Children in foster care who qualify for adoption subsidies are twice as likely to get adopted as children who do not qualify for subsidies, according to a Cornell University study.

Rosemary Avery, associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell and a family economist, tracked the outcome of all the children in the New York state foster care system who became available for adoption between January 1980 and May 1993, a total of 30,699 children. The study, published in a report to the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), is one of the first to look at the factors affecting the adoption of foster children.

"The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 provides federal matching funds to states to support the adoption of special-needs children -- those who are handicapped and/or hard-to-place. This study provides strong evidence that this legislation has had a major impact and has radically improved the lives of the nation's most vulnerable children," says Avery.

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She found that 98 percent of special-needs children who qualify for adoption subsidies eventually get adopted, compared with only 76 percent of children not qualifying for an adoption subsidy. "Receiving subsidies, therefore, gives special-needs children, especially children who are members of minority races, a significant advantage in their probability of getting adopted," she says.

Avery also found that children who enter foster care between ages 2 and 5 experienced significant and "extremely worrisome" delays.

"The population of children used in this study was extensive and, although the data collection stopped in 1993, they provide valuable insights for future social-service planning and monitoring," says Avery. Her findings, she believes, are applicable to foster care populations in other large states including Texas, California, Michigan and Illinois.

A foster child's chances of being adopted also are largely influenced in New York by county-level caseloads of social workers, Avery found. Larger child protective services (CPS) caseloads were associated with a lower probability of adoption. "This is the first evidence we have that indicates how sensitive adoption rates are to work-load dynamics and service agency specialization," Avery says.

Among her other findings:

• Only 10 percent of children who enter foster care in New York are actually available for adoption. However, Avery points out that more than 90 percent of the children who are available eventually get adopted. Contrary to popular belief, being older or male does not affect a child's chances of being adopted.
• The higher the number of placements in institutions or group homes foster children experience during their stay in foster care, the lower the probability they will be adopted. However, the number of foster home placements was not found to affect a child's probability of being freed for adoption (parents relinquishing their rights) and, in fact, slightly increases that probability.
• The number of delinquency hearings a child is involved in does not have an impact on the probability of being freed for adoption or adopted, at least in this study, while the number of court hearings that involve a child's mistreatment slightly increase the child's probability of being freed for adoption, and only marginally reduce the child's probability of being adopted.

Avery's 213-page report, "Public Agency Adoption in New York State," was supported by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, Department of Health and Human Services.