Organization says Subsidies Are Crucial
The Children's Rights advocacy organization for children has issued a report summarizing the results presented in a study of six states that offer child subsidies to adoptive and prospective-adoptive parents from the foster care system. This report was created in association with the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC), and funded by Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. The report was released in July 2006 examining the importance of child subsidies when adopting from the foster care. These subsidies are vital to the decision making of a prospective-adoptive family desiring to adopt a child with special needs.
Because certain states are having financial woes they are reducing adoption subsidies. Children's Rights filed a lawsuit against the state of Missouri for making a law restricting adoptive families to access to funding to one year. A federal court had this law struck down after finding it to be a violation of federal law and unconstitutional. Since 2001 twenty-six states have reduced child subsidies because of experiencing budgetary crises.
There are many benefits in adopting a child out of the foster care system and doing so provides an important service to the state government. Such a voluntary action on the part of adoptive parents should be considered an investment. Adoption creates permanent homes for children in the foster care system. This relieves the greater burden from the child, the foster care system and the state. It additionally strengthens the family which is the bedrock of society.
To fail a child at an early stage of development can have lasting and damaging effects on the child, and to their community. Without fiscal vision and planning a greater burden will be placed on all areas of the community up to the state level.
Children who are "aged-out" of foster care are prone to have more difficult problems, such as, not graduating from high school or acquiring a GED, unemployment, unwanted pregnancies, suffering mental illness, and incarceration.
Julie Farber, Children's Rights' director of policy has stated. "Adequate adoption subsidies are critical to parents' ability to adopt vulnerable children from foster care."
Most foster children have special needs, such as, birth defects, attachment issues, and emotional or behavioral problems. Those follow a child into adoption. By reducing the monthly payment assistance for a special needs child or children, systems may put an adoptive family at financial risk. Families do not adopt children to add a financial resource, however, subsidies help assist the adoptive parents to care for children who have extraordinary needs.
Fortunately, for Maine's adoptive parents, adoption subsidies remain consistent with the foster care reimbursement rates.
The Survey Demographics
Children's Right developed the survey using a total of 242 adoptive and prospective adoptive parents caring for 670 adoptive and pre-adoptive children, and conducted the study in Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, and Texas.
According to this survey, 98% of the participants were foster parents before adopting. Others were at the initial stages of the adoption process. Also included were numerous "therapeutic" foster care givers.
One of the most important findings was that for families in these states reimbursements were higher before the care givers became adoptive parents.
A few of the questions that families ask when deciding to adopt a special needs child in foster care are: Will we receive a medical card, i.e. Medicaid? What are the levels of services covered by medical insurance? What is the availability of adoption subsidies? And, how can we access to information about the child's and the biological families medical history?
According to the survey, 65% of adoptive families site the availability and/or the level of the subsidy available as being sufficient to allow them to incur the greater financial responsibility required by the adoption process. For the prospective-adoptive families, 45% stated that only with the subsidy would they be able to continue with the adoption.
The simple yet economic truth in human terms is that sound policy making is the foundation for developing positive outcomes through adoption. You are encouraged to read the full report "Ending the Foster Care Life Sentence: The Critical Need for Adoption Subsidies", which can be found at www.childrensrights.org.
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