c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service<
RICHMOND, Va.—Years after their drug-addicted mother walked out, a Juvenile Court judge in July 1996 decided to award custody of three children—ages 10, 6 and 4—to the grandmother of two of them.
The grandmother, whose son fathered two of the children, seemed to have everything going for her. She had a new house, a prominent lawyer and the power of her appeal to keep the family intact.
But city caseworkers were skeptical, and the decision was appealed. What they did next reflects a monumental change in the way cities are dealing with children from troubled homes.
``We hired a private investigator to watch her house,'' said Hunter Fisher, a lawyer who is manager of human services for the Richmond Department of Social Services. ``And in court, we introduced 10 hours of tape showing a hundred people entering and exiting each of two nights. Children were coming and going, too.''
Since most of the traffic occurred in the middle of the night, the city convinced an appellate court that the house was being used for illicit activities, including drug dealing, and the children remained in foster care.
Overturning the long-held premise that keeping families together is the best policy, child-welfare officials here and across the country have been doing everything possible to delay or avoid the return of children to potentially abusive or neglectful families. The result is that more children are spending longer periods in foster care. And that, in turn, is contributing to what is already one of the biggest problems facing the child-welfare system: a ballooning foster care population.
Since 1985, this population has almost doubled—to 500,000 children from 276,000—as an epidemic of crack cocaine use and other drug and alcohol abuse has torn families apart. The children stay in foster homes for three years, on average, as overwhelmed caseworkers try to help the parents with the problems that made them abusive or neglectful.
In fiscally tight times, the federal cost of such support, which the states match, has leaped to $3.3 billion annually from $546 million, in large part because of the soaring cost of treating children born with a variety of ailments because of parental addictions.
Concern over costs, and the welfare of the children, has led to a push for more and faster adoptions—most often by foster parents themselves—and for permanent placements in foster homes when adoptions cannot be arranged.
This year, two bills racing through Congress with wide bipartisan support would urge juvenile courts to make children's safety, rather than family preservation, their paramount concern. The bills would offer states money for increasing the number of adoptions from foster care. That would mean being quicker to terminate parental rights and would free children for adoption when preserving the family would pose a greater risk to children's safety.
The shift in federal policy began last year, when Congress approved a $5,000 tax credit for each child adopted by a family with an income below $115,000. It also removed most barriers to interracial adoptions, making it easier for black children to be adopted by white families.
Late last year, President Clinton 
ordered the Department of
Health and Human Services to find ways to double the number of
adoptions of foster children, currently 27,000 a year, by 2002.
But some child-welfare experts say these changes—the move away from keeping families intact and the push for foster care and adoption—may go too far in the other direction.
``There has been a backlash against family preservation,'' said Susan J. Notkin, director of children's programs for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York. ``If you have a child at risk, you have an obligation to do something. But I believe many children are removed because we have not taken the time to determine what the parents need.''
Providing families with intensive services, including therapy and drug-abuse treatment, is also much cheaper than putting a child into foster care, Ms. Notkin said.
Adoption is not an easy answer, either. Children who have suffered abuse and neglect often need professional help, wherever they live, and many potential adoptive parents are reluctant to take them on.
All the hopes, scars and frustrations of children from abusive homes and the parents who take them in are on display in Vickie and Tim Ladd's five-bedroom brick ranch house, with a pool, a trampoline, a swing set and a basketball hoop in a tranquil development just south of Richmond.
As their three foster children recounted their earliest memories, it was easy to see why they no longer resided with their biological parents.
``There was a lot of drinking,'' said Dawn, 17. ``My stepfather would attack me so I'd run away.'' She was rescued by the state when she was 11, but, by then, she was out of control; she was taken into seven foster homes that then turned her out.
Her foster brother, Lonnie, 14, sweaty after jumping on the backyard trampoline, said that when he was 8 and 9, he would slip out into the night to look for his mother in bars.
In a heart-shaped frame in her room, Stephanie, 13, wiry and a little fidgety, has a picture of her mother, who went to jail briefly for beating her. ``She'd bring up her fist and hit me on the side of the head,'' she said, mimicking the whack. ``I have ADHD,'' she said. ``That's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I take medicine. It calms me down.''
