Standing on the precipice

There are approximately 30,000 children in foster care
in the state of Texas alone.

What comes to mind when you hear "foster home?" Is the connotation positive? Most likely it is not. Foster homes and foster parents are just one piece in an impossible puzzle of state caseworkers, therapists, doctors, birth families, extended families, judges, and abused children in limbo. One hopes that when the pieces come together, the child is in a safe, nurturing, forever home. But the picture doesn't always come out that way.

The term "foster home" isn't positive for me, either. From terrible news stories to my own students, I've just never gotten a good impression of this necessary but imperfect aspect of the child protection system. Which is why I approached with such trepidation our meeting last Friday with a new adoption agency - the first step in our effort to become just that - a foster family.

¹fos·ter  adj   \ˈfȯs-tər, ˈfäs-\

: affording, receiving, or sharing nurture or parental care
though not related by blood or legal ties

At our current straight-adoption agency, we have support group meetings every two months. At the most recent gathering, I had the chance to ask an actual CPS caseworker where the children are. I asked her why we are seeing so few broadcasts and even then mostly for large sibling groups or children with severe needs. She said the rest are being adopted directly by their foster parents, a truth I had come to realize but was thankful to have confirmed by someone working directly in the field. Therefore those kids are never made available to straight-adoption families.

Since that meeting, Shawn and I were turned down on our submission for Destiny and her brother. We were sent another broadcast for a sibling group of four kids, which we declined. Around the same time, with the help of some good friends who made an introduction, I spoke at length with a foster/adoption expert about her experiences fostering 23 children and adopting six. Her comments on the place in line of straight-adopt (from foster) parents are that we are at "the bottom of the totem pole" and, more succinctly, "screwed."

Armed with this new information, we met a week later with a new agency that places children in dual-licensed foster/adoptive homes (our current agency handles straight-adopt only). We learned about the process - more paperwork, more training - that we'd have to go through to get foster licensed in addition to our already approved adoptive home study. It seems likely we'd be finished with that process in October and ready to receive a foster placement.

2 types of foster homes were described to us by the new agency. One type, “legal risk,” is where the state is 90-95% sure that they have exhausted birth family and extended family placement options and that the child or sibling group is headed for termination of parental rights and adoption. The second type, an “emergency placement” foster home, is one where the state has in some cases almost no information about the child/children, but needs a foster home in which to place them, sometimes straight from the police squad car that removed them from the abusive birth home. In those cases the state will have at least a year to decide where the child ends up.

What’s troubling me is that the new agency has said that the wait and competition we could face as a “legal risk” foster home could be nearly the same and just as fruitless as our straight-adopt experience. This really surprised me, as I’d assumed the risk we would take on as any kind of foster home would pay off in the closer proximity to available (or nearly available) children for adoption, the ones we were told were all being adopted by foster parents before they ever get to straight-adopt. The new agency, however, is in the process of adding “emergency placement” families to their caseload, because of the fact that potential adoptive parents are having less success as “legal risk" foster homes. For my husband and I, the idea of becoming an “emergency placement” home (when our goal is adoption) is still much too terrifying to consider. Watching kids come and go with no assurance they’ll be part of our future is not what we wanted, and the truth is I guess we’re not desperate enough to try that. Yet.

Today I'm going to let the new agency know that we're transferring our case over to them for dual licensing. We've been wrestling with this decision for about a week and a half since that initial meeting, and I'm still so nervous to relinquish this much control that I can hardly write the email. I've never been bungee jumping, but as we stand on the edge of the abyss that is the foster care system, I hope and pray that there is something or someone there to catch us as we fall. And that we don't end up on the news.