Dual track for foster care, adoptions to be abolished
NASHVILLE (AP) — Tennessee children removed from their homes are now placed in foster care — often for years — before they can be considered for adoption.
Viola Miller, the new commissioner of children’s services, wants to abolish that dual track and try to get more children adopted into their foster homes.
One change that will be required is paying those parents more to adopt than they’re getting for foster care, and Miller is searching diligently for about $4 million to do it.
She believes she can find most of the money without asking Gov. Phil Bredesen — by looking closer at the department’s contracts and seeking federal funds.
“We have to find a way to do that. Otherwise, we have a disincentive in our system to adoption,” Miller told The Associated Press during an interview this week.
Miller, who took office in January after leaving a similar job in Kentucky, hopes eventually to have 85 percent of the children in state custody who aren’t returned to their families adopted into their foster homes. Currently, that rate is about 65 percent.
“We’re going to combine the foster and adoption certification process,” she said. That will make families eligible for either role and make it easier for a foster parent to adopt.
“Then you work very hard to make sure that process is as streamlined as possible and that foster parents aren’t waiting 40 forevers to get that adoption to happen,” Miller said. “But that’s a much easier piece of work because you don’t have to move the child. To me, that is the best of all possible worlds.”
It also will require significantly increasing the pool of foster families, but Miller said she must first must concentrate on keeping the current number.
Simply returning phone calls within 24 hours would do wonders, she said. Also, demonstrating from the top that they are important would help. Miller said she sent a message to foster parents, saying she’s available to talk.
And she is trying to make sure her staff is responding appropriately through what she calls “secret shopping” — calls by administrators posing as prospective foster parents. The staff is also undergoing customer service training.
“We’ve got to get to the point where when we take children into custody, we aren’t placing them based on ‘where is there a bed,’ which is what we’re doing now,” Miller said. “We want to be placing them based on what is the best possible family long-term for this child.”
She’s also trying to streamline the adoption process itself and reduce the number of children who need adoption. “We should never in Tennessee have more than 600 or 700 children on that list at any given time, and we’re at 1,200. Terrible,” Miller said.
Rather than requiring potential adoptive parents to go through 30 hours of training before undergoing a criminal background check and then an intensive study of their home environment, the three could occur simultaneously, Miller said.
One of the first things she did after taking office was abolish match parties for children and prospective adoptive parents.
A couple in the midst of adopting a 14-year-old girl told lawmakers earlier this month of their horror at the “cattle auction” where they waited at the seventh hole of a miniature golf course as children were herded through.
Miller said her staff is open to change but was burdened by bureaucracy.
“You have got to constantly analyze what you’re doing and why you’re doing it or you’ll find yourself 20 years down the road doing something you think was sent down from God to Moses on the Mount, and it’s simply grown up as a myth.”
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On the Net:
Tennessee Department of Children’s Services: http://www.state.tn.us/youth/