Testimony to the Ohio House

Testimony to the Ohio House

Health and Family Services Committee

On HB 529

By Penny M. Wyman, MA, MSW, LSW

May 17, 2006

Good afternoon Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. My name is Penny Wyman. I am the Executive Director of the Ohio Association of Child Caring Agencies and I am pleased to be here today to share our views on House Bill 529. We appreciate the interest that the sponsors, Representative Jeff Wagner (and Senator Tom Niehaus on the companion bill in the Senate, SB 287) for their leadership, stamina and patience in trying to sort through the interested parties’ process and the differing opinions that came to light during our work together on this bill.

As you now know, the Ohio Association of Child Caring Agencies (OACCA) is a statewide association of 82 private and public agencies that provide a wide array of services to thousands of children and families across Ohio every day of the year. These services include:

Caring for children in foster care experiencing the trauma of child abuse or neglect.
Finding adoptive families for waiting children and providing post-adoption support so that new families can grow together.
Helping children recover from mental illness, substance abuse or juvenile delinquency.
Providing emergency shelter care for children whose families are in crisis.
Counseling for children and for families.

Coordinating respite care for families with children who need intensive support.
Offering highly structured, closely supervised education services for children who cannot attend public school.

Some OACCA members were founded in the 1800s by citizens concerned for the thousands of children orphaned following the Civil War. Some were founded in the early 20th century in response to the needs of children and families during the Industrial Revolution. Other members were founded more recently to provide high quality professional services to families and children coming to the attention of county juvenile courts and children service agencies. OACCA was formed in 1973 to unify these agencies’ advocacy efforts and achieve common goals.

HB 529

One third of our members are licensed adoption agencies. They primarily find families for older, multi-need children who have spent a large portion of their childhoods in the child welfare system. Private agencies do very few infant adoptions, but they do facilitate a large number of foster parent adoptions and what we call child-specific recruitment.

Child-specific recruitment means developing an individualized plan for a particular child based on the child’s background. …It is often used to find a family for a child with a disability or condition that requires special care. Cooperation from neighborhood service agencies can help recruiters locate an appropriate family. For medically needy children, support groups and associations related to the condition or disease can be an excellent resource.

(Excerpted from: Targeted Recruitment: The Most Effective Strategy by Dr. Denise Goodman)

Providing this level of specialized care requires rigorous preparation of the child, the family, and of community resources. Home studies must be thorough and include an assessment of virtually every facet of each potential adoptive family’s history. This history must include any contact the family has had with children’s protective services. That information can be accessed by PCSA’s or by the families who can then share it with the placing agency. Soon, SACWIS will allow faster and broader access to this information. At any rate, this makes notification an unnecessary extra step in the adoption process.

Many of our members, public and private, have expressed serious concerns with the notification requirements in this bill. The public agencies told us that this notification will increase their liability and their administrative costs. In talking to adoption staff from seven different county child welfare agencies, we discovered that they shared this concern and felt, like we do, that the rules already in place, if enforced, would provide the protection Ohio children need and would have prevented the situation in Huron County.

In the official newsletter of Geauga County JFS, Volume 3, Issue 4, Executive Director Tim Taylor responded to the Huron County case and this proposed legislation as follow:

“I’m concerned what will come from this one highly publicized, awful case and that our state leadership is proposing broad-based changes (again) based a situation in one county. I’m concerned that the ODJFS thinks the answer to any problem is more rules and more paperwork. I’m concerned that anytime one or two or even a handful of counties foul up, the law and rules change for all 88 counties. I’m concerned about what will happen to those 11 children and the other 6,000 children in Ohio currently waiting to be placed with an adoptive family if families decide that the bureaucratic hassle and invasion into their privacy is just too much to bear.”

As Bryan Brown shared with you when he testified before you last week, we are concerned with the potential for misuse of the information shared and for the creation of additional barriers to adoption for children with all sorts of special needs or characteristics. Potential adoptive families should not face discrimination as the only type of parents that have to “pass muster” with children’s services. As another public agency staff person points out in an e-mail message to us:

“This law treats all adoptions alike with the visits and other expectations that are being required. It also does not take into consideration experienced adoptive families, who may regard such intense (public) agency involvement as extremely intrusive and it could discourage such families from subsequent adoptions. Such intrusiveness is not imposed on birth families, whether new parents or experienced parents.”

Our aim is to work with PCSAO and ODJFS to ensure that all child welfare services are delivered according to the laws and rules established for them, where all professionals – public and private – fulfill their responsibilities according to these regulations and where there are meaningful sanctions for failure to do so. The Huron County case is an example of poor quality work by the agencies involved in the home study process, the placement process and in the post-finalization service delivery. What sanctions have been imposed on those agencies? Has the Department offered technical assistance to any of the players? If we do not effectively enforce current legal requirements for adoption services now, how will adding more requirements improve our system?

Good practice dictates the development of a high level of intimacy during the adoption process between the family, the child and the adoption facilitator. Bringing in an uninvolved third party intrudes on that relationship – particularly when that third party brings with it implied accusations of child maltreatment, unless the family can prove its innocence.

The Ohio Association of Child Caring Agencies’ members support this bill with the exception of the notification provisions. We can not support this perceived discrimination against and intrusion into the lives of potential adoptive families without establishment of good cause. If the suitability of these families to adopt waiting children is to be based on informal, undocumented information – not on the Central Registry, not public record of criminal charges filed, not based on access to due process, but with a great risk of being based on gossip and innuendo, our system is in trouble in deed. Much more trouble than the Huron County case exposed.