The North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC) produced the following adoption fact sheets for SPARC to help inform adoption community members and adoption advocates. The fact sheets, derived mostly from 2011 AFCARS data, have information about the number of waiting children, the length of time children spend in care, the race of waiting and adopted children, types of exits from foster care, Title IV-E payments, and more.

To download a PDF of your state’s fact sheet, click on your state name. See below for sources and notes on specific data points.

Alabama

Alaska

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

DC

Delaware

Florida

Georgia

Hawaii

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

 

Kentucky

Louisiana

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

Mississippi

Missouri

Montana

Nebraska

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Mexico

New York

North Carolina

 

North Dakota

Ohio

Oklahoma

Oregon

Pennsylvania

Puerto Rico

Rhode Island

South Carolina

South Dakota

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

Vermont

Virginia

Washington

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Wyoming

 

Source
NACAC prepared these fact sheets using data made available, with permission, by the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) were originally collected by the Children’s Bureau. NACAC’s work was funded by SPARC. The collector of the original data, SPARC, the Archive, Cornell University and their agents or employees bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

When used, data on race of a state’s child population is from the 2011 Children’s Bureau Child Welfare Report Outcomes data center at http://cwoutcomes.acf.hhs.gov/data/overview.

Notes on Specific Variables
Waiting Children
AFCARS defines waiting children as foster children ages 0 to 17 who either have a case goal of adoption or whose parental rights have been terminated. Youth who are 16 and 17 who have a goal of emancipation are not considered to be waiting children.

Length of Stays
For adopted children, the length of stay is the lifetime length of stay for those children who have had only one or two episodes in foster care, which includes about 94 percent of the children. For waiting children, the length of stay is for the most recent foster care episode.

IV-E
In our fact sheets, children were counted as IV-E if a IV-E payment was made on their behalf during the reporting period for waiting children, and at adoption for adopted children. Some children who do not receive a payment in this timeframe may still be IV-E eligible.

Prior Relationship of Adoptive Parent
Adoptive parent(s) can be counted in four categories—stepparent, other relative, foster parent, and non-relative. In the AFCARS state-by-state data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, some states count parents in more than one category, while others do not. The data reported on the Children’s Bureau website does not duplicate categories and was our source for this variable on most states’ fact sheets. In some cases, however, the data did not seem accurate (all adoptions were by foster parents, for example) so we omitted the variable for that particular state.