Since September 1997, the number of children in foster care in the United States has increased by 52%, from 382,002 to 581,000 children, and as of September 1999, the average length of stay was two years and eight months nationally.1 In New York City, the number of children in foster care has decreased by 28% since 19972, although the average length of stay for chil- dren in foster care is over four years.3 The most recent annual figures report that 30,858 children were in foster care in New York City in fiscal 2001 (July 1, 2000 – June 30, 2001).4 For too many children, foster care has become a long-term experience, causing unnecessary trauma, family dissolution and difficulty when the majority (59%) of children in care are eventually reunited with their families.

Over the past five years, New York City’s child welfare system has undergone significant changes intended to keep children safe and strengthen families. Local govern- ment engineered some of these changes and others were delivered by President Clinton and Congress. On the local level, the Mayor created a separate city agency for child welfare services, called the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), which has benefited from unprecedented accountability, attention and resources from City Hall. In 1999, Commissioner Scoppetta announced the city’s plan to provide neighborhood-based child welfare services to children and families in the communities where they live. Through this initiative, ACS intends to shorten the length of stay for children in foster care and develop a network of support services for families to ease the transition home and support children and families when they are no longer connected to the city’s child welfare system.

In November of 1997, during this evolution in New York City’s child welfare system, President Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) (P.L. 105-89) into law marking a major transformation in how states process cases of child abuse and neglect in Family Courts across the country. In writing ASFA Congress attempted to shorten the length of time that children could stay in foster care, increased the frequency with which Family Courts review a child and family’s progress towards achieving permanency, and demanded that states ensure the safety of each child until permanency is achieved. After hearing extensive testimonies from children who had endured years of interminable upheaval, Congress reacted by enacting legislation designed to expedite permanency for children in foster care by shortening their length of stay in care and reunifying them with their families or finalizing their adoption. Under ASFA, in order to be eligible for federal IV-E foster care funds, states are required to enact enabling legislation. New York State’s ASFA (NYS ASFA) legislation was passed into law February 11, 1999.

Recognizing the major impact of ASFA on the opera- tions of the Family Court, Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York (CCC) undertook this project to document the situation and identify resources needed by the courts to maintain children’s safety and move children quickly into permanent homes. ASFA requires major changes in Family Court and child welfare casework prac- tice that must be implemented by the states. The New York City Family Courts, along with ACS, the Legal Aid Society and the 18-B Panel Attorneys have taken significant and meaningful steps towards expediting permanency for chil- dren in foster care. Increased training, new protocols and guidelines enhance the shared commitment of judges, attorneys, and caseworkers to ensuring child safety and achieving expeditious decisions about permanency. Yet, as important as these tools are, they cannot compensate for the sheer lack of financial resources available to the Family Court. Without funds to hire additional judges, attorneys, referees, case coordinators and other court personnel, and without adequate physical space and the availability of support services in the community, few children will be able to quickly find a permanent home and avoid long stays in the foster care system. The successful implementation of ASFA in New York City depends upon the Family Court’s ability to process thousands of additional petitions, the quality of legal representation for parents and children in these proceedings, and the ability of ACS and voluntary agency caseworkers to obtain support services for children and families in the community. The failure to successfully carry out components of ASFA will result in a loss of federal foster care dollars, which represent approximately half of the source of funds used by the states and localities to pay for the room, board, and administrative costs of children in foster care.