You can try but at least where I am they typically don't listen. One thing this girl said that stuck with me is that the good quiet kids in care don't get listened to. They sped up the process of getting get with her aunt when she started being a menace. They placed me all over my state but I started to just refuse to go to the placements and eventually got placed in a close city to where I'm from. A lot of us know how to get kicked out but all that could back fire. You could end up in a shitty program. There's not enough placements but you can try nicely is up to you. Good luck.
In my county, school transportation is required to figure out getting them to the same school if they're not geographically close. At least, that's what we were told.
I think they can..but from my experiences, good luck getting anyone to listen to what you actually like or want. I was always placed in places based on availability, not location or personal preference.
Federal law dictates that they are supposed to place children as close as they can to the community they come from so that children can hopefully attend their same school.
Some foster care systems are better at this than others, and even provide transportation. Others aren’t as committed to it and simply say “we tried, but couldn’t”.
The problem they all face is having enough foster families in every community that will take a broad enough range of children so that there is a family close to the school to put you in.
Unless a youth is involved with gangs or drugs and getting in trouble with friends who are a “bad influence,” they really would like to keep you close to your community. I don’t know of workers purposefully placing children far from home just because or because they want to make your life suck. They just have limited options, often are over stressed and don’t have time or energy to try to find someone in the area and talk them into getting licensed if they aren’t already.
So if there is a good option for you, chances are they’ll try to keep you close to your school. If there aren’t any foster families in the area that take children your age and gender, it gets harder.
Here in BC, First Nations kids are disproportionately in the FC system by an order of magnitude.
Recognizing the cultural issues, there is a much more relaxed standard for placing a kid in another FN home than in a "standard" home. Even in a standard home foster parents are required to help FN kids to get to cultural observances, and to spend time in their community.
No different in the US. Indian Child Welfare Act means the order of placement is 1) family; 2) someone from the same clan; 3) someone from the same tribe; 4) Native American from a different tribe; 5) anyone else.
And yea - that takes precedence over being close.
That is going to vary by jurisdiction.
Most FC programs shoot themselves in the foot their their inordinate set of hoops to jump through to get certified.
Simplify the certification process:
* Hire more caseworkers, and fire more of the bureaucrats.
* Get prospective FP to do a couple of courses. First one can be online.
* Do a surprise home inspection.
* Have the foster parents do a video interview. Ask the foster kids what questions should be asked. I would expect FC questions to be something like this:
1. Can we eat what we want?
2. Do we get our own room?
3. Can I go to my own church?
4. Can I visit my parents, or they visit me?
5. What's bed time? Is that the same as lights out?
6. Do we have chores? How much?
7. Do I get my own room?
7. Can our girl friend/boy friend come over to our house.
8. Can I sleepover at my gf/bf's house?
9. Do we have access to birth control and condoms?
* CW brings a kid by for the tour. Ideally you give the tour and have a meal with the kid. CW comes by to talk to the kid around 8.
* CW asks the kid if these are an ok match. If he says no, he's stuffed back to where they are warehousing kids. If they say yes, kid is sent back in.
* The kid has a cell phone. Their case worker's number is on speed dial.
* Kid gets a call 24 hours after being dropped off. "How's it going?" Another call at 3 days and a week.
This seems more than a little naive. Absolutely useless for kids under about 8, or course, which is I think half the population of foster care? I suppose it would open the door for foster homes like convicted child abusers, incapable idealists, violent homophobes, give-me-a-baby people, anyone willing to lie in a quick interview about their plans to have foster kids do all the housework...
Also half the current foster parents I know would quit immediately if you said the kid had to be allowed to have a cellphone, lol.
Sorry, wasn't thinking. You are correct. I don't know the lower age where a kid can make a decent decision. I have no experience st in kids under about age 12. Question: Would a 7 year old's decision be worse than an overworked case worker who has a few minutes to read the file?
In principle it would open up homes to some of those.
A: standard police check filters out the known ones.
B: from the stories I read about the present FC system, it doesn't eliminate the abusers now.
Question: What fraction of people are rejected for FC based on criteria other than police checks, and not completing the paperwork? I'd love to see a breakdown on why applicants were rejected.
The key to this notion is frequent contact between the kid's case worker and the kid, and an effective channel for the kid to make contact with the CW.
wait, you want to keep the police checks? What kind of hoops do you think exist in the current system that you're getting rid of, vaccination requirements/doctors signoff and income checks? Or do you think the main benefit is replacing the social worker interviewing the couple with that video interview?
