everything is drugs and poverty, and those issues are not addressed in this legislation.”
The initiative’s harshest critics also worry that 12 months is not enough time for some parents, the majority of whom abuse alcohol or other substances, to shape up. The new law, in their minds, only punishes already disadvantaged families, most of whom are poor and African-American.
Such are the tradeoffs, however, of shifting the child welfare system from a parent’s timeline to a child’s, according to Judge Nancy Sidote Salyers, who presides over the Cook County Circuit Court’s child protection division.
“No matter where the line is drawn, whether it’s 12 months, 18 months or two years, there are going to be people who will not have successfully kicked the habit,” she said. “But that is looking at it from the perspective of the adult, not from the perspective of a child.”
Under the new state law, judges are forced to decide after one year whether to return the child to his or her parents, terminate parental rights or put the child into subsidized guardianship, a new option created in May that already has placed 477 children.
Subsidized guardianships–which other states are monitoring closely–allow foster parents, particularly those caring for relatives, to become permanent legal guardians of the children. They receive monthly state subsidies without having to undergo bureaucratic and sometimes confrontational adoption tangles.
Moreover, a new federal “bounty system” put in place this fall creates financial incentives for states to move more children into adoptive homes. States get up to $4,000 for each child adopted beyond a targeted minimum and $6,000 for each additional special needs child. In Illinois, that baseline is 1,800 adoptions in 1998, which is the average number of adoptions over the last three years, according to Jim Kaufmann, legislative liaison for DCFS.
In turn, Illinois is asking private agencies here to permanently place within a year 6 of every 25 children on their caseloads–or they do not get reimbursed for taking on additional foster children. The agencies’ response has been to start hiring adoption specialists and to train other staff on how to find more permanent homes for children.
Currently, 2,518 children in Illinois are legally free for adoption, though nearly half have gotten so old that the goal for them is to return home or live independently upon reaching 18. The remaining 47,000 linger on with no certain future, though many have been given the goal of one day returning home.
By the end of this month, Salyers said she expects that 6,000 petitions to terminate parental rights will be filed. Five years ago, only 1,207 such petitions were filed.
The greater number of children freed for adoption is likely to prompt more foster parents to become adoptive parents because the process will become easier and less time-consuming, according to Jerome Stermer, president of Voices for Illinois Children, a child advocacy group.
Before the new state law, which actually has been in effect in Cook County since Sept. 1, one court date followed another and there was seldom an established plan to find permanency for the child. The few short months of experience in Cook County has shown that parents respond to the no-nonsense law, said Salyers.
“We get more cooperation. They stay in touch with their caseworker. They show up for court,” she said.
One mother feeling the pressure of the new deadline is Sandra B., a Northwest Side woman who lost custody of her three teenage children in early 1996. DCFS removed the children from Sandra’s care because she had no housing, and they now live with her sister in relative foster care.
Last June, Sandra, 35, enrolled in a substance abuse program when she was three months pregnant, hoping to offer her new child a better life, one without the years of foster care limbo.
Her older children’s cases have slogged through juvenile court at a foot-dragging pace because Sandra kept getting new caseworkers who didn’t know her case, the mother said.
Through a handbook distributed at a parenting class at The Women’s Treatment Center in Chicago, where she is trying to break her cocaine habit, Sandra found out about the new permanency initiative.
“It let me know that DCFS is not playing around. You really have to get your life together or there will be consequences. You have to make a choice; are you going to go back out there and use, and if you use, they’ll put your child up for adoption,” said Sandra, as she cradled her 1-month-old daughter, Shadatra, in her arms.
Still, though she acknowledges the reality of the new law, Sandra also doesn’t think it’s fair.
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“Giving a person a year’s time to get their life in order is not enough time because it takes so many years to get your life messed up,” said Sandra, who has a 15-year drug addiction. “In one year, you’re learning to know yourself. I can see they are looking out for the benefit of the child, but you have to look at the parent, too.”
Cutting foster care rolls and increasing adoptions have gained national prominence in the last year. In November, President Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, a law aimed at promoting adoption and other permanent homes for children. Under the new law, states must start adoption proceedings on behalf of children who have been in foster care for 15 out of the most recent 22 months.
Clinton has said he wants 54,000 foster kids nationwide to be adopted each year starting in 2002. With 47 state agencies reporting 27,115 legalized adoptions last year, it’s a realistic goal, according to the Child Welfare League of America’s adoption program director, Ann Sullivan.
“There is much greater discussion of adoption at higher levels. . . . Congress, state legislatures, and all that. But if we focus only on the numbers, the initiative could backfire on us,” Sullivan said. “Adoption can do a lot of things, but it doesn’t solve every problem. It’s really a disservice to the children and the families to say, `Now you’re adopted, now you’re on your own.’ “