Missouri's adoption subsidy cuts prompts lawyers' response

St. Louis Daily Record & St. Louis Countian, Mar 27, 2006 by Mike Nixon

John Ammann likes kids. He likes adults who choose to be parents and make homes for children that need them by way of adoption.

Ammann also believes that parents who have taken in special needs youngsters from foster care deserve a little extra help when it comes to the financial costs associated with raising a child that has a physical or emotional handicap.

That is why Ammann, director of the Saint Louis University Law School Legal Clinic, has joined with a coalition of 15 other lawyers and family advocacy organizations from St. Louis to Kansas City, and even outside Missouri, to bring a class-action lawsuit against the state following last year's signing into law of Senate Bill 539 by Gov. Matt Blunt, a portion of which eliminates financial support offered to adoptive parents of children with special needs that have come out of state-run programs.

The suit, which was originally filed Aug. 15, 2005 - just 13 days before the withholding of subsidies went into effect - is scheduled to go to trial April 27- 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri in Kansas City.

We are hoping the legislature fixes this problem, Ammann said. Missouri has a huge budget surplus now, a lot more than anybody predicted. The legislature is looking at restoring some cuts to Medicaid, and we applaud them for that. This program is just a drop in the bucket, [and] when it comes down to it, they might be saving a couple million dollars a year when all is said and done.

Ammann explained that the Missouri program offered supplemental financial assistance, generally around $200 a month per child, to cover expenses associated with special needs of children who have either been adopted out of foster care or who are in foster care awaiting adoption, until they reach the age of 18 years. But with a stroke of the governor's pen, children already receiving subsidies were immediately cut off from this state funding, and hope of assistance for future adopted kids in this category was dashed.

A broader part of the law included a needs test, based on the incomes of birth parents of children placed in foster care and the incomes of the adoptive parents. Here's the irony of it, Ammann said. If you adopt a 12-year-old child, and the kid's been in foster care for 10 years, who cares what the birth parent's income was 12 years ago. But that's what we look at to determine if the subsidy can be needs tested.

The law also places a cap on assistance if an adoptive family has an income greater than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which would be about $37,700 a year for a family of four. The problem with that, Ammann and others argue, is that it does not take into account the added financial burden placed on families that might otherwise be considered financially stable when a special needs child is placed in their care.

Let me be very clear that it is not me or my agency that is bringing this suit, said Melanie Scheetz, executive director for the Foster and Adoptive Care Coalition in St. Louis, as she offered an explanation of the situation and praised the efforts of legal professionals taking the issue to court.

Why is this a big deal? Scheetz asked rhetorically. The average person might think [if the adoptive family] makes enough money they should be able to afford to take care of the kid's needs. That's a lovely thought until you are a person who actually has a child who has severe needs. Scheetz told of one family that spends in excess of $300 a month on diaper costs alone for a child who also needs and will continue to require physical therapy and other treatments as he grows.

You want to do the right thing and adopt a child, but you don't want to bankrupt your family, Scheetz said.

Statistics indicate that 85 percent of children adopted from the foster care system do have special needs of one for or another. Most of those are not adopted into what experts in this field could categorize as financially affluent environments.

Not everybody is aware of the adoption subsidy system, Ammann said. [Having the subsidy] is good economics for the state. Many of these kids have very severe needs, who are in residential placements, that may cost the state as much as $3,000 a month. So it's a whole lot cheaper for a child to be in a loving family than it is to be in an institution. That's our argument all along. And the state's own experts said that the cuts from Senate Bill 539 would keep kids in foster care longer. They admit that would be the effect of this bill. If the kids are in a residential setting, it will cost the state more money than if the child are adopted. That's not counting the emotional cost placed on a child who has to stay in foster care or a group home or a residential setting for even longer than he has already been there.

Child advocacy groups confirm that while there are many positive foster care settings, the facts remain that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of children in foster care have some sort of behavioral or emotional disorder. According to Mentoring USA, 37 to 46 percent of children leaving foster care have not completed high school, 25 to 51 percent of children who have grown up in foster care enter the world unemployed after leaving the foster care system, and 12 to 35 percent of those children end up homeless at one time or another.