Who Hears The Voice Of The Children?

Allenah-

I commend you for taking this stance. I would like to offer one piece of advice. I am sure that your religious convictions are strong and true, however, they will likely offend those that do not share the same. I don’t think you or any of us can afford to lose support just because of different religious opinions. So, I think it best to keep Biblical phrases/arguments out of this, especially if you hope to be in front of Congress someday.

With all that said, you are taking the same path that I intend to do some day. I am shrouded in secrecy now as I haven’t not finished my journey. At age 38, I made the specific decision to have a family by adopting out of foster care. I bought into all of the media hype. I did the research. I was still young enough to have a bio child, but felt that I was being led down a different path. As a single parent, I knew that I was not prepared to take on the older children. So, once I was “settled” and started my path, in September of 2008, I did all of the prep work through the county to get certified. I still only wanted to adopt. But, here in my county, they require the adoptive parents to attend the same classes as the foster parents. In fact, only the last 2 of 6 weeks of classes deal with adoption. It is a strategy you see; they would not have enough foster parents if they did not do it this way. On day one, 80% of the participants were adopt only. By end of training, of the 80% remaining, 80% were foster-to-adopt.

The agency then tries to accuse the pre-adoptive parents of using them as an adoption agency. True enough, some of the people in the system are only trying to build families and cannot afford other means of doing it. Some are in it to pad their retirement income. But, by and far, the significant majority of foster parents I meet in classes are in it for the kids.

I am still mourning the loss of my first placement. You see, since I was limited to two children during my first two years, I could not be in queue for adoption. So, I had my two foster daughters for exactly two years and one day. Their birth mother did nothing more than visits for the entirety of the case plan’s first 18 months. The agency gave the first extension for the pure misguided believe that one of the children’s birth father might get a job and take both. There was no evidence that he had even applied but they took his word solely. By the time the extension was nearing an end, the birth mom “miraculously” came into enough money that her rent on “proper housing” was paid for one year. That was all that they cared about. There was evidence that the birth mom and her new husband were verbally abusive to each other and the kids, there was an actual physical abuse incident one week before the court hearing to release the children to the mother, and nobody cared.

The bottom line in this case was that the first case worker and her supervisor allowed it to be dragged out for so long that by the time the mother secured housing, there was no justifiable reason, to judges anyway, that they could NOT send the children back. That CW moved in Feb and the new CW and her supervisor were both flabbergasted, CW’s words, that this case had drawn out for so long. The so called GAL did not show up to the hearing, so it was continued, but the birth mom’s attorney asked for and was given temp custody of the children until the continuation. The children were devastated, as was I. Neither wanted to return to the mother. But, since they were so young, instead of recognizing that even after all of the supervised and unsupervised visits the kids still didn’t want to live there, that maybe there is a reason, they tried to accuse me of sabotaging the reunification. Yes, I did that by loving them too much, ensuring that they were clean, healthy, and had a clean home and clothing.

Anyway, I will follow along here. I truly believe that the only way this system is going to change is to have class action lawsuits. What needs to happen is that enough kids who SHOULD have had parental rights terminated at 15 months based on the ASFA , and who would have still been young enough to be highly adoptable, but were not, and did not get adopted, but ended up aging out of the system as a result, if enough of these kids file a lawsuit that the decisions made by the agencies and court violated their Constitutional rights, and that by the Federal Government allowing loopholes in the ASFA and failing to put in mandates and sanctions to force the states to abide by it, the federal government failed in their responsibility of maintaining the children’s rights and freedoms.

I hope that long, run on paragraph made sense. But, there are enough of these kids out there now that if you could get them all together, you would have a leg to stand on.

This system is all about keeping the system going. Each person does what they do to draw the cases out the longest so that they keep the monies coming into the system, and justify their jobs. If they followed the guidelines of the ASFA alone, I know in my county that the vast majority of children under 6 would be adopted. But instead they continue to push the limits, send kids back to birth parents who cannot and/or will not properly parent them, so that more than 1/3 come back into care, and when they finally terminate parental rights, the children have been so emotionally traumatized that nobody wants to adopt them.