Finding Permanent Homes for Adoptable Children - Pepperdine ...

The Adoptive Family Resource Center reports that California has over 2,500 foster care children
placed out of state, and that although this only approaches three percent of the over 100,000
children in foster care, children are increasingly placed out of state as part of a national
movement to secure more permanent homes. However, the process of placing children across
state lines is timely, costly, and administratively daunting. The Interstate Compact on the
Placement of Children (ICPC) has as its objective this very goal of facilitating the safe placement
of children across state lines. The ICPC is a statutory law in all fifty states, the District of
Columbia, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. The Adoptions and Safe Families Act
(ASFA) requires that states provide a plan for effectively using cross-jurisdictional resources, and
they are not permitted to deny or delay a child’s placement if an approved family is available
outside the child’s home jurisdiction. To ensure an adequate supply of adoptive families for
eligible foster care children, it is necessary to recruit a larger base of potential adoptive families,
and using interstate adoption as mandated by the ASFA as a tool to expand that base is essential.
In March of 2000, the United States Department of Health and Human Services reported that the
permanency goal of 131,000 children in foster care was adoption, and this was an increase from
those in foster care during the 1990’s, due to the implementation of the ASFA. In order to make
the interstate adoption process a more effective and manageable option for placing children into
permanent homes, some key trouble areas must be identified. A number of quandaries plague the
ICPC process, including incomplete staff knowledge about how to use the ICPC to place children
out of state, a lack in the capacity of states to complete home studies and offer post placement
services across state lines, a lack of mandatory timelines and reporting techniques, little
accountability for ICPC provisions matching ICPC practice, and jurisdictional uncertainty in
presiding over custody hearings involving the ICPC.
The motivating force of this report is to place more children into permanent adoptive homes by
better using the ICPC. Currently, there are two viable options for achieving this goal, but the
recommended course of action will meet the following criteria. In order to develop a policy that
places more children into permanent adoptive homes, offers a more enforceable and less
bureaucratic process, provides guidance to judges, caseworkers, and lawyers, demands
accountability from public agencies, and is politically and economically feasible in the current
administration, the Association of Administrators for the Interstate Compact on the Placement of
Children (AAICPC) may choose to revise the ICPC process as it stands now or it may pursue
federalization of the ICPC. Given the criteria previously postulated for selecting any potential
solution, amending the ICPC as it exists now is the best possible option.
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