THE Child Development Agency (CDA) is looking to cut the number of children entering state care, as part of efforts to improve its own efficiency while safeguarding the best interest of Jamaica’s youths.

To make this happen, new CDA boss Carla Francis Edie said they will strengthen the foster care programme while seeking to have more children adopted.

“In February (we) usually celebrate foster care month and so next year we will be taking it a little further. If we get most of the children out in foster care, and those who have been abandoned, if from an early age we can get them adopted, then we can free up the system,” Francis Edie, a trained social worker, said.

Foster care and adoption is especially important, she said, given the large numbers of children for which children’s officers, for example, now have responsibility.

“Persons (children’s officers) might have like 200, which is a lot for one person, which means that there is no way you are going to be able to really offer the quality care that the agency would want. So foster care is going to be a thrust for us, and adoption,” Francis Edie noted.

To that end, there is in place a foster care improvement plan, which includes the offer of specialised foster care for children with special needs, such as those with mental or physical challenges or severe medical conditions, according to Rashida St Juste, the CDA’s public relations and communications manager.

The plan also makes provisions for improved case management practices with case managers required to visit foster homes no less than six times per year even as they serve a caseload of no more than 50 children. A study of the agency’s foster care programme, carried out by the Office of the Children’s Advocate and tabled in Parliament in February, revealed that among the deficiencies in the system were poor communciation between the CDA and foster parents and limited financial — foster parents are given only $8,000 every two months — and psychological support to some families.

“It is also clear that not enough is being done to adequately prepare foster children for adulthood and independence,” children’s advocate Mary Clarke told Parliament then.

At the end of 2007, there were 1,160 children in foster with an attempt made each year to have another 300 added to that number, St Juste said.

As for adoption, the intention is to boost the numbers. For the year 2009/10 alone, 109 adoption orders, allowing the transfer of parental rights to adoptive parents were issued while 43 adoption licences were issued, giving permission for children to leave Jamaica for adoption to be concluded in a scheduled country and the United States.

Since 2004, 690 adoption orders have been issued and 195 adoption licences, St Juste noted.

Francis Edie said that the CDA was also intent on strengthening partnerships with agencies in communities while building awareness about the CDA and its role, to help realise a decline in the number of children requiring state care.

“We will have to work with organisations that are already in the communities so that, one, the persons in the communities would be aware of the organisations (to whom they can look for help). We are talking like the Social Development Commission and there are other non-governmental organisations that work in the communities as well,” she said.

Francis Edie added that parenting education will also be critical since individuals without parental skills are bound to become frustrated when faced with a problem child.

“I have seen cases where parents need just a little help or just to be referred to another social service agency rather than taking their child and putting their child in care,” she told the Observer. “So there might be a parent who comes in with a child, who can’t bother with the child anymore, the child is exhibiting behavioural problems. The social worker’s responsibility would be to talk to the child, talk to the parent. Is it is a situation where the child could be referred to the Child Guidance Clinic or is it that the guidance counsellor in the child’s school can work with the child?

“Also, the CDA has the Child and Family Support Unit (CFSU), which actually began operating October 2009. A parent and a child would come, the social worker at the CFSU would counsel with the child, provide psycho-social support to both of them and then that would prevent the child from going to court,” she added.

The CFSU, Francis Edie said, has so far managed to help more than 480 children and their families

She noted that there were plans afoot to have the CFSU, which is now only operated in the south-east region, rolled out in the other regions — western, southern and north-east.

A halfway house is also to be established to absorb the children who have aged out of the system, but who have not family on which they can rely for support.

The facility, which forms a part of an independent living programme, which has a price tag of $375 million, is to be set up within six months.

“When children have attained the age of 18 and they have nowhere to go, so they have no relatives, it would be like a respite care between institutions and going out to reintegrate into society,” Francis Edie said.

She added that the facility will offer counselling and mentorship, and help youths to find jobs.

In the interim, the CDA boss said that they were also determined to enhance the quality of care offered to the more than 5,000 children currently in state care.

That includes, she said, improving the facilities in which children live.

“We know that the facilities can never ever be home, but as much as is possible it should be a close resemblance of what a home should look like,” she said. “We talk about a lack of resources but I believe that there are many organisations out there that will help. It is just that not everybody will come to us and so we will have to go out there and seek the assistance.”

In addition, Francis Edie, who up to recently was the registrar at the Children’s Registry, said she would be making herself personally available to the children in care while making it easier for them to have direct access to her.

“I myself will be going into the institutions. I believe I should lead from the front so I will be making the announced visits and the unannounced visits in the nights sometimes, too, and meeting with the children and the caregivers as well. But just to let the children know that we do care and that they can have direct access to me,” she said.