Judge Shookhoff encourages University
community to support adoption
by Ann Marie Deer Owens
During an emotional Nashville Forum, Juvenile Court Judge Andy Shookhoff
challenged the Vanderbilt community to provide leadership in a collaborative
effort to find loving permanent homes for several hundred children in foster
or other temporary care in Davidson County.
The April 22 presentation at the Stadium Club to approximately 265 people
included moving testimonials from four families that have adopted children
through the Center for Adoption at Family and Children's Service, a public/private
partnership created to provide a full range of adoption services. The other
speakers were Jan Dick, coordinator for Resource Exchange for Adoptable
Children in Tennessee (REACT), and Joseph, a 12-year-old boy who very much
wants a permanent family.
Shookhoff, a former associate professor of the practice of law at Vanderbilt
and former director of the Vanderbilt Juvenile Law Clinic, said there has
been a dramatic increase in the number of children who have been neglected
and abused and cannot be returned to their biological families.
"This involves families who are being challenged, torn apart by drugs,
alcohol, mental illness, physical illness, just a range of problems that
beset families," said Shookhoff, who is also a 1977 graduate of the
Vanderbilt School of Law. "Over the past 10 years we have seen an increase
in the number of kids that come before us each year, from 900 about 10 years
ago to 2,800 last year." One of the reasons for the higher number is
a dramatic increase in crack cocaine addiction, he said.
In 1992 Shookhoff hired court referee Mary Walker, a former social worker,
to help him develop a better way of responding to children in foster care
who were not being placed for adoption. They began reviewing every case
to learn what brought them into foster care and what were the obstacles
to finding them permanent homes.
"We found that a significant number of these children were not anywhere
closer to going home than they were when they came into care, some of them
years ago," Shookhoff said. He also said that while the children were
being provided basic needs such as food and shelter, there was not much
of a plan in terms of where they were to go in the future.
Shookhoff has been working closely with the Center for Adoption, a joint
project of the Tennessee Department of Children's Services and Family and
Children's Service, to improve the process of matching children and adoptive
families and provide more support during the process.
Shookhoff urged the Vanderbilt University community, both collectively
and as individuals, to provide support, assistance and educational efforts
to encourage more families to adopt children in the public foster care system.
REACT, a statewide program to match children with prospective parents,
is housed at the Center for Adoption. Dick, REACT coordinator, said there
are approximately 200 children who are seeking permanent families in Davidson
and the 13 surrounding counties. Across Tennessee, there are approximately
700 children waiting for someone to adopt them. Dick also introduced several
adoptive parents at the forum who challenged many myths about adoptions.
An adoptive father named Jim said he used to think he was too old to raise
another child after his son grew up. He and his wife, Sandy, now have a
10-year-old daughter whom they adopted and love very deeply. Other families
introduced to the audience include a single mother and teacher who adopted
a girl and a young couple who adopted a teenager.
Perhaps the person at the forum who best demonstrated the need for more
adoptive families was Joseph, a child in the foster care system who said
he likes to laugh, tell jokes and make people laugh. He lost his mother
to lung cancer. "I am really a pretty good kid, and I would just like
to have a family," he said.
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This document created May 22, 1997
HTML Translation by Billy Kingsley