Most people, if not all, are familiar to some extent with Child Protective Services (CPS) or the equivalently-named branch of the child welfare system in their state that is responsible for screening calls related to suspected child abuse/neglect and then determining, via investigation, if those calls are substantiated or not. Many people tend to perceive of CPS as the agency that willy-nilly removes kids from their homes, whether it's for a valid reason or not. I'm not saying that CPS is infallible - it's an agency staffed and operated by human beings, after all - and I'm also not saying that CPS is perfect, for the same reason. Obviously, I haven't been privy to every interaction that CPS in Michigan has had with every call and family with which/whom it has encountered, so I can't make any kind of balanced assessment of how well it works to maintain children in their homes with support when needed, versus removing children when there is clear danger to their well-being if they remain. I also fully admit my privilege in being a white woman of the comfortably middle class who is married to a white dude and has a college education. I fear a CPS call far less than I might were I a person of color and/or single parenting and/or with less than a college education and/or living in poverty or the working class, because I don't need to worry about snap judgments of my parenting based on my appearance or circumstances. The history of the child welfare system is also quite damning - it began more or less with removing poor children, and disproportionately Black and Native children, and putting them in poorhouses and asylums, whether or not they were truly orphans. So it's not surprising that people still struggle with the question of whether or not the system can be trusted, let alone trusted to act in the best interest of supporting birth families and reuniting children with their parents. Find the right Facebook groups and you'll read about the experiences of some former foster youth (FFY) themselves, sharing the mistrust they developed from being involved in the system. When "more than 85% of children in foster care have had a minimum of two different placement settings within the first 12 months of being placed in the system," it's not hard to understand why CPS gets a bad rap for destroying families and sometimes actually making things even worse for kids. Nevertheless, this is the system we currently have, and for all of its flaws and need for improvement in places, I do choose to believe that the majority of workers involved with this branch of child welfare do have the best interests of children in mind when they screen calls and go on investigations.
Lest you think that I'm viewing things through the rose-tinted glasses of a "perfect" parent who has never interacted with CPS - or worse, a sanctimonious foster parent who sees CPS as necessary to taking children away from "bad" parents - I will assure you now that I have had my own first-hand experience. A handful of months into hosting a friend and her two young children for a year while they got back on their feet from an unhealthy situation, I responded to a knock on our front door to find a CPS worker on our porch informing us that we were being investigated for alleged lead exposure. Now, we do live in a house that is over 100 years old, and our upstairs windows were still the very old wooden framed, rope-and-pulley style, and the frames did have some peeling paint. We also had some paint peeling on the walls of our back staircase, which we had blocked so that little kids couldn't access it. In short, it was entirely possible that kids could have ingested paint chips that potentially contained lead, but we thought it was pretty slim, particularly since our own kids had come back from their annual blood draws with no concern for elevated blood lead levels and they had resided in the house for longer than our friend's children had. The more obvious cause of elevated blood lead levels in our friend's children was that they had recently lived in Flint, where the water crisis was just starting to become recognized on a national level, but that because we lived in the older house, one of the workers who came around for home visits through programs like Early On made the assumption that the children were being exposed there. This fact wasn't taken into consideration during the investigation, to my knowledge, but since we could readily share the results of our own children's blood draws, and as we had also recently gotten a quote for replacing all of the second-floor windows because of our own concerns about the peeling paint, the case was quickly closed with a finding that it was unsubstantiated. But for a few heart-stopping moments after that woman introduced herself and her purpose for being on my porch on that beautiful sunny day, I knew the fear of having a stranger enter my house, judge me wanting as a parent and protector of my own children, and remove my babies to the care of someone we didn't know on the assumption that they could take better care of them, and that I would have to start fighting to prove myself as competent on a higher level than someone who had been trained and licensed to raise someone else's children. And when we started working to become licensed again so that we could pursue adopting Stargazer, we did have to explain to our licensing worker why we had a note about an unsubstantiated CPS investigation on our record. It will follow us forever, even though it never even came close to our being involved with the courts outside of the incidental event of the worker getting a warrant to investigate our home, and even though it was closed as unsubstantiated. Any brush with children's services at all leaves a mark.
And yet I still have faith in this system, and our experience is the reason for it. The system as we know it today was created to protect children, first and foremost, and to do so by allowing - in some cases, mandating - people to call a central intake line to report suspected abuse or neglect of a child, followed by screening the call to determine if it warrants an investigation, and if it screens in, sending workers and police to investigate the situation to see if it is substantiated or not. If it is substantiated, the next step is to decide whether it's a situation that can be rectified while keeping the children in the home (ideal), or if it requires the children to be removed to a safer environment while the parents receive services to help them better care for their kids. Children are almost never, or should almost never be, removed at the first CPS visit. That only happens if the worker determines that the environment and situation pose an imminent risk of harm to the child, and requires that they get an emergency removal order signed by a judge in order to actually take the child out of the home. I can't guarantee that this is always how things go, but I can reasonably assert that this is most likely how most cases go, since legal orders are involved and it's really more of an event to remove a child than it is to leave them in the home. Our experience followed this expectation of the system.
