Part 5: Children often wait for 'their turn' at having real home

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Last year, a caseworker rediscovered Michael and took steps to find him a permanent home. But it was too late. After six years in foster care, Michael is now considered mentally retarded, can barely speak and is struggling to learn sign language. Today there is no family waiting to adopt him.

Michael is one of the victims of a state adoption process plagued by bureaucratic inertia and too few resources to match the children with the families who want them.

"The system is not working. Children are just sitting," said Kathryn H. Karp, whose catalog of children with special needs - called "My Turn Now" - is one of the most successful tools in Georgia for recruiting adoptive parents. "Most of the children who come into the state's care and need families are failed by the system. They could be placed in new families and be on with their lives, and they're not."

On any given day in Georgia, there are close to 500 children in the state's custody who are available for adoption - most because they were so severely abused or neglected by their parents that parental rights have been severed.

Unlike the healthy white infants who are in top demand, almost all the state's adoptable children have special needs - meaning they are black children over 1 year; white children over 8; children with mental, physical or emotional handicaps; or children with brothers and sisters whom the state wants to place as a group.

Despite the children's special needs, a growing number of adults want to adopt them - older adults who are starting their families later in life or couples and single adults who can't afford to privately adopt an infant but still want children.

Yet families have waited three or four years before the state places a child with them. Some give up in frustration. Others, such as Dr. Lytia Howard, are forced to go out of state.

Several years ago, Dr. Howard told the Fulton County Department of Family and Children Services that she was interested in adopting two older black boys - children who are readily available and among the hardest to place.

After choosing a pair of brothers in the "My Turn Now" book, she was told she couldn't have them. The boys needed a father, caseworkers said, and she was single.

When she was turned down again on another set of children she had identified, she turned to other states. Within months, she was approved by Pennsylvania's child welfare agency to adopt the two children she has today - Richard, 8, and Ryan, 6.

"If there are over 400 children in Georgia who need homes, then you tell me why it takes over two and a half years to process an adoption," said Dr. Howard, director of special programs for Georgia Tech's College of Engineering.

Ms. Karp, whose agency is private but receives its space and some funding from the state, attributes the delays to shoddy management and a lack of resources. Despite the waiting list of nearly 500 children, there are only three people in the state department's central office to manually sift through all the families on file and find a match for each individual child. According to Ms. Karp, the state has made efforts to computerize the system for six years, but it is still not up and running.

Credit: Johnny Crawford / AJC file

Credit: Johnny Crawford / AJC file

No 'Efficient System' for Placing Children 

According to Geraldine Jackson-White, chief of the state's adoption unit from 1982 to 1986, stories such as Michael's are all too common.

"I guess the pressing problem that's facing the adoption program now is we have children who are free, who have remained free for a long time, but there's not an efficient system for recruiting families, studying them and placing the children," she said.

Jimmy, who has Down's syndrome, was available for adoption at birth, but a Richmond County caseworker assumed no one would want the mentally retarded baby.

That assumption helped keep Jimmy out of the adoption pool for eight years. When the county child welfare department finally did publicize Jimmy's case recently, it took only two months before a family from Michigan stepped forward in hopes of adopting the child.

But it may be too late. At 9 years of age, Jimmy cannot speak; he's not toilet-trained; he's barely learned to walk. Although the Michigan family has other Down's syndrome children, the parents did not feel they could handle Jimmy's unique problems. He's still waiting for a family he can call his own.

Ms. Jackson-White blames the state's legislators for failing to make children the priority they deserve to be. An increase in funding and staff would go a long way toward finding hundreds of children permanent homes, she says.

"The Department of Family and Children Services always takes the blame," she said. "But they are as constrained as the General Assembly makes them. Everybody thinks children are being taken care of, and they're not."

Forrest B. Burson, the state's current head of adoption, says the situation is not nearly as bad as these women suggest. "We've made so many changes and come so far," he said.

For one thing, Mr. Burson says, the numbers are misleading. Rather than 500 children up for adoption - a number quoted not only by Ms. Karp, but also by the national Child Welfare League of America and the department's own public relations office - Mr. Burson says a more accurate tally is about half that. Adoptive homes have been identified for all but 253 children, he says. Legal proceedings have just not been completed.

