AUDIT: TAKES TOO LONG TO ADOPT KIDS.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

Foster children in Los Angeles County spend an average of 45 months waiting to be adopted - nearly a year more than the national average - because the system is so inefficient, an audit released Monday revealed.

The audit, conducted by the county Auditor-Controller's Office, found that a variety of inefficient procedures complicate the adoption process, which ideally should take no more than a year.

``That's absolutely horrible,'' said Amy Pellman, legal director at The Alliance for Children's Rights, which provides free legal services to prospective adoptive parents and has been pushing the county to increase the number of adoptions.

``It means a child has to languish in the system for nearly four years, be visited by a social worker, and be embarrassed by a social worker showing up at their school. It's unnecessary.''

Auditors found that caseworkers generally complete their adoption responsibilities as time permits, resulting in significant delays, particularly in home studies of prospective parents.

``Unfortunately, through no fault of their own, the adoption of the child is a secondary, not primary, focus of staff,'' auditors wrote.

Officials with the county Department of Children and Family Services did not return phone calls seeking comment.

But Maryam Fatemi, DCFS acting bureau chief, wrote in response to the audit that the department generally agrees with it and is committed to improving the adoption process.

County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who called for a streamlined adoption process in February, said some children have to wait more than five years to be adopted and many end up reaching the legal age of 18 without ever being adopted.

Antonovich said the audit shows that efforts by the DCFS to streamline the adoption process are ``pathetic,'' and are among the reasons he successfully urged the ouster of former DCFS Director Anita Bock.

``This is an example of heavy-handed bureaucracy and inefficient management,'' he said. ``There is no excuse when dealing with young people who will be emancipating at age 18. Unless we find adoptive homes for these children, they will end up as vital statistics.''

The supervisors are scheduled to vote today to direct DCFS Acting Director Marjorie Kelly to host an adoption training conference in the spring, where experts would speak on streamlining the process and recruiting older parents for older children.

The supervisors will also vote to ask churches and synagogues to encourage their members to adopt foster children.

The vote follows the National Adoption Day event Saturday in Monterey Park, where Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and actor Bruce Willis were on hand as hundreds of children were formally adopted into new families.

The third annual nationwide event springs from a Los Angeles County program developed five years ago to attack the region's adoption backlog. Since then, the Saturday Adoptions Day program has helped finalize adoptions for thousands of children and has been copied in 34 cities across the country.

Nationwide, an estimated 565,000 children are in foster care, with more than 130,000 awaiting adoption.

In Los Angeles County, adoptions rose from 911 in 1996 to 3,266 in 2001, a 258 percent increase. Meanwhile, the backlog of adoption cases involving children who have spent years in foster care dropped 79 percent, from 1,402 in March 2001 to 297 in January.

DCFS officials said they expect the backlog to be cleared by next year.

Despite these successes, the average time to complete an adoption - from the time a biological parent's rights are terminated until the child is adopted - is 23.2 months, well above the national average of 16 months and California average of 13.9 months. The audit's report said children spend an average of 45 months in foster care before they are adopted, well above the national average of 36 months.

An April report by Bock said children spent an average of 62 months in foster care, from the time they were removed from their parents' home until they were adopted. Bock noted that the danger in the rising number of adoptions is the increased risk that those children's adoptions might fail and the child might have to re-enter the backlogged foster care system.

Elan Melamid, division chief of the DCFS Adoptions Division, said 10,000 to 12,000 foster children have been adopted in the county since the late 1990s, and he expects 3.3 percent of those adoptions to fail.

``We have 500 to 600 children out there now living with families that have a likelihood of coming back into foster care,'' Melamid said at a recent foster care conference.

The county has 3,100 foster children waiting to be adopted, down from 4,400 at the beginning of the year.

Melamid said the number of adoptions has been dropping since reaching a peak in 2001 and he expects the number to stabilize at about 2,000 a year.