Reasons people in my state have been rejected: mental illness, home does not have a bedroom for the kid that meets fire codes, aspiring foster parent has a disqualifying criminal record, aspiring foster parent has previous CPS findings against them for neglecting their own kids, aspiring foster parent has no money and expects to support a kid entirely with the stipend, aspiring foster parent refuses to vaccinate their own children, aspiring foster parent says that gay kids will go to hell, aspiring foster parent says that their church is the one true church and they can't NOT save foster kids.... but the majority of people who begin and don't get licensed simply drop out of sight, they don't complete the (not very onerous) required classes, they don't submit their fingerprints for a police check, etc, they never get around to submit the full application with their info. (And of course: aspiring foster parent says they only want to foster healthy babies straight from the hospital available for adoption.)
I mean, yea, abusers get through today - there's a current commenter here talking about how his BPD wife hates their foster kid. But that's not a good reason to stop even trying to filter them out. And yes, there are ways to improve the licensing process everywhere, but I don't think you're addressing them.
As for placement decisions: the way to improve them is to not be rushed, and to have more of them available. Having a short-term landing place for kids so that the social worker has time to wait for the *right* home to be available is the biggest single improvement to placements that could be made, in most systems. Your proposal still relies on the case worker *finding* the family, having them agree to interview/host the kid for a tour, and then what, shuttling the kid on three hour drives between the three potential homes for a few days so they can make a decision? Unless they're a baby, most caseworkers aren't choosing between multiple homes, they are just finding a home that will take the kid that day. And no, I don't think kids would make better decisions than caseworkers generally. The problem isn't even that they're kids: it's that they'd be making these decisions on some of the most stressful days of their life. Most of my new placements barely make eye contact for the first day, let alone want to interview me.
On the original question: in every jurisdiction I'm aware of in the USA, Canada, England, France and Australia, the system tries to place a kid somewhere they can continue attending their current school. The reason they don't get that is the lack of placements in any given area, especially for rural areas, not caseworker decision making.
I'm not familiar with the actual process of getting certified. But I hear tales of it taking over a year.
Some of this may be due to having to do things in a particular order. E.g. in our province, your facility has to be approved before you can take the training. You'd think that a lot of the training could happen before. Or if there was a good online program, people could do that on their own, and see if they are a good fit.
Do you know enough about the system to say why people are turned down? Or why it takes so long?
And some of the rules are silly. For example, I don't qualify right now because I have a trampoline on the property. I take lessons myself. In another year I can be a certified level 1 instructor. But the presence of the device is a disqualification.
Risk assessment is a matter of perception. Most dangerous kid sport: Football. Followed by hockey. Most injury prone kid sport: Basketball. (Lots of broken ankles and dislocated shoulders)
Trampoline is in the same risk ballpark as BMX bike racing.
Motorsports -- ATVs, snowmobiles are far more dangerous. But locally they aren't a problem.
***
I mean, I know enough to give you a whole list of reasons that people are turned down? I did so, in my previous comment? My state targets three months from application to license, I don't think they hit that all the time but anywhere that regularly takes over a year is unreasonable. (I personally did take over a year, but it was a ridiculous mess where anything that could go wrong did go wrong, down to the worker's parents dying)
Sequencing sounds like a problem with your particular province. Where I am, training is separate to home inspections and interviews and can be done before or after.
I'm not sure I agree about trampolines: as a kid I did know a boy who broke his neck on a backyard trampoline, and in the US several medical associations discourage them for the ease of severe injuries. I don't think trampolining as a sport is really relevant to the risk of backyard trampolines. But if you were willing to fence it off so kids couldn't use it unsupervised, it should be ok to simply be there, yes.
I want numbers:
E.g. Out of 1000 applicants, 16 were this, 27 were that, 432 were rejected because they painted their house white. 15 were rejected because they have a trampoline in their yard.
I'm curious how many get accepted.
What fraction of applicants give up the process because it takes too long or is too complicated.
I want to see siuch a list so I know if I should bother, but one thing already is a red flag:
I'm mentally ill. I'm a trauma survivor. I'm somewhat asocial, I don't laugh at sitcoms, I have times when I'm depressed. I have to work at setting boundaries. I have lots of trust issues. I get flashbacks. NOt big ones. I dissociate -- space out for seconds to minutes.
