November 17th, Richard Barth presents "Adoption and Safe Families Act: Current and Predicted Outcomes of Policy
Implementation"
at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

The effectiveness of federal legislation designed to increase the number of children adopted into permanent homes will be the topic of the Nov. 17 lecture in the Child Policy Speaker Series.

Richard Barth, Frank Daniels Distinguished professor of social work at the University of North Carolina, will speak at 3 p.m. in Georgia State University's Andrew Young School of Policy Studies building at 14 Marietta St. (7th floor seminar room). His lecture, titled "Adoption and Safe Families Act: Current and Predicted Outcomes of Policy Implementation," is free and open to the public.

About 200,000 children are placed into foster care each year with the intent of reunifying them to their now safer family but with a possibility that they will not go home and will, instead, be adopted by another family. "The greatest tension in child welfare policy is to ensure that the children who can be reunified to their family have a reasonable chance of doing so" says Barth, author or co-author of 12 books and more than 150 articles and chapters on child welfare services. "Yet, the implementation of new policies that do not mandate as much effort to return children home has raised questions about whether or not families have a fair chance to resume their lives together."

Passed in 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act rewards states financially for increasing adoptions and eliminates some of the requirements for reunification services. The law says that the health and safety of children takes precedence over efforts to reunite families.

Sponsored by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Child Policy Speaker Series is a program of the Georgia Health Policy Center. Established in 1995 at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, the center offers a community-based, multidisciplinary approach to improving health status at the community level. For more information, visit www.gsu.edu/ghpc.