Since coming to the Ladds, these children are looking ahead to more conventional lives.
Calm, direct and settled after three years here, Dawn has recaptured two lost years of school, is on the honor roll and starts community college in the fall.
``I draw,'' Lonnie said. ``I'm going to be a comic artist.''
Stephanie said no child of hers would need foster care. ``First,'' she said, slapping a finger into the palm of her left hand, ``I'm going to get mature. Then I'm going to get married. After I get married, I want one kid. Just one. I want a girl, but whatever God gives me, I'll deal with it. I'm going to be strict but not too strict. She's going to have a curfew. She won't be allowed to date until she's 16.''
The prospects are not so clear for two children the Ladds have adopted, Steven, 13, and Jason, 14.
When the Ladds took him in at age 4, Steven had been sexually molested in another foster home. ``He never forgot,'' Ms. Ladd said.
Jason came to them at 2, two years after the Ladds had married and were told that they could not have children of their own.
``He had been severely beaten,'' Ms. Ladd said. ``He had broken bones. He had mental retardation and fetal alcohol syndrome.
``He's a beautiful child,'' she said, picking up a framed photograph on a living room table of Jason in a baseball uniform.
But in November, Jason had to be moved into a group home for children with behavioral problems. After 14 years of marriage, Ms. Ladd had become pregnant with Zachary, and Jason was beating her.
In communities like Richmond, with many abused and neglected children like these, the big issue for child-welfare officials is not so much adoption or family preservation, but the immense and rising costs of caring for the children. Officials say they are overworked, understaffed and underfinanced.
The Richmond Department of Social Services has 35 caseworkers dealing with 870 foster children, about twice the number it says it can readily serve.
Staffing levels like this in many cities have led to a lack of oversight and failures to prevent abuse by foster parents themselves, critics of the foster care system say.
``The crunch of children backed up in foster care is more a statement of how damaged these children are than of the willingness of people to adopt,'' said Michael A. Evans, director of the department. ``There are people who are willing to adopt healthy children. But crack mothers don't have healthy children.''
Frederick Pond, the manager of Virginia's adoption and foster care services, said hopes in Washington for any increase in the number of adoptions of troubled and abused children were way too optimistic unless the government took on some of the costs and responsibilities of raising adopted children.
The State of Virginia, for instance, offers one of every three adoptive parents the same $262 to $388 per child it gives foster parents each month. The state also offers some parents subsidies for their children's therapy.
Even then, Pond predicted, more and more adoptive parents will return their children to the state because of difficulties in raising them.
Life has been tough, but satisfying, for Denise and Beauregard Evans, the foster parents of Pamela, Lakisha and Kenneth. The children have been with them since soon after their birth, and they hope to adopt all three.
The Evanses are rearing 10 children, including 4 of their own, in a split-level house on a cul-de-sac with a driveway cluttered with children's plastic vehicles. Still in their 30s, they have sheltered 129 children for months or years.
All but their own four, who range in age from 1 to 17, have various disabilities, including retardation, speech impediments and hyperactivity. One was born to a girl who was 12. Another needed a blood transfusion at birth and weeks in a hospital to start purging the crack cocaine from her body.
After school, the Evanses' house is a warren of children doing homework and playing, with the bigger girls watching the toddlers. Kenneth is in a tent in the living room with a floor full of plastic balls. He was born addicted to cocaine, Ms. Evans said. ``He's a little delayed for a child his age,'' she said. ``Lakisha, too.''
After the custody battle in the courts, Ms. Evans said, the girls needed therapy. ``We started getting mood swings,'' she said. ``Lakisha stopped talking, and Pamela just shut down. She started getting mad at everybody.''
But Pamela seems settled now. Shy and skinny, with straight, long black hair, she is in the fourth grade and said she liked spelling and math.
But she remembers her visits with relatives in the past.
``They were on drugs,'' she said. ``They'd act weird. I'd go and look at TV in the other room.''
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