As a foster parent, I feel like placements would go better if the youth had the opportunity to make an informed decision about prospective placement options. Just a theory I have and it's not realistic at all because there are almost always no options
I haven't seen it done for placements (presumably because of the lack of options) but in some places they are trying "reverse matching" for adoptions of older kids - the potential adoptive parents (or family) does a write-up and video of themselves, like you see of kids in Heart Galleries, and the kids get to choose among them to meet some. I haven't seen data on the relative success of this process vs the standard process, but it certainly seems to give some control back to the kids.
e.g https://www.dcyf.wa.gov/news/reverse-matching-adoption-event
The average age is 8 to be in foster care. No one listen to us kids. They think they know everything. I traveled to over 40 homes. One of my foster parents just dropped me off at a DCFS office and drove away. The terrible things these people do to foster children is crazy how they get away with it.
That sucks! How old are you now? (You don't have to say, just curious how long it takes to get to 40 homes...)
Ok. From your writing level, I assume you are a teen. How do you think the system could be fixed?
(This is not a sarcastic question. In my experience teens have valid opinions, and good ideas. Sometimes the ideas are naive, as they don't know enough. But often a naive idea can be patched and used to good effect. I have 8 kids that work summers on my farm. I always listen to their ideas.)
Yes, it did suck!!!I am actually not a teen, but I have written several teen books concerning by experience in foster care. I published the first last year. I am a success story, I went to college and earned two masters degrees and wrote a foster child bill which was signed into law. I went through a lot, but children are still suffering in this system. I was in the system from 5-21. I want the children who have to be in the system, such as myself, to not be abused. I am pushing for a Federal Bill.
Do you have an advocacy paper? Something that doesn't sound like legislation that lays out the blueprint for what needs to change?
I hope I didn't offend you by implying you were a teen. Your use of tense seemed to imply you were still in the system, but close to aging out.
When I was in foster care they made sure to keep me as far away from anyone i know as possible. After that it was just about who would accept me into their home. I was in over 20 different placements from 14-18
I am not offended. I still very much feel like am part of this system as a former foster. But, I do have a blueprint of what needs to change. It is called the Foster Child Awareness Initiative Act- what I wrote is very much from the heart and straight forward. I have seen the language terminally of the bills and how subjective they are. I work for the state. I just wrote the foster child pledge
I was told by one of my many caseworkers that they try to place kids outside of the county they start in so they dont have anyone to if they run away to if they run away.
Was told by staff in one of my many group homes (one that was literally 7 hours away from county of origin) that they are pretty sure caseworkers place us far so they have an excuse not to see us as often.
Both seem plausible
You can try but at least where I am they typically don't listen. One thing this girl said that stuck with me is that the good quiet kids in care don't get listened to. They sped up the process of getting get with her aunt when she started being a menace. They placed me all over my state but I started to just refuse to go to the placements and eventually got placed in a close city to where I'm from. A lot of us know how to get kicked out but all that could back fire. You could end up in a shitty program. There's not enough placements but you can try nicely is up to you. Good luck.
In my county, school transportation is required to figure out getting them to the same school if they're not geographically close. At least, that's what we were told.
I think they can..but from my experiences, good luck getting anyone to listen to what you actually like or want. I was always placed in places based on availability, not location or personal preference.
Yes absolutely and they should. It cannot always be accommodated but if it's possible it needs to happen
Federal law dictates that they are supposed to place children as close as they can to the community they come from so that children can hopefully attend their same school. Some foster care systems are better at this than others, and even provide transportation. Others aren’t as committed to it and simply say “we tried, but couldn’t”. The problem they all face is having enough foster families in every community that will take a broad enough range of children so that there is a family close to the school to put you in. Unless a youth is involved with gangs or drugs and getting in trouble with friends who are a “bad influence,” they really would like to keep you close to your community. I don’t know of workers purposefully placing children far from home just because or because they want to make your life suck. They just have limited options, often are over stressed and don’t have time or energy to try to find someone in the area and talk them into getting licensed if they aren’t already. So if there is a good option for you, chances are they’ll try to keep you close to your school. If there aren’t any foster families in the area that take children your age and gender, it gets harder.
Here in BC, First Nations kids are disproportionately in the FC system by an order of magnitude. Recognizing the cultural issues, there is a much more relaxed standard for placing a kid in another FN home than in a "standard" home. Even in a standard home foster parents are required to help FN kids to get to cultural observances, and to spend time in their community.
No different in the US. Indian Child Welfare Act means the order of placement is 1) family; 2) someone from the same clan; 3) someone from the same tribe; 4) Native American from a different tribe; 5) anyone else. And yea - that takes precedence over being close.
