New York Program Speeds Up Adoptions Fast Track Can Find Permanent Home In 2 Months

In the world’s fastest city, parenthood has been speeded up as well, thanks to the new Adoption Fast Track program.

Under a program that aims to move children more quickly out of foster care and into permanent homes, adoptions that sometimes took years can now be completed in two months or less.

Tens of thousands of children are in foster care in New York City. Those adopted in Family Court often were “neglected, abused or bandoned, which makes the timeliness of the adoption crucial,” Judge Michael Gage said.

Gage leads a Family Court team of dozens of judges working on the adoptions.

The adoption process itself remains unchanged. The idea is to speed up the paperwork and move the bureaucracy along faster.

More city resources and staff are being used to perform mandatory child abuse screenings, home investigations and fingerprint checks, according to David Bookstaver, spokesman for Family Court.

“We feel confident we’re getting better information - as well as quicker,” Gage said.

For example, home investigations of prospective parents are more thorough because more workers have been assigned to do that, and caseworkers and others checking candidates are better trained, she said.

In the past, fingerprint checks were only done if some question was raised about a possible criminal record. Now, everyone who adopts is fingerprinted, Gage said.

On Tuesday, at the mammoth, gray courthouse in lower Manhattan, Helen Salters beamed as she emerged as the adoptive mother of her 9-year-old grandson, Eric. In the past few months, she said, “things have moved a lot faster.”

New York’s drive to speed adoptions was part of an initiative announced several months ago by President Clinton.

Other states in the forefront of the movement are Illinois and Washington, said Charlotte Vick of the North American Council on Adoptable Children, a nonprofit organization in St. Paul, Minn.

The goal in New York City is to complete at least 1,700 adoptions between April 1 and June 30. As of Tuesday, 2,000 had been finished, some in just two months.

Over the same period last year, only 805 adoptions were completed by the city’s Family Court system. Many had taken years to process.