Allegheny County children and youth officials welcomed the state Supreme Court's announcement Thursday that it has created an office to speed the placement of 20,000 neglected children across the state.
"We want to stop the drift from home to home and put the kids with a permanent, quality caregiver," said state Supreme Court Justice Max Baer. "Some of the kids are in foster care forever."
A total of 2,546 children are living outside of their homes in Allegheny County. Of those, 1,951 are in foster care, according to the county Department of Human Services.
The average wait for those foster children to be placed in permanent homes is 22 months. However, that number drops to 13 months for children who return home to their parents, said county Human Services Director Marc Cherna.
The goal of the new Office of Children and Family in the Courts is to shrink those placement times across the state to less than a year, make court appearances more frequent and improve training for judges who handle the cases.
"The main thing is that it's great to put more attention on the need for permanency for children," Cherna said. "We want kids to go home faster or to be adopted quicker."
The first announcement of the new office took place yesterday in Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and officials will make the announcement today Downtown with local children's groups.
"Foster care is temporary. The child doesn't have that sense of home," Cherna said. "A year in a child's life is a lot longer than older people. Kids need to have quick movement."
Because of bureaucracy within the system and delays and postponements in the courts, many children often are stuck in "foster drift," said Baer, a former administrative judge in the Allegheny County Family Division.
Sixty-two percent of foster children are placed with relatives and 90 percent are placed together with siblings in Allegheny County, according to the Department of Human Services.
The new office will organize representatives from each county to discuss strategies and options in improving foster care and permanent placement.
Officials may share ideas that have worked in their county with others facing similar problems, Baer said. For instance, Allegheny County has boosted its adoption rate with the help of donated legal services, while Philadelphia has a program that offers supervised visitation for fathers.
"Hopefully, this will create some procedures that all courts will follow in addressing a child's need for permanence," said Scott Hollander, executive director of KidsVoice, a Downtown-based children's advocacy group.
"Think about the summer after second grade and how long those three months were. A year is a blink of an eye for an adult, but it's a lifetime for a child," Hollander said.
Andrea Hoffman Jelin, who has worked in Philadelphia family court for 34 years, began work last month as the office's administrator. Her $90,000 annual salary and the office is funded through 2011 with $1 million a year in federal grant money, Baer said.
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