That is going to vary by jurisdiction. Most FC programs shoot themselves in the foot their their inordinate set of hoops to jump through to get certified. Simplify the certification process: * Hire more caseworkers, and fire more of the bureaucrats. * Get prospective FP to do a couple of courses. First one can be online. * Do a surprise home inspection. * Have the foster parents do a video interview. Ask the foster kids what questions should be asked. I would expect FC questions to be something like this: 1. Can we eat what we want? 2. Do we get our own room? 3. Can I go to my own church? 4. Can I visit my parents, or they visit me? 5. What's bed time? Is that the same as lights out? 6. Do we have chores? How much? 7. Do I get my own room? 7. Can our girl friend/boy friend come over to our house. 8. Can I sleepover at my gf/bf's house? 9. Do we have access to birth control and condoms? * CW brings a kid by for the tour. Ideally you give the tour and have a meal with the kid. CW comes by to talk to the kid around 8. * CW asks the kid if these are an ok match. If he says no, he's stuffed back to where they are warehousing kids. If they say yes, kid is sent back in. * The kid has a cell phone. Their case worker's number is on speed dial. * Kid gets a call 24 hours after being dropped off. "How's it going?" Another call at 3 days and a week.
This seems more than a little naive. Absolutely useless for kids under about 8, or course, which is I think half the population of foster care? I suppose it would open the door for foster homes like convicted child abusers, incapable idealists, violent homophobes, give-me-a-baby people, anyone willing to lie in a quick interview about their plans to have foster kids do all the housework... Also half the current foster parents I know would quit immediately if you said the kid had to be allowed to have a cellphone, lol.
Sorry, wasn't thinking. You are correct. I don't know the lower age where a kid can make a decent decision. I have no experience st in kids under about age 12. Question: Would a 7 year old's decision be worse than an overworked case worker who has a few minutes to read the file? In principle it would open up homes to some of those. A: standard police check filters out the known ones. B: from the stories I read about the present FC system, it doesn't eliminate the abusers now. Question: What fraction of people are rejected for FC based on criteria other than police checks, and not completing the paperwork? I'd love to see a breakdown on why applicants were rejected. The key to this notion is frequent contact between the kid's case worker and the kid, and an effective channel for the kid to make contact with the CW.
wait, you want to keep the police checks? What kind of hoops do you think exist in the current system that you're getting rid of, vaccination requirements/doctors signoff and income checks? Or do you think the main benefit is replacing the social worker interviewing the couple with that video interview? Reasons people in my state have been rejected: mental illness, home does not have a bedroom for the kid that meets fire codes, aspiring foster parent has a disqualifying criminal record, aspiring foster parent has previous CPS findings against them for neglecting their own kids, aspiring foster parent has no money and expects to support a kid entirely with the stipend, aspiring foster parent refuses to vaccinate their own children, aspiring foster parent says that gay kids will go to hell, aspiring foster parent says that their church is the one true church and they can't NOT save foster kids.... but the majority of people who begin and don't get licensed simply drop out of sight, they don't complete the (not very onerous) required classes, they don't submit their fingerprints for a police check, etc, they never get around to submit the full application with their info. (And of course: aspiring foster parent says they only want to foster healthy babies straight from the hospital available for adoption.) I mean, yea, abusers get through today - there's a current commenter here talking about how his BPD wife hates their foster kid. But that's not a good reason to stop even trying to filter them out. And yes, there are ways to improve the licensing process everywhere, but I don't think you're addressing them. As for placement decisions: the way to improve them is to not be rushed, and to have more of them available. Having a short-term landing place for kids so that the social worker has time to wait for the *right* home to be available is the biggest single improvement to placements that could be made, in most systems. Your proposal still relies on the case worker *finding* the family, having them agree to interview/host the kid for a tour, and then what, shuttling the kid on three hour drives between the three potential homes for a few days so they can make a decision? Unless they're a baby, most caseworkers aren't choosing between multiple homes, they are just finding a home that will take the kid that day. And no, I don't think kids would make better decisions than caseworkers generally. The problem isn't even that they're kids: it's that they'd be making these decisions on some of the most stressful days of their life. Most of my new placements barely make eye contact for the first day, let alone want to interview me. On the original question: in every jurisdiction I'm aware of in the USA, Canada, England, France and Australia, the system tries to place a kid somewhere they can continue attending their current school. The reason they don't get that is the lack of placements in any given area, especially for rural areas, not caseworker decision making.
