The months stretched into years, and still Betty Taylor wondered if someone was going to show up one day, produce some paperwork and take her two children away.

The girls, Taylor and Deijah, had been brought to her as infants, foster children from a troubled home. One year went by, then two. Taylor was the only mother the girls had known, and soon they were 3, then 4, and then in school. Still, the court would not bring the case to a close, holding out hope that the parents might reclaim their children.

But on Nov. 23, 1999, the adoption went through. Betty Taylor was finally mother to two little girls. The process had taken nearly six years.

"It went on for so long that I wasn't sleeping well, worrying that social workers would come and move the children for some reason," she said. "But I loved my girls so much it never occurred to me that it wasn't going to work out."

Taylor's odyssey stretches across a remarkable period of transition in the lives of her daughters and in the way the nation finds homes for children caught in circumstances so difficult that they become wards of the state.

Since 1997, when President Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, a bill that emphasized placing foster children in permanent homes rather than waiting for possible but unlikely family reunions, adoptions from foster care have bolted from 28,000 in fiscal 1997 to 46,000 last year.

Using the federal law along with a series of city and Superior Court reforms, the District has seen one of the fastest-changing adoption rates in the nation: Adoptions of foster-care children have nearly tripled in four years, from 113 in 1996 to 330 in fiscal 2000, which ended Sept. 30, marking a profound change in hundreds of young lives in the District.

"Kids in foster care were spending an average of three years in the system, while the efforts to reunite them with their birth families went on and on," said Michael Kharfen, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Now the emphasis is on putting the child in the best possible permanent home as quickly as possible."

The federal law set a 12-month deadline for courts to determine a permanent plan on a foster child's new life. Or, if a child has been in the system for 15 of the previous 22 months, the courts have to submit the same plan. The state gets a bonus of $2,500 to $4,500 for every foster-child adoption that exceeds the state's previous adoption average.

In the District, the new federal concept resonated with two key figures on a uniquely personal basis. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), who has made adoption of the District's 3,200 foster-care children a priority of his administration, was a foster child before being adopted at age 3. And Eugene N. Hamilton, the former chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court who played the decisive role in streamlining adoption procedures, has, along with his wife, Virginia, taken in more than 40 children, adopting four.

"Adoptions were languishing in the system for years, for no apparent reason," said Hamilton, who stepped down in September after seven years at the court's top spot. "Now we've got a system that rolls."

Said Carolyn N. Graham, deputy mayor for children, youth and families, "Mayor Williams thinks that all foster children deserve to live in a loving home like he was raised in, and he intends to promote that philosophy in every area of government."

For parents harboring children in the District's troubled foster system, the new adoption measures are a rare bit of good news.

The foster-care system, subject of a class action lawsuit in 1989 and in receivership since 1995, has been mired in inertia for years. The city did not meet the 1997 federal adoption guidelines until this year, risking $42 million in federal funding, despite several changes at Superior Court to speed up the the process. Children stay in foster care an average of 42 months, far above the national average. And although the number of adoptions is growing, there are still myriad problems that parents say are much worse in the District than elsewhere.

"It seems like you get a new social worker so often that you have to start the process all over again," said Edna Moore, who has adopted five foster children with her husband, Michael.

In the mid-1990s, the District's system for foster adoptions was in shambles. Only a few dozen cases were approved each year, and many prospective parents were scared away by the dysfunctional system. In Superior Court, the adoptions calendar shifted from judge to judge every three months. There was no clear timetable for when key documents had to be submitted.

But in 1997, at the same time the federal law was being enacted, Hamilton set down new guidelines. If foster parents filed for adoption, social workers had to file a background report within 90 days. If that adoption was contested by the birth parents, a 45-day deadline for an initial status conference was set. Both measures were the first written guidelines for the court.

Hamilton also assigned one judge to hear adoption cases for six months at a time, doubling the existing timetable. In 1998, Arthur L. Burnett Sr. held the position for a year. Zinora Mitchell-Rankin, presiding judge of the family division, has held it for the past two years.

"The more times you change judicial officers, the more time you lose in the new judge having to review the file," said Mary E. Abrecht, a judge who oversaw adoptions for six months in 1997. "If you've heard a case two or three times, everything is expedited since you're familiar with the issues. You have a vested interest in your orders being carried out."

Meanwhile, the Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) hired Toni Oliver, an expert in foster adoptions based in Atlanta, to help bring its adoption program into compliance with court orders. And Williams created a volunteer committee that explored ways to find permanent homes for foster children.

The changes have been clear. There were 113 foster adoptions in fiscal 1996, then 132, 168, 250 and 330 in succeeding years. The court's new program recently won one of five national adoption grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, some $600,000 to help clear away further red tape.

"The changes are about 75 percent court-sensitive and 25 percent CFSA-sensitive," said Tommy Wells, executive director of the Consortium for Child Welfare, an umbrella organization of nonprofit agencies in the District. In 1998, the group paid for an extra law clerk to help Burnett with adoptions. The position has now become a permanent court position.

"There's been a dramatic change in adoptions, but it's really all due to improved administration and paperwork. It's not like there's been a rush of new adoptive parents," Wells said.

But Wells and others point to a host of problems that remain.

The District has been slow to implement $5 million in congressional funding that would further speed adoptions. The CFSA receivership is still mired in controversy, as Ernestine F. Jones recently announced her resignation as director after a string of highly publicized agency failures.

And Pierre Bergeron, a family law lawyer, worries that the new deadlines may be too short for troubled parents who are facing the termination of their rights. Most of them have serious drug problems, he said, and recovering could take several years.

"The biggest mistake the court can make is to want to come in and fix everything by separating the child from their parents because of some difficulty," Bergeron said. "Children belong with their families, and quick adoption doesn't take into account the anger, frustration and alienation that children may develop later on."

Barbara Collins, president of the D.C. Metropolitan Foster/Adoptive Parents Association, isn't convinced.

"The overriding issue is getting children into good homes," she said. "The new deadlines encourage that. It's much better than leaving a child in limbo for years at a time, wondering where they are going to live."