And while a recent national study by the Child Welfare League shows there are more than 2,000 Georgia couples waiting to adopt a child - the third highest number in the country - Mr. Burson says these are people who want a healthy white infant, what he calls an "adoption fantasy."

"We just don't have healthy white infants available for adoption in public agencies," he said.

Only 170 families are waiting for special needs children, according to Mr. Burson. Still, even those families wait, sometimes for years before the agency gets around to doing a home study on them.

"I just don't believe that there's a real commitment to placing children, be they younger or older," said Paula E. Bonds of Atlanta, who adopted a child from Illinois after becoming frustrated in her attempts to get an older black child from Georgia. Ms. Bonds is regional counsel for the NAACP.

Some parents are forced to wait because the children available aren't the ones they want, according to Mr. Burson. "Not all the families and not all the children will match up," he said. "A lot of the families say they want special needs children, but when it gets down to telling them what the specific needs are, they say, 'I don't know if I can handle that.' "

The primary delay, however, has resulted from the way the state traditionally has conducted home studies, Mr. Burson said. He says a new method for making the evaluations, now being phased in across the state, should alleviate the problem soon.

Another bright spot is the success of the "My Turn Now" catalog and WXIA-TV's "Wednesday's Child." Both feature children who want and need homes. Thanks to both programs, a few get lucky and find homes. They're children like Angie.

Foster Homes, Shelters - and Finally a Family 

At 6, Angie was so neglected by her mother that she and her sister and brothers were removed from their home and placed in foster care.

Angie was 9 when the Bartow County Department of Family and Children Services finally moved to terminate her mother's parental rights, freeing the children for adoption.

For a total of six years, Angie was shuttled between a half-dozen foster homes, staying in between placements at an emergency shelter in Rome.

She was in the process of being adopted by one of her foster families when authorities discovered her foster father had been sexually abusing Angie, perhaps for the entire two years she lived there.

In the ensuing months, the state sent Angie's picture to Ms. Karp to be listed in the "My Turn Now" catalog. When Mike Dobbins and his wife, Jane, first saw Angie's picture and expressed an interest in adopting her, they were told that both she and her sister were tied up as witnesses in a child sex abuse case and were unavailable for adoption.

The couple persisted, and in March 1987 Angie moved into the family's Adairsville home. On Feb. 12, 1988, she officially became Angie Dobbins. She was 12 years old.

Because of her mother's neglect, Angie's teeth had deteriorated so badly that she had difficulty speaking, a handicap that had put her behind in school.

"When she moved in with us, she couldn't add 2 plus 2 without counting up on her fingers," Mr. Dobbins said.

In the "My Turn Now" catalog, Angie was described as "mildly mentally retarded."

Immediately the couple bought a set of flashcards and began working with their daughter each evening. At the end of the school year, Angie brought home a report card with three A's, two B's and a C. The family celebrated at a nearby restaurant.

"It changed her whole attitude about school," Mr. Dobbins said.

Today at 14, Angie is an active girl with hazel eyes, curly brown hair and a penchant for roller-skating.

But her life could have started a lot sooner, her father says. From the time Angie and her sister and brothers were first placed in foster care, three years elapsed before their mother was finally given an ultimatum either to give up her parental rights voluntarily or face the child welfare agency in court.

For Angie's older sister, the damage by then had been done. Today the 15-year-old remains in foster care after spending nearly a year in a psychiatric hospital.

From No Children to Four: An 'Instant Mom' 

One of the most pressing problems contributing to the further abuse of children once they enter the child welfare system has been the amount of time it takes to terminate parental rights, according to a growing number of adoptive parents.

"We need to set a limit on how long we're going to try to keep a family together," said Joyce Wright of Atlanta, a business analyst for Southern Company Services and the adoptive mother of four girls. "I think we place too much emphasis on the natural parents. If they don't shape up in a year, I think we should take those children then."

Life for her daughters was a Charles Dickens tale before Mrs. Wright and her husband, Richard, invited them to become permanent members of their family.

