Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones's Statement for National Foster Care Month

May 21, 2008

HON. STEPHANIE TUBBS JONES
OF OHIO
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

• Mrs. JONES of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I rise today both in recognition of May as National Foster Care Month and to acknowledge our shared obligation to do everything that we can to help the more than half a million children currently in our Nation's foster care system. I applaud the thousands of devoted adoptive parents in Ohio and across the country who provide children and youth in foster care with permanent, loving families.

• Twenty-one-year-old Ashley Flucsa entered Ohio's foster care system at age 10. She spent the next 8 1/2 years in foster care , longing for a family to call her own. ``I wanted to have the same sense of security that children in non-foster families have,'' she recalls. ``I wanted to have a place to go during college break and I wanted to be able to fully trust that I would always have a place to call home. I wanted a mom to shop with and a dad to someday walk me down the aisle. I wanted stability.''

• Today, Ashley is a nursing student at Lakeland Community College. Her foster parents, Yvette and Jim Goldurs of Cleveland Heights, are in the process of adopting Ashley. She hopes to someday become a nurse practitioner or a doctor, and she is very involved with the Ohio Youth Advisory Board, which allows her to share her experiences and advocate for reform on behalf of Ohio's children and youth who are still in foster care . Most importantly, she has found the permanent family that she longed for.

• Currently, Ohio has more than 17,000 children living in foster care . In 2005, a quarter of these foster children were waiting to join adoptive families. They had to wait an average of nearly 4 years to do so. More worrisome still, many of Ohio's foster youth will never find the permanent family they need. More than 1,200 youth ``aged out'' of Ohio's foster care system in 2005 completely on their own, with no family to rely upon.

• The Federal Adoption Incentive Program, which was first enacted in 1997 as part of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, encourages States to find foster children like Ashley permanent homes through adoption. The Adoption Incentive Program is due to expire this year, on September 30, and should be reauthorized so that it can continue to serve as a vitally important incentive to States for finalizing adoptions for children in foster care , with an emphasis on finding adoptive homes for special needs children and foster children over age 9. I am proud of Ohio's success in finalizing more than 10,400 adoptions of children from foster care between 2000 and 2006, earning $5.4 million in Federal adoption incentive payments, which are invested back into the child welfare program.

• We need to help more foster children in Ohio and across the Nation join loving, permanent adoptive families. The Adoption Incentive Program is effective in encouraging more adoptions from foster care , and I look forward to seeing that it is reauthorized this year.