Senate subcommittee advances bill to shorten foster-care permanency timelines and speed adoptions

A South Carolina Senate subcommittee on Family and Veterans' Services on Thursday voted to give bill S240 a favorable report to the full committee after a multi-hour hearing that focused on shortening the timelines courts use to move foster-care cases toward permanency and adoption.

The bill would change several deadlines in state child-welfare procedure: move the statutorily required permanency-planning hearing earlier, from 12 months to 9 months after a child is placed in foster care, and shorten the maximum period of reunification efforts from 18 months to 15 months. The measure also directs earlier preparation of adoptive-home background summaries, adds tools to find or notify absent parents, and strengthens one ground for termination of parental rights (repetition and severity of abuse and neglect).

Senator Billy Garrett, the bill sponsor from Greenwood County, told the subcommittee the bill’s central goal is to “shorten the time it takes to get permanency planning so we can get a child adopted.” Garrett said the proposal would initially reduce the reunification window by three months — from 18 months to 15 months — and that the longer-term aim is to run adoption efforts in parallel with termination proceedings so “on that day … we go ahead and go forward with the adoption.”

Jim Thompson, an adoption attorney who described decades of practice in both private and foster-care adoptions, told…