When children in foster care cannot be successfully reunited with a family
member, the Placement Services Unit will work toward finding a permanent
home for them through adoption. Our Unit has been highly successful
in decreasing the length of stay in foster care and finding appropriate
caring families to provide permanency through adoption. A large
focus has been placed upon providing training to all of the placement
services staff on the issues in adoption to strengthen the bond that the
child and family make when committing to adoption. Our foster
parents participate in many of the adoption and permanency planning
focused trainings to better enable us to work in partnership toward
the goal for the children in care.
Whereas adoption focused training is provided through contracts with
outside providers such as Parson’s and Family Focus, training that must be
provided to the foster parents, much like the group home staff, is
provided by in-house certified trainers. The training required for the
foster parents to gain certification is called Model Approach to
Partnership in Parenting (MAPP). MAPP is a 30 hour course offered in
10 sessions. The training is currently provided by a Senior Caseworker in
the Placement Services Unit along with the Staff Development Coordinator
and an experienced foster parent who have all been through the New York
State train-the-trainer program. Trainings are provided to certify new
families for foster and adoptive parenting twice per year.
Achieving permanency without delay is the ultimate goal for the Placement
Services team. A fact that speaks for itself is the statistic that
out of the forty six (46) children in the custody of the Commissioner at
the close of 2004, fifteen (15) are either in pre-adoptive placements or
scheduled to soon be moved to one. During 2004, six (6) children were
adopted. None of which were siblings of each other, representing six separate
families being enhanced by the love of a child.
Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA)
Federal legislation in
1997 entitled the Adoption & Safe Families Act amended Title IV-E of the
Social Security Act.
The Act required that States conform their foster care, adoptive, and
child protective systems to comply with a group
of broad based initiatives. These initiatives included efforts
that were designed to reduce dependency upon foster care; enable foster
children to return home sooner; conduct permanency hearings; review
criminal background checks of prospective foster and adoptive parents; and
to introduce new procedural rights for certain children in foster care.
In
February, 1999, New York State passed is ASFA version as Chapter 55 of the
Laws of New York for 1999. This legislation has offered a
constructive framework for local districts to move forward some of their
child welfare cases. The Family Court is empowered to make a finding
that a local district need not make reasonable efforts to prevent or
eliminate the need for placement or to return the child home. The
conditions under which this finding can be made are called aggravated
circumstances. Termination of Parental Rights (TPR) cases were
also expected to be accelerated under this legislations particularly since
a termination petition must be filed for a child in care 15 out of the
most recent 22 months. Exceptions to this are when the child is
in the care of a relative or the local district documents in the most
recent case record that a compelling reasons exists why it is NOT
in the child’s best interest to have a termination petition filed.
During the course of the past year, the Services Division has continued to
excel in the area of meeting the requirements of the Adoption and Safe
Families Act. In 2004, 90 children were served
by Foster Care. Of that, 42 children (47%) were discharge from the
agency’s care, with 6 children successfully adopted.
The
radical increase in the number of children discharged and/or having
finalized adoptions proves the agency’s success in achieving permanency
for Washington County children by providing interventions at the onset of
a placement case in combination with concurrent planning.
