Until recently, most Coalton removals happened because a teacher called from school. Social workers estimated anecdotally that until recent years this used to describe perhaps 90 percent of all investigations, but that’s all changed now.
“Now, with the drug culture and that so-called war on drugs ongoing here, CPS workers are riding along in the patrol cars on midnight raids. Which means we remove kids in the middle of the night with all the trauma of arrests and search-and-seizure going on around them, sirens blaring, guns drawn, parents screaming and getting handcuffed. Then those kids are going to the ER to get checked out about half the time, and then back to somebody’s office and crying themselves to sleep on a couch with a coat thrown over them, and we’re sitting there beside them until daylight when we can start calling people.”
The calls begin with colleagues in DSS, social workers specializing in family placement, foster-care specialists, adoption coordinators—again, the titles vary but the job remains the same: find a place the kids can go that matches the foster parents’ preferences with a child’s needs. A DSS questionnaire listing preferences like gender, age, personality, and physical traits is supposed to help in this effort. Parents fill it out when they go through the licensing procedure for fostering.
Liz laughs; there is no mirth in the sound. “Sounds great, right? Tell me what genius thinks after I’ve spent ten minutes with these traumatized children, I can look through the thirty-two of these [questionnaires] we have on file and find the ones that match. This child is sitting next to me, crying. ‘Do you like dogs, honey? Look up so I can see what color your eyes are.’” Liz waves a hand in frustration, then seems to catch herself. “Of course, odds are strong we know these kids already, so it’s not that bad. Plus, we take them to the ER to get checked out so we get more info right away.”
Still, CPS workers try to avoid crisis placements. If they suspect that one might be coming, they keep a list of potential matches in mind, reviewing available homes for preferences or even calling foster parents they know to have a casual chat about “what might or might not happen.”
“Then you pray for their availability the day it happens,” Liz shrugs.
The availability of thirty-two licensed homes doesn’t sound too bad in a county that last year had just under a hundred foster kids needing placement, does it? Yet the social workers say they use about ten of them, returning to those over and over. There are many reasons why, but a big one is the number of people who check “single child under six” on their preference forms.
“I can place them via phone, driving down the mountain,” Liz says of children at that young age. “But what do you do with the six-, eight-, and thirteen-year-old siblings, and that oldest one cussing you up one side and down the other? How many homes have room for three at once, plus take kids in the teen years?”
Enter option number two. If DSS is willing to pay a supplemental fee, no fewer than seven private agencies in a three-county area of rural Coalton are contracted to work with the state to place children in therapeutic care; in urban areas, that number climbs. Many of these agencies deal with regular placements as well, which still cost the state more because they involve a fee for the agency to have trained and prepared the parents. DSS policy is to start with its own office’s lists to find parents available for regular care, but often the social workers wind up calling private agencies.
There’s no real rhyme or reason to how those calls go out. The DSS social worker puts the fishhooks in the water, describing the children as best she can to her counterpart at the agency. The private agency’s social worker looks over his list of available homes and starts making phone calls. The first one to call back gets the kids.
“It’s just about what you could imagine,” says Cody, a director of one of those private agencies. “A friend at DSS called me last week at midnight; had three-year-old twin boys in her backseat . . .” Cody launches into a story.
The boys had been chewing on wood in their home because they were suffering from pica—a nutritional deficiency that causes people to eat nonfood items—and acute malnutrition. That “behavioral problem” made the twins eligible for placement via therapeutic foster care. Cody placed them within the hour, and a day later he got a call from another friend at a different agency.
“He says to me, ‘We wanted them! We’ve had parents waiting a long time!’”
Around the room, social workers roll their eyes, look away, shake their heads, throw loaded facial expressions Cody’s way; one gives a snort that might be interpreted as The only reason you’re getting away with telling that story is you’re the supervisor.
Cody notices. “Yeah, it’s a little unseemly how that part goes. Because that sibling group of three and the oldest one’s a teenager? Yeah. They’re gonna get split up.” Workers nod, sigh, and refill their soda glasses.
From here, the process can turn murky. If the parents follow the family management plan put in place to help things at home—running water is installed, Uncle Bobby’s put on a restraining order, Stepdad goes back to counseling, and the therapist cites progress—the kids might be returned. If Mom goes into drug treatment and the extended family have custody, the kids will go back after Mom gets out. If the state has the kids during that time, Mom is supposed to pass a drug test and appear in court. When all goes according to protocol, should she lose her sobriety later, the kids will be taken again for temporary placement until she gets clean. This is often how bouncing through the system begins for the kids.
Things happen in the order they’re supposed to, or they don’t. People do their jobs, or they don’t. Parents get clean and stay that way, or they don’t. Children go to a foster home, back to Mom, to a foster home, and back to Mom in stretches lasting three months to a year, depending on the family court’s availability, Mom’s progress, and the attention of the guardian ad litems and caseworkers to the nonstop flow of documents across their desk. (A guardian ad litem is someone appointed by the court to represent the legal interests of the children; sometimes they are therapists or other professionals, and sometimes Child Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA volunteers.)
There’s nothing to stop the ebb and flow of returns and removals except a somewhat fluid set of court expectations or the advocacy of the ad litems. In the states within the Coalton area, a third party’s being prepared to step in as parent can facilitate the termination of parental rights (voluntary or involuntary). Judges by far prefer seeing proof that adoption is imminent to making a child a ward of the state for any lengthy period.
The involuntary termination of parental rights requires proof that a parent has abused or neglected his or her child(ren) sufficiently to endanger the child’s life and health, and that “reasonable efforts” to resolve these parental problems have failed. Each court visit tends to have deadlines attached to it, and the United States has a twenty-four-month deadline for enacting termination—but when the clock starts on that deadline can vary by judge. One of the stories in this book involves an involuntary termination that occurred within two months. Another took six years.
Dale, who was not at the “pizza meeting,” later pointed out one reason for such variations. “Drug addicts lose their ability to provide a safe home for their children, not their wish to provide it. They’ll fight. They’ll try to get clean. They’ll either make it, or they’ll relapse. Which means the whole thing starts again.”
It’s a hard dance to watch under any circumstances, but when the clock is ticking toward the point when adoption is allowed, the waiting is the worst part for the child in question, her family, and her caseworkers.
“Once they realize Mom or Dad is never going to get it together, these kids long to be adopted. They want stability. And they know