Their father had died when they were young, leaving the girls and their four older sisters with a mother who was neither capable nor desirous of caring for them.

Initially, the oldest sister tried to raise them, but after a few weeks, she decided their care was too much to handle.

For five years, the children lived in an isolated group home in Toccoa. There they were under the tutelage of a fundamentalist Baptist preacher who believed in strict corporal punishment and provided them with no formal education. When their mother filed a petition in court one day to get her children back, the state welfare agency discovered their living conditions and took custody of them. For the first time, the children were split apart and placed in separate foster homes.

"I think it had a tremendous impact on them," Mrs. Wright said. "It became their goal to get back together."

While home for lunch one day, Mr. Wright saw the girls featured on Channel 11's "Wednesday's Child" program. Both Mr. and Mrs. Wright were on their second marriages but eager for children. Recently they had begun talking about adopting a child or two.

"He called me at the office and was real excited and said, 'I just saw some kids that I think you should see,"' Mrs. Wright recalled.

In May 1987, they contacted the DeKalb County Department of Family and Children Services and began the lengthy process of adoption. By the time their girls moved in, Patricia was 16, Penny 12, and Edna and Lora, the twins, 10.

"It was a real experience for me," Mrs. Wright said. "I went from no children to four children. Instant mom."

But she and her husband say the adjustment for their children was far greater. Their years in the Toccoa home had slowed them down enormously both academically and emotionally, their mother says.

"They were so secluded that they had really limited experiences and big gaps in just life in general," she said.

When she sent them into McDonald's with permission to get whatever they wanted, "they didn't know how to do that," she said. "They'd never been to a restaurant."

Patricia has had the hardest time adjusting. For years, she had served as the children's mother, a role all four girls found difficult to give up. Although a pretty girl, today Patricia keeps to herself and has trouble making friends.

"You never hear her sitting around giggling on the phone," her mother said. "She's not into clothes. Sometimes I'll tell her go on and be a teenager. Most of the children her age are carefree and she is not carefree. Probably never has been."

Because of the special needs of children such as these, families can receive up to $228 a month in government funds for each adopted child. Some children also qualify for Medicaid coverage.

The "My Turn Now" book is full of children such as the Wrights', who despite their near-adult status do not want to face adulthood alone.

"It's hard for a person that old to decide they want to be adopted," Mrs. Wright said. "But Patricia very much wanted to be adopted before she was 18. I guess she wanted to establish her roots before she came of age."

'Ours Is a Positive Story' 

One 16-year-old currently profiled in "My Turn Now" is a boy named Stoney. A "caring young man with sparkling blue eyes, Stoney has no major health problems, nor physical limitations," the book says. "He is depressed, though, about his life situation and the fact that he is in foster care. It is felt that Stoney would be much less depressed if he had some stability and permanence in his life." (Recently a family has expressed interest in adopting Stoney.)

The book itself is a sad commentary on the needs of hundreds of Georgia children. Even Ms. Karp finds the catalog a bit offensive.

"It's like going shopping for a child," she said. "But you can't beat success, and if that's what it takes to place these children, you have to do it."

Some children don't understand why no one offers to adopt them once they're advertised. Eddie, 12, and his brother, Trekaris, 8, are described as "delightful, engaging and outgoing youngsters. They both love bike riding and are interested in participating in sports. They are very attached to each other and are in need of a placement together. They are looking forward to being adopted.

After three years of being profiled, they recently asked to be removed from the book. According to Ms. Karp, "The older one finally said, 'I will no longer have my picture taken. I will no longer go on TV. What's wrong with us? (Since then, a family has expressed interest in adopting them.)

Ms. Karp and Mr. Burson agree that if more families were exposed to these children, they might realize there was a place for them in their homes.

Since moving in with the Wrights, Patricia and her sisters have made steady progress both at home and at school, where the two older girls have particularly had problems.

"Ours is a positive story," Mrs. Wright said. "And it's the kind of story I think people need to hear. There are lots of kids that people could work into their lives, but they're afraid. And I understand that. I'd just like to be able to dispel some of their fears. The truth is, our lives have been enriched by these girls."

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