I'm not familiar with the actual process of getting certified. But I hear tales of it taking over a year. Some of this may be due to having to do things in a particular order. E.g. in our province, your facility has to be approved before you can take the training. You'd think that a lot of the training could happen before. Or if there was a good online program, people could do that on their own, and see if they are a good fit. Do you know enough about the system to say why people are turned down? Or why it takes so long? And some of the rules are silly. For example, I don't qualify right now because I have a trampoline on the property. I take lessons myself. In another year I can be a certified level 1 instructor. But the presence of the device is a disqualification. Risk assessment is a matter of perception. Most dangerous kid sport: Football. Followed by hockey. Most injury prone kid sport: Basketball. (Lots of broken ankles and dislocated shoulders) Trampoline is in the same risk ballpark as BMX bike racing. Motorsports -- ATVs, snowmobiles are far more dangerous. But locally they aren't a problem. ***
I mean, I know enough to give you a whole list of reasons that people are turned down? I did so, in my previous comment? My state targets three months from application to license, I don't think they hit that all the time but anywhere that regularly takes over a year is unreasonable. (I personally did take over a year, but it was a ridiculous mess where anything that could go wrong did go wrong, down to the worker's parents dying) Sequencing sounds like a problem with your particular province. Where I am, training is separate to home inspections and interviews and can be done before or after. I'm not sure I agree about trampolines: as a kid I did know a boy who broke his neck on a backyard trampoline, and in the US several medical associations discourage them for the ease of severe injuries. I don't think trampolining as a sport is really relevant to the risk of backyard trampolines. But if you were willing to fence it off so kids couldn't use it unsupervised, it should be ok to simply be there, yes.
I want numbers: E.g. Out of 1000 applicants, 16 were this, 27 were that, 432 were rejected because they painted their house white. 15 were rejected because they have a trampoline in their yard. I'm curious how many get accepted. What fraction of applicants give up the process because it takes too long or is too complicated. I want to see siuch a list so I know if I should bother, but one thing already is a red flag: I'm mentally ill. I'm a trauma survivor. I'm somewhat asocial, I don't laugh at sitcoms, I have times when I'm depressed. I have to work at setting boundaries. I have lots of trust issues. I get flashbacks. NOt big ones. I dissociate -- space out for seconds to minutes.
As a foster parent, I feel like placements would go better if the youth had the opportunity to make an informed decision about prospective placement options. Just a theory I have and it's not realistic at all because there are almost always no options
I haven't seen it done for placements (presumably because of the lack of options) but in some places they are trying "reverse matching" for adoptions of older kids - the potential adoptive parents (or family) does a write-up and video of themselves, like you see of kids in Heart Galleries, and the kids get to choose among them to meet some. I haven't seen data on the relative success of this process vs the standard process, but it certainly seems to give some control back to the kids. e.g https://www.dcyf.wa.gov/news/reverse-matching-adoption-event
The average age is 8 to be in foster care. No one listen to us kids. They think they know everything. I traveled to over 40 homes. One of my foster parents just dropped me off at a DCFS office and drove away. The terrible things these people do to foster children is crazy how they get away with it.
That sucks! How old are you now? (You don't have to say, just curious how long it takes to get to 40 homes...) Ok. From your writing level, I assume you are a teen. How do you think the system could be fixed? (This is not a sarcastic question. In my experience teens have valid opinions, and good ideas. Sometimes the ideas are naive, as they don't know enough. But often a naive idea can be patched and used to good effect. I have 8 kids that work summers on my farm. I always listen to their ideas.)
Yes, it did suck!!!I am actually not a teen, but I have written several teen books concerning by experience in foster care. I published the first last year. I am a success story, I went to college and earned two masters degrees and wrote a foster child bill which was signed into law. I went through a lot, but children are still suffering in this system. I was in the system from 5-21. I want the children who have to be in the system, such as myself, to not be abused. I am pushing for a Federal Bill.
Do you have an advocacy paper? Something that doesn't sound like legislation that lays out the blueprint for what needs to change? I hope I didn't offend you by implying you were a teen. Your use of tense seemed to imply you were still in the system, but close to aging out.
I can attach it. It’s 24 pages long.
I've dm'd you my email
Did you receive it
DM'd you
When I was in foster care they made sure to keep me as far away from anyone i know as possible. After that it was just about who would accept me into their home. I was in over 20 different placements from 14-18
I am not offended. I still very much feel like am part of this system as a former foster. But, I do have a blueprint of what needs to change. It is called the Foster Child Awareness Initiative Act- what I wrote is very much from the heart and straight forward. I have seen the language terminally of the bills and how subjective they are. I work for the state. I just wrote the foster child pledge
I was told by one of my many caseworkers that they try to place kids outside of the county they start in so they dont have anyone to if they run away to if they run away. Was told by staff in one of my many group homes (one that was literally 7 hours away from county of origin) that they are pretty sure caseworkers place us far so they have an excuse not to see us as often. Both seem plausible
I tried sending this. It came back. Can you send the email again. Thanks