Fifteen years ago, two professors from the University of Pittsburgh were invited to go to Russia by city government officials in St. Petersburg. The Soviet Union had dissolved, and with it, a lot of government support for child welfare initiatives. What policies, what services should we put in place, the city fathers asked the academics?

But while Robert McCall and Christina Groark, respectively a professor and an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education and co-director of its Office of Child Development were exploring those questions, they also had a chance to visit one of St. Petersburg's orphanages. That visit set them on a new path of child welfare issues in Russia and led them to produce some of the most interesting research I have read to date on Russia's orphanages and how to make them better. It's going to take a few posts to tell you everything I learned from them during my recent interview.

Since that first trip, the professors have been back to Russia 25 to 30 times, visiting not only more orphanages in St. Petersburg, but also some in Moscow and Siberia, concentrating on the baby homes that serve children up to age four. They have seen how these facilities care for young children, and gathered some thoughts about what they could do to improve the lives of these children and their caregivers.

McCall and Groark got the seed money for their first orphanage visit from International Assistance Group, a Pittsburgh-based adoption agency that was one of the first to be re-accredited by Russia on June 27. IAG has funded their work on and off, along with the U.S. Public Health Service's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Howard Heinz Endowment.

What struck me most in their research is that the consistency in caregivers that I saw in my sons' orphanages (in Vladivostok and Sakhalin) is not the norm across Russia. McCall and Groark found that a single group of children might be exposed to 60 to 100 different caregivers in their first two years at a baby home. The preferred staffing pattern for a baby home--24-hour shifts for the full-timers, combined with days off, part-timers, staff turnover and the transfer of children to new caregivers as the children grew older--account for those high numbers.

I was also, however, surprised to learn that there is fairly high turnover among the children in a baby home. McCall and Groark found that 40% to 50% of the children leave every year. Some back to biological families (remember, Russian orphanages are often used for temporary care), some to foster families and some, yes, to adoptive parents.

In upcoming posts, I'm going to look at the changes that the professors recommended and how they improved orphanage conditions, as well as at their plans for the future.