Poverty, bias and difficulty in finding adoptive parents are key among a number of factors that contribute to the higher proportion of black children who end up in foster care, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

The report, completed last month, said its survey of 48 states and the District of Columbia showed that most jurisdictions have taken steps to address the disproportionate representation, including involving families in decisions regarding children’s care, building community support to help children remain within their families and to widen the search for relatives to care for the children. The states, however, also reported that they had limited ability to analyze data and come up with strategies and often relied on assistance from universities and non-governmental organizations for help.

“Families living in poverty have greater difficulty accessing housing, mental health, and other services needed to keep families stable and children safely at home,” the GAO found. “Bias or cultural misunderstandings and distrust between child welfare decision makers and the families they serve are also viewed as contributing to children’s removal from their homes into foster care. African American children also stay in foster care longer because of the difficulties in recruiting adoptive parents and a greater reliance on relatives to provide foster care who may be unwilling to terminate the parental rights of the child’s parent -- as required in adoption -- or who need the financial subsidy they receive while the child is in care.”

The report also said that while states welcomed federal assistance, a lack of flexibility to use funds to provide indirect services that would help keep children within families, such as drug treatment or counseling for parents, created a hindrance, “although states can use other federal funds for this purpose if they consider it a priority.”

The GAO conducted a survey of all 50 states and the District between November 2006 and January 2007, and 48 states responded. The agency also interviewed researchers and federal agency officials; conducted a literature review of information on the issue of foster care and adoption, analyzed federal legislation and policy and conducted site visits in several states, as well as consulted state and local officials and others involved in child welfare systems by telephone.

The report’s findings and recommendations were sent to the Department of Health and Human Services, which provides federal oversight of state child welfare operations and administers about $8 billion in funding each year for child welfare services, and to the House Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In September 2005, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem), then the ranking minority on the powerful House Ways and Means committee, asked the GAO to investigate the cause of disproportionate placement by race in foster care and to recommend solutions.

Rangel’s request followed a 2005 report he had requested from the Congressional Research Office, which showed that African-American and American Indian children were about twice as likely to be among the children entering the foster care system than their overall presence in the general population.

According to the report, theories about racial disproportion in the child welfare system suggest that children of color are more likely to be poor or from single parent homes, which are considered risk factors for maltreatment; that they come into contact more often with social services officials who are likely to report such mistreatment; that biased assumptions likely spur social service employees to report children of color to child protective services, and that children of color have less access to preventive services or conditions that promote permanent placement.

The GAO report confirmed those findings and noted that black American children made up less than 15 percent of the overall child population in the 2000 Census, but 27 percent of the children who entered foster care in 2004 and represented 34 percent of children who remained in foster care at the end of that year.

“At each point in the child welfare process, the disproportionality of African American children grows,” the report said.

The report also said that difficulty in finding appropriate adoptive homes, the impact of being placed in foster care with relatives, an unwillingness to adopt older black children and a belief that black children are more likely to be diagnosed as having special needs also contributed to longer stays in foster care. Black children made up nearly half of the children eligible for adoption and waited significantly longer than other children for placement.

Rangel is now chairman of Ways and Means, which could help legislative initiatives to address the issue.

In Michigan, which began a process in 2004 to reduce the number of children of color in foster care, the results of the GAO report weren’t surprising.

“The data has been around for a long time,” said Gale Norman, race equity coordinator for the Michigan Department of Human Resources.

Norman told BlackAmericaWeb.com that Michigan started the process of looking for ways to remedy disproportionate representation before it became a national issue and has developed a three-pronged strategy to engage families in decision making, review the state’s policies and come up with a list of best practices that can be replicated throughout the state and to improve its communications strategies between agencies.

Last year, the agency had won a waiver of federal regulations to allow it more flexibility in using federal foster care money to help children stay within their families instead of being moved into the foster care system. Norman said, however, the waiver had been put on hold, most likely because of budgetary constraints.

She said the state, with the help of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, was using a tool that helped to analyze the role race played in foster care placements and used two counties as the pilot sites.

“From these findings, we will give local officials very short-term results they can achieve with minimal adjustments they can make immediately to test for race neutrality,” Norman said. “We feel that in itself will make a difference.”

She said the state expects to have results by the end of December.

In addition, the state has worked with Casey Family Programs’ peer counseling strategy, in which states share strategies and develop monitoring groups to review data and ensure there’s been change.

“I hope that this actually gets us to a national conversation around federal funding streams,” Lyman Legters, director of the Seattle field office for Casey Family Programs and a leader of the King County Coalition on Disproportionality, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Legters also said he hoped that agencies would look at more flexible ways to address the needs of children in foster care, especially adolescent children.

“What we’re trying to do internally over the next couple of years is redefining our approach to adolescent children in foster care, and we’re asking ourselves is adoption always the best option? When you have kinship adoption, some of these children don’t need to lose connections with their biological families,” noting that relatives, especially grandparents, often are unwilling to cut off biological parental rights to the children.

“We all have undying hopes for our children, always hoping Mom and Dad will step up and get things right,” Legters said. “It’s all very individualized.

“The bottom line in foster care, in my experience, is it has to be individualized. We can’t create these boxes and make families fit into them. Sometimes it’s foster care, sometimes adoption, support for family guardians and third party custody until reconciliation can be achieved.

“We also need to spend more time looking at the paternal side of the family. Certainly, there’s been focus on the mother’s side,” Legters said.

He added that research has also shown that adolescent adoptions, when necessary, are not always fraught with difficulty as has commonly been assumed.

“I’m not certain that’s the reality,” Legters said. “With the right situation and right resources, adolescents are absolutely adoptable.”

The GAO recommended that Congress consider amending federal law to allow federal reimbursement for legal guardianship, similar to that provided for adoption, and that HHS help states track their data on disproportionate placement, as well as share the agency’s initiatives to address the issue.

In a response appended to the report, HHS said it has adopted technical assistance plans to assist states, although it differed from the GAO recommendations on the breadth and execution of some of the strategies.