#selection staffing

As the 1 year mark since being approved was approaching, I was beginning to wonder if we really were meant to adopt. I knew it would be a wait, but I did not expect it to take this long. “How can it take this long when there are so many kids waiting?” We get asked this all the time. There is a process and caseworkers want to make the best match possible. I can’t say that I fully know the answer myself, but there is a process. It can be devastating to a child to be placed in a home, only to have the parents give up on them when things get tough and return them. I get it, so I continue to try to be patient, knowing that our child/children are out there waiting for us.

When we were approved for adoption, that approval was to last a year before we would have to renew again. As adopt only, renewal just meant that we had to update vaccinations for the dogs and cat, update any medical changes and meet with our adoption worker to make sure our home was still in satisfactory condition and discuss any life changes that would affect possible matches. During that meeting, we expressed our frustration at not receiving any referrals. She said she understood and stated that these things take time and that we needed to be advocates for ourselves. I was a little frustrated by this answer. We had no idea what that looked like. Iowa does not list available children, so we didn’t know who to contact and we didn’t know contacts in any of the agencies to get our names out there. We had registered on the iowakidsnet web site, so we naively assumed caseworkers were scouring that resource for available families. Apparently it’s still new and caseworkers are slow to adopt using it. Our worker said she would put our names out there to a couple of her contacts and hopefully that would generate some results. We did get one phone call out of it, but it was not even close to being a match. The caseworker knew it was a long shot, but she had a very difficult to place sibling group and thought she would try. Meanwhile another sibling group of 4 became available on the Texas Exchange (TARE) that we felt seemed like a prefect match for us. We were excited about this one. The next morning we were marked as not selected for this group. Although there was no investment in these kids we were crushed to learn that we would not even be considered for this group. Taking the advice of our caseworker, I wasn’t going to sit back and accept the decision without a fight. I was going to advocate for ourselves. 😃. I called up their caseworker and asked if she could explain, without going into much detail, why we were not chosen. After a quick search for our home study, she said that our home study stated that we were willing to take a group up to 11 years of age. The eldest was 12. Although the study did say 11, further in it states that we would consider older, if sibling cohesiveness warranted it. Lessoned learned. Make your preferences clear and up front. Caseworkers don’t have time to deep dive into all home studies, so they quickly weed out based on the initial pages. Once we cleared up the misunderstanding, we were now being considered for them.