The objective of the state's contract with the Children's Home Society, a private adoption agency, is to find good permanent homes for children who need them. In many instances the process works perfectly. But the way the system is set up, with the agency being paid when home placements are made -- and thus having a financial incentive to make them -- and with adoptive parents receiving payments from the state for the children, things can go tragically wrong.

Let's hope there are no more Sean Paddocks out there. His short life, which ended in February of 2006 when he was 4 years old, is a testament to just how badly this system can malfunction. His adoptive mother, Lynn Paddock, will be in prison for the rest of her life for the abuse that killed him.

Astonishingly, Paddock and her husband kept asking for more children, and being given them, for years. A News & Observer report last Sunday by Mandy Locke detailed the achingly sad story of how parents who should have loved him failed Sean, and how the system failed him, too.

A social worker for the Children's Home Society placed Sean in the Paddock home. She is not talking, and neither are Society officials nor officials with the state Division of Social Services, because a lawsuit is pending. Reports on the adoptive home were made by the social worker, but it's apparent that DSS audits were either incomplete or not designed to uncover problems.

A bitterly ironic twist to the story is that relatives had cared for Sean and his siblings for a while, taking over for biological parents, and would liked to have continued doing that. But they couldn't support the three along with their own children, burning through their savings. The money to which they were entitled as caregivers was a fraction of what the adoptive parents wound up getting. That is wrong, and it is the first glitch in the system that should be corrected.

It goes without saying, almost, that the state's contracts with the Children's Home Society need to be reviewed. Offering the thousands of dollars agencies can receive under contracts for placing children might be simply be the wrong approach. That kind of incentive, as critics already have noted, could lead to agencies wanting to place kids and keep them in adoptive homes without paying enough attention to warning signs.

In the trial of Sean's adoptive mother, she testified of being abused herself. Yet this little boy's life was a horror story. What's needed is a rethinking of the way the adoption system works, or doesn't work, and how to absolutely ensure safety for adopted children -- particularly those coming from foster care situations, whose needs can be harder to meet -- before the actual transfer of custody.

Adoption can be, often is, a wonderful gift for parent and child, making all lives involved better and more fulfilled. It should have been so for Sean Paddock. It is not too late for the state to do all it can to make it so for others.