This summer I was an intern at the Atlanta Office of the Child Advocate (OCA). OCA is an organization that was created several years ago by the State of Georgia and is used as a "check" on all the Division of Family and Children's Services (DFCS) in Georgia. Georgia has 157 counties, thus there are also 157 DFCS agencies throughout the state (one per county). The main Office of the Child Advocate is located in Macon, GA, so that the Office can be centrally located in the state. This summer, for the first time, there were several opportunities for interns to work in Atlanta, out of the Child Placement Office, which is located downtown, directly across the street from the Capitol.

The main focus of my summer job was reviewing various DFCS agencies throughout the state. Because these reviews were done at random, the DFCS agency was given only a few hours notice of our arrival, and that was all the time they had to pull out the 10-15 files of children that we requested to review. The reason it was so important to do these checks at random was because we wanted this to be a true assessment of how each DFCS handles itself on a regular day-to-day basis. We did not want to give them time to possibly alter any records or replace important records that were absent from a file. For the interns, this review involved driving to an individual DFCS unit on a given day (sometimes as much as 7 hours of driving per day!) and sorting through the records and files of random children in that county's foster care system. Often times, one "record" could consist of 5-6 thick three-ring binders. Some county's records were more organized than others, and every county had their own system for filing a child's records. For example, the reason the files were so thick in a few counties was simply because children's records were filed with their siblings, and sometimes there were as many as eight siblings per family! Sorting through the records involved making sure that various, important documents were there - i.e. recent court orders, adoption records (if applicable), case reviews, Citizen Review Panels, records showing that the child's medical, emotional and educational needs were all being met, etc. When a record did not contain some of this documentation, it was marked to have "concerns." This summer, I visited DFCS agencies in Fannin, Cherokee, Fulton, Rabun, Houston, Dougherty, Rockdale and Baldwin counties.

Throughout the summer, I participated in several other activities of note - from June 2^nd through June 17^th, I was involved in the planning and organization of the Celebration of Excellence, an annual graduation ceremony for all foster care children in the State of Georgia currently graduating from high school, college, or some other post-secondary graduate school. The Celebration itself was amazing, and I was so glad to have had the opportunity to work on it, even for a little while. It was wonderful to really see and hear what a difference the Georgia foster care system has done for so many children, despite all of the known setbacks it faces on a daily basis.

I also was able to attend various meetings throughout Atlanta with my supervisor, Allyson Anderson, who was great to work with. Together, we attended meetings with the State Law of Georgia YLD (Young Lawyers Division) Juvenile Law Committee, two Georgia Association for Homes and Services for Children Child Placement and Planning Meetings, a Youth Summit Breakfast, and the Child Placement Project Retreat at the Emory Conference Center. Furthermore, I was given the opportunity to see Senate Bill 80 signed into action by Governor Sonny Perdue and was also able to attend a private meeting with Trey Childress, Governor Perdue's Policy Director, in which we discussed what the field of child advocacy hoped to gain in the next legislative session.

Lastly, I worked independently throughout the summer on an adoption research program. The focus of the project was determining how the other forty-nine U.S. states handle adoptions that originated as deprivation cases. For example, in Georgia, when a case originates as a deprivation case (i.e. a child is removed from his/her natural home), the case is brought to juvenile court. Then, if/when a child's parental rights are terminated, and the child is going to be adopted, the case is transferred to family court, where adoptions are regularly heard. The problem with that system is that often times, a case takes years to transfer from the juvenile court to the family court, and anything can happen during this time. The Office of the Child Advocate's goal is to develop a pilot program sometime in the near future which will focus on a way to keep a case that originated in juvenile court in juvenile court, even after it enters the adoption phase. The idea is that if the case keeps the same case number, and the same judge who heard it in its deprivation phase hears it in its adoption phase, children will begin entering and exiting Georgia's foster care system on a much more rapid pace. To further OCA's goal, I spent much of my summer contacting various adoption specialists, including attorneys, lawyers, advocates, and policy directors to determine how different states handle foster care adoptions. I learned a lot in terms of helping Georgia to model its future plans, and I laid all of my research out in a manual that explains each state's policies and depicts everything through a color-coded map of the U.S. and various tables and charts.