Not Quite

Here's that data again:

• Percent of children discharged from foster care to adoption in the past year: 19%
• Median months from removal to adoption discharge: 34.6 months
• Median months from TPR order to adoption finalization: 10.2 months
• Legally-free children adopted within 12 months: 23%

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Data often raise more questions than answers, especially preliminary data. You can begin to draw reasonable inferences from any dataset, but you’ll almost always need more data to really understand the problem.

Remember that the measure of time from TPR to adoption finalization is the narrowest lens for understanding adoption timeliness in a jurisdiction. It mostly reflects the procedural steps from the court’s decision to sever one set of parental relationships in order to finalize its decision to create a new parent-child relationship and legal family.

Here, the data does not confirm that the majority of children who are adopted from foster care are adopted within 1 year from TPR (the data references median, which is the midpoint in a range of values). Likewise, the data reveal nothing about how adoption timeliness for children with identified adoptive resources compares with adoption timeliness for “legal orphans,” or those who no longer have legal ties to their birth family yet have no adoptive family either.

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