Agenda for Safe and Healthy Families

Ø Preventing the need for adoption – Hillary will reform the foster care financing system to allow states to invest in what’s right for the children in their care. Along the lines recommended by the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, Hillary will provide support to states as they provide the range of services from prevention of placement in foster care to support for children who have been reunified with their families or adopted. Without taking away the entitlement for children in foster care, Hillary will provide new rewards for states that succeed in reducing the number of children in care and lessening the time they spend in care. Rather than essentially forcing states to keep kids in care in order to get federal matching dollars for payments to foster homes and administrative funds, Hillary will enable states to invest in keeping families healthy and kids out of foster care, investing in services from housing assistance, to mental health counseling, to respite care. The policy will also enable states to invest more money in quickly reunifying children with their families when it is safe to do so.

Ø Getting Adoptive Parents in the Door -- A recent study found that 48 million Americans have said they would consider adopting out of foster care. Approximately 240,000 Americans reach out to child welfare agencies each year to inquire about adopting or fostering a child, but only 22% of those fill out an application or attend an orientation meeting; only 6% complete the adoption home-study; and an even smaller fraction actually adopts or fosters a child. The problem is that states aren’t investing in encouraging parents to adopt; while 22% of children in the foster care system are available for adoption, yet states spend only 1.3% of their foster care funds on recruiting and training foster and adoptive parents. We can do much more to draw in prospective parents and connect them with children who desperately need loving families. As President, Hillary will:

• Recruit Prospective Adoptive Parents -- Hillary will provide an enhanced federal match for child welfare funds spent on parent recruitment initiatives. She will also provide $50 million for innovative public-private partnerships designed to recruit and retain prospective parents. Hillary’s guiding principle will be that no child should remain in foster care for one day longer than is necessary.
• Require states to streamline their adoption processes in order to make them user-friendly – As President, Hillary will require states – as a condition of receiving child welfare funding – to develop and implement improved systems for retaining adoptive parents all the way through the process. States will be required to track the number of inquiries they receive as well as their retention rate at every step in the process, and to develop and implement an action plan based on their findings. And she will gather and disseminate information on the best practices communities are using to recruit and retain adoptive parents so that states and communities can build on each other’s successes in this area.
• Make the Adoption Tax Credit Permanent – The Adoption Tax Credit provides $10,960 to cover any costs incurred in the course of an adoption, or in the case of children adopted out of foster care, any tax liability of the adoptive parents. This credit is set to expire in 2010. As President, Hillary will make this tax credit permanent. She will also look for ways to provide an even greater incentive to adopt children out of foster care, such as making it partially refundable.

Ø Keeping Adoptive Families Together – W hile most adoptions succeed, 10 to 25 percent of adoptions out of foster care are dissolved or disrupted. One major reason is that adoptive parents often can’t get the support their children need. In the most tragic instances, adoptive families have to send children back to foster care to get them the services they need, such as mental health treatment. In addition, many states provide less in adoption assistance than foster care assistance, discouraging foster parents who’d like to adopt from actually doing so. As President, Hillary will:

• Fund comprehensive post-adoption services – Hillary will ensure that federal funds support children who have been adopted out of foster care and make mental health and other services for adopted children reimbursable under federal child welfare guidelines, just as these services are for children in foster care .
• Increase access to adoption assistance – Hillary will put adoption on a level playing field with foster care by increasing adoption assistance payments to the same level as foster care payments, in states where they are lower.

Ø Supporting Other Forms of Permanency

• Subsidized Guardianship – Hillary will also support families doing what they have done for generations – caring for their extended kin. She will provide federal resources to support subsidized guardianship programs for children who have been in foster care for at least one year, are not candidates for adoption or returning home, and who demonstrate a strong attachment to a relative who is willing and able to care for them. Through subsidized guardianship, children can achieve permanency yet remain connected to their biological relatives. Research has shown that the availability of guardianships encourages permanency, including adoptions, by encouraging family members to think in terms of the children’s long-term interests. Because subsidized guardianship has worked in the states where it is available, Hillary will support it nationwide.