|
First, you must be licenced to adopt from foster care before anyone will talk to you about a placement. Getting licenced involves having a homestudy done and approved, and finishing whatever licencing classes your state requires.
Then and only then will anyone work to get children into your home. There is a slight chance that if children your own worker knows about would be a perfect match for you, the children could be moved in before all the paperwork was completed, but that is so incredibly rare that it's not worth hoping for.
Then your worker works on finding a match for you. She'll take what she knows about each of her waiting families, and what she knows about children in the state, and try to make matches. Families help by finding children they may be interested in, and requesting their worker to send their homestudy to be considered for the child.
Finding a picture of a child first is going about it backwards. Different states take different amounts of time to licence families, but even a fast licencing could mean the children are already placed with another family before you're ready. Sometimes it works, but again very very rarely.
It's also important to note that national photolistings usually contain children who cannot be placed in their own state because so few people are interested in a child like that. Either the child's age, race, number of siblings, illness, behaviors, or disability make everyone who knows about that child pass on the possibility of adopting him or her. Confidentiality rules prohibit most of that information from being listed on a public web site.
Which also means that each state has hundreds or thousands of children waiting to be matched with adoptive homes who the workers expect to be able to match reasonably easily. These children usually never appear on photolistings, but the workers know about them, and homestudies are considered for them.
Once a child's worker has your homestudy, she can evaluate it to see if you are prepared for the type of children she has waiting to be matched with families. It can be a process full of waiting! Not always, but often.
If adopting from foster care is something you're interested in, definately take some time to research the issues children in foster care often face. "A Child's Journey Through Placement" is a really good book if you don't know much about the process. It is full of case studies, and follows quite a few children from their biological families, talks about the reasons the children were removed from their parents, the parent's attempts (or non-attempts) to get them back, the childrens' foster families and how they handled behaviors, and the families that some of them ended up with. It's really good, and fairly easy to read.
You can call DHS or a private agency contracted by the state to place children from DHS, and get informational brochures and attend orientations. Then pick the agency (DHS is it's own agency) you wish to work with, and go through their licencing procedures. It won't cost much at all - likely just a few hundred dollars. No sense in paying for a private homestudy when it might not be appropriate for DHS placements and would cost you a lot of money, and you'd still need an agency for the classes anyway. It can be a pain to work within the system, but it's preparing you for all the red tape and headache that will be caused by doctors who don't take Medicaid, bio parents who don't show up for visitors, neighbors who think the kids are rotten just because they're "foster kids", etc.
It's a lot of work, but most people believe it's all worth it in the end.
Good luck!
|