ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 15, 1996 TAG: 9612160087
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
President Clinton on Saturday ordered administration officials to find ways to double by 2002 the number of children adopted from foster homes in hopes of reducing the time that children languish in that system.
Clinton's call for changes in the process comes as Congress is working on legislation overhauling adoption policies that promise to be one of the major social policy debates in the next session.
``I can think of no better way to fulfill the promise of this season than to bring a child to a family and a family to a child,'' Clinton said in his weekly radio address from the Oval Office.
There are more than 450,000 children in the nation's foster care system, Clinton said, placed there because of abuse, neglect or other reasons. Most eventually return to their homes, he said, but nearly 100,000 do not. ``Those children wait far too long, typically three years or more, to find permanent homes,'' he said.
Clinton said his goal was to make adoption easier and ``to make moving children out of foster care easier,'' to increase adoptions of foster care children each year from 27,000 to 54,000.
As a first step, Clinton ordered Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to report back to him in 60 days on what new measures, including financial incentives to the states, will be needed to meet the administration's new goal.
The recommendations coincide with draft legislation circulating in Congress that aims to accelerate the adoption process.
Some of the areas likely to be addressed in the legislation and in Shalala's report include:
* Making it far easier for states to remove children from families where the child has been tortured or subject to severe physical or sexual abuse or where a sibling has died from abuse or neglect.
* Requiring states to evaluate the status of children in foster homes earlier and more frequently so that they will not languish there for unnecessarily long periods.
* Providing financial bonuses to states that move children out of long-term foster care and into permanent, adoptive families.
The money most likely will come from reducing the federal assistance available for foster care after a certain period of time. HHS officials expect any new financial incentive would pay for itself, because increasing adoptions would reduce foster care costs, which are about $15,000 a year per child.
The current adoption law, passed in 1980, requires states to pursue ``reasonable efforts'' to keep families together to qualify for federal money for foster care.
``Reasonable efforts'' have been broadly interpreted by the courts, and some members of Congress believe that too often little emphasis is put on ``reasonable.''
Despite the bipartisan support for change, adoption legislation is controversial because of concerns by the ``parental rights'' movement that the states will too quickly put a child up for adoption without consideration of the natural parents' rights.
States also may object to proposed penalties for failing to move children out of foster care fast enough, according to social policy specialists who have followed the issue.
In his Oval Office address Saturday, attended by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Shalala, several adoptive parents and their children, as well as four children waiting to be adopted, Clinton said he was ``proud'' to sign a $5,000 tax credit to help families adopt and to ban racial preferences in adoption. That measure passed Congress this year.
There had been some speculation, fueled by a comment by Hillary Clinton in a Time magazine interview in May, that the Clintons were considering adopting a child.
The White House on Saturday said the Clintons had decided against adopting a child while they are in the White House because they would not be able to give the child enough attention.
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