[ecj0320]

I am(& hubby) a newbie to the Foster Care program. We are considering Foster-to-Adopt program in NC.
I have been lurking the boards & searching the internet for awhile.
However, I can not find an answer to my question.

Who pays for the homestudy expense fee when participating in the foster care/foster-adopt program?

I did not know if the fee was waived or foster care or not.

Also, what is(if there is one) the adoption fee(range) to adopt the child you are fostering when in the foster-adopt program?

If anyone could answer this question that would be great.
Thanks for your time & help!

[DianeS]

I'm not very familiar with NC, but in most states here's how it works:

If you get your homestudy done through DFS itself, it will be free. There may be a few things you have to provide for the homestudy, and you will have to pay for those. Like, a physical from your doctor, a certified copy of your birth certificate, etc.

If your state allows private agencies to do homestudies for families to adopt from foster care, then each of those agencies can charge the parents what they wish, and it's up to the parents to take that cost into consideration when they choose their agency. In my state, some agencies didn't charge anything but you had to get the required classes somewhere at your own expense (a few hundred dollars), others provided the classes for free but charged an application fee before doing the homestudy (again a few hundred dollars), some did a combination of the two. But I did find one agency that charged $4,000 (yes, four thousand dollars) for the process, but gave a lot of hand-holding through the process and system that supposedly justified the cost.

Note: a regular homestudy done by a worker who isn't approved to do foster care homestudies isn't going to count. So those agencies that only do homestudies for domestic adoption or international adoption - skip them. If they do foster care homestudies they KNOW they do them - they're different, have different questions, and involve quite a few hours of mandatory classes. Regular homestudies just won't count.

Most (maybe all) states have a space n their budget for "non-recurring expenses" to be reimbursed after the adoption of a child from foster care. In my state, it's up to $2,000 of receipts that can be submitted and the state will give me my money back for those expenses. So the few hundred dollars for my classes would be reimbursed after I adopted.

Every state handles actual adoption expenses differently too. Some states handle the adoption of the child all the way through, and don't charge the adopting parents anything. Others have the adopting parents pay some of the fees - like court costs and new birth certificate (here, that's about $250). Others have the new parents hire an attorney of their choosing to complete the adoption once the state's role in terminating bio parents rights is over. Some states have all adoptions from foster care handled the same way, others pay more for the adoption of a special needs child and have the parents pay more for the adoption of a non-special needs child.

Again, if your state has the program that allows reimbursement of non-recurring adoption expenses, those are things that would likely be eligable.

I hope that helps. At least now you have some more terms available for you to search with. Good luck!

[ecj0320]

Thanks for giving me some more helpful information!
Adoption homestudies in NC are around $1,500. We just did not know how much they were for foster care/foster-adopt & if they were waived.

Do you(or anyone else) know of anywhere I could find info on foster-adopt expenses for parents in NC?

Or should we just contact our counties/states social services department for more info?

[DianeS]

Originally Posted by ecj0320

Or should we just contact our counties/states social services department for more info?

Yep, this is how it's done. Call them up, express interest in providing foster care or adopting from foster care, and ask what the first step is. Almost all the time, the first step is attending an orientation session where they gather all the prospective foster or adoptive parents in the same room and tell them all the basics. Which, of course, would include information about homestudies and the other requirements of getting licensed. It saves them a LOT of time to get everyone together and answer all the questions just one time, rather than answering everyone individually over the phone or e-mail.