It’s been too long
since I wrote anything here. A couple
weeks ago we attended a training session mandated by our new county. Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I had
expected. The staff and the other
families were as nice as I anyone could have asked for, but that wasn’t really
the problem. If we back up another week
we encounter the problem. Before we left
Belmont County we completed all of the training required by them and by the State
of Ohio and were certified as foster parents.
We understood that, since we would be in a new home, we would need to
have another home visit and another fire inspection. The problem is that when we contacted our new
county agency, we were told that we would also have to take several additional classes,
rewrite our home-study and provide
copies of the home-studies that were done for our first two adoptions thirteen
and fifteen years ago.
We’ve all heard
about first impressions and these were not
good ones. We weren’t too happy about
some of the new requirements and wished them luck with the last one. We sure don’t have copies of our old
home-studies (or if we do they are buried so deep in our box pile they may not
be found until our children go sort through our stuff when they put me in a
nursing home), I’m not sure the agencies that wrote them retain records that
long, and at least one of the social workers that wrote them died ten years
ago.
As I said, we went
to the first class the new agency required and it wasn’t bad. It was all about the rules they expected us
to follow. Many rules were the same as
Belmont County, some were new and a few were just explained better. Some of the things that we learned weren’t
especially welcome. The county was
fairly clear that although you have the chance to express your preferences,
when they select you for a particular foster child you may not get the chance
to review their file first and it would count against you (as in, it would
impact your ability to be offered foster children in the future) if you refused
a child that was offered. One other item
did not go over especially well with us.
Our new county requires an exclusivity agreement. If anyone is certified by them they insist
upon exclusive “rights” to them as foster parents for a minimum of one
year. If you choose to change agencies
in less than one year, the (taxpayer supported, public) agency will bill you
for the expenses they incurred in getting your certification. We thought this was unusual and we mentioned
it to a couple other social workers that we know. Neither had ever heard of such a thing. Again, not a great first impression.
Surprisingly, at
the same time that we were discussing these negative first impressions, I had a
surprise visitor at my office at church.
A representative from Guidestone, a private foster care/adoption agency
stopped by the church to meet the new pastor (me) and to see if she could come
and speak for a few minutes about their agency some Sunday morning. Since Guidestone is essentially an agency of
the United Methodist Church, this was a reasonable request. The surprising thing was the timing. My wife and I had already discussed the
possibility of meeting with them to discuss options particularly because of our
first impressions at our county agency. The
end result has been that we’ve deliberately slowed the pace of re-certification
with the county (since we don’t want to have to pay them for their services if
we choose to go elsewhere) and we are looking more deeply into what it would
take to re-certify with Guidestone instead.
All in all, the
process is taking longer than we thought it would, is more difficult that it
ought to be, and now we are not so sure that foster care is something we want
to pursue long-term. Instead we are
feeling that foster-to-adopt as a deliberate path to adoption may be the best
course for us. The adventure continues…
