What You Need to Know about the New Family First Bill

From the Chronicle of Social Change, an analysis of the new Family First bill, and in particular this section deals with adoption support:

In 2008, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act set a timeline for “de-linking” federal adoption support from income standards set in 1996. Under the old regime, the feds would only fund adoption support for children whose parents were under the poverty line in 1996.

Fostering Connections enacted a 10-year phase-out of that policy, starting with older teens and incrementally including all children including newborns. By 2018, under Fostering Connections, the feds would support adoptions of any foster youth.

This saves states money and increases the federal burden to support adoptions. Since the vast majority of the kids adopted from care are younger, the majority of new federal spending comes in the final two years of the de-link.

The shift proposed in Family First would essentially freeze the de-link in place, and kick it down the road about two-and-a-half years. So the de-link would still come to completion, but not until 2021.

The motive is money, but YSI has learned there is also a policy reason in play. There is concern among some child welfare leaders in Congress that states are not living up to the promise to reinvest the money being saved on de-linking.

Some adoption advocacy groups were still discussing the change when we called today. Mary Boo, executive director for the North American Council on Adoptable Children, said her organization would continue to support the bill.

“It wouldn’t have been our first choice,” Boo said of the offset. “We’re an adoption advocacy group but we firmly believe in prevention.”

Boo also noted a valuable clarification in language stating that preservation funding could be spent on children adopted from foster care. This has the potential to steer serious resources toward a blind spot in the child welfare continuum: adoptions from foster care put into jeopardy by mental health problems.

We recall well a briefing some years back, hosted by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, in which an adoptive mother was forced to place her child back into foster care because of serious mental health challenges that caseworkers had not prepared her for. Foster care, she said, was the only way to access emergency services because the family could not afford them.