So, at the time, we had closed our license due to a lack of bedroom space, and so we were being investigated as just run of the mill citizens. What about when you're a foster family? Can you still be investigated? As it happens, not only can you be investigated, but it's probably even more likely to happen than if you're just hanging out minding your own parenting business. Case in point: We had CPS called on us because we had someone else's kids in our house, and someone got concerned about the welfare of those children, not ours. When you take responsibility for someone else's kids, the chances of having a report made on you goes up considerably, and it's usually because it's the only control that that someone else can exert over the situation; sometimes it's an effort to have you discounted as a foster parent so that the child will return to the bio parent's care. It's a major reason, in addition to maintaining good records that can follow the child when they leave your home, that foster parents are told to keep a daily journal and to report any incidents of injury to the social worker - it's a CYA measure (and, also, you can be investigated for failing to report injuries and those sorts of things to the worker, even if the biological parent doesn't opt to make a report). But, since you're already in the system, it's not a state CPS investigation anymore. Now it's a state MIC investigation - maltreatment in care - AND a special evaluation by your agency. Joy! A two-for-one deal!
When we decided to pursue Stargazer's adoption, I wasn't concerned in the least about MIC and special evaluations. We'd never had cause before to worry about them, because we've followed such a unique path in the world of foster care. We've never dealt with biological parents at all, let alone retaliatory ones. Stargazer wasn't going to be any different, as far as that went. There are biological relatives in the picture, but we'd hashed out nearly from the beginning that the relatives were interested in us adopting and maintaining contact with them, rather than adopting themselves (and, yes, I know I open myself and them up to all kinds of judgment by just leaving this part of the story there, but there it is). We have an amicable relationship with them and there hasn't been any reason to be truly concerned that they might suddenly start accusing us of anything or contesting the adoption. I anticipated fairly smooth sailing between placement and finalization.
Our agency has been nothing but incredible to work with. This is our third agency, and unless something catastrophic happens, I can't imagine working with any other agency in the future. Our licensing worker was supportive and helped us out by writing to petition the state for a bedroom waiver for us so that Stargazer could have her own bedroom in our three-bedroom house for a couple of months before having to share it with Froggy. Licensing rules state that opposite-sex children, whether they're biological siblings or not, can no longer share a room once one child is over age 5, and Froggy turned 6 not long after Stargazer moved in with us, meaning that she had to move out of Bean's room and into the room with Stargazer. I felt that it would be unfair and challenging to ask a 14-year-old to move from an institutional placement directly into a shared bedroom with a nearly-6-year-old, hence the waiver. Our foster/adoption worker - let's call her Bella - has been incredible to work with and is on top of all the policies and procedures. I've been able to reach out to other foster parents with information about things like getting funding for tutoring because Bella has shared that information with me and their workers were oblivious. When she came to our house for the first visit after Stargazer was placed with us and officially transferred to our agency, Bella had a flowchart to share with us that she had created herself to show the steps of the adoption process just because she had had so many families who wanted to know where they were at. I brag about her constantly to people because she's so organized and on top of things, and when she recently had her work evaluation and her supervisor called me to ask about our experience with her, I am not ashamed to say that I gushed about her. In return, Bella has told me about times when she's heard our name around the office - after reaching out to our recruitment specialist about support for pre-adoptive parents of teens, I sort of became an unofficial peer mentor to another woman, and I'm also hosting the pilot of a foster care recruitment home party because I asked our recruitment specialist if she'd ever heard of doing something like that after reading about other agencies doing such a thing when I attended a foster parent conference - and proudly been able to say that that's one of her families, and she's always expressed how impressed she is with how on top of things I am. It's a great relationship filled with mutual admiration, and last Monday I spontaneously wrote a 5-star review of the agency on Google. On Tuesday afternoon, I got a call from the licensing supervisor. We had been tapped for a special evaluation. Another licensing worker would be at our house that evening to conduct interviews.
The circumstances were understandable. Stargazer has an ongoing health issue that lead to us taking her to see a pediatric specialist because it was making her miserable, and because she was also missing extensive stretches of school due to it. Foster care tends to already put kids in a vulnerable position regarding academics, and she couldn't afford to miss as many days as she was out. The specialist put her on a medication that helped tremendously. But when it ran out, I decided to hold off on getting it refilled to see if the underlying issue had resolved or if it was still a problem. (NOTE: Though this wasn't what we got dinged on, learn from my mistake and do not allow a foster child's medication to lapse without consulting with the doctor and having their permission to reduce or stop the medication - this easily could have become a major thing.) Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, the symptoms were back, and she missed another three days of school while we got the prescription refilled and it started working again. On the fourth day, she accidentally fell back asleep and missed the first half of school. On the fifth day, she made it for the whole day, and that afternoon, one of her teachers emailed me to inquire about her eye. Now, I had woken Stargazer that morning, as I typically did, and I even remember seeing her face under the hall light when we passed each other on her way to the bathroom, and there had been nothing wrong with her eye. But the teacher shared with me that it looked like she had a healing black eye, and that Stargazer had told her that it had come from someone she didn't know while she was at the park earlier in the week. That story did not add up, and I told her I would be sure to take a look when I got home from work. I did; there was still no black eye, but when I mentioned it, Stargazer shrugged it off and said she didn't want to talk about it. I didn't think about it again until that call on Tuesday when I learned we were under a special evaluation for an alleged black eye. Naturally, the teacher had gotten concerned with events playing out as they did - kid misses three and a half days of school and shows up to class with what, to her, looks like a healing black eye - and she is obligated to report any suspicion of abuse to CPS as a mandated reporter (I'm a mandated reporter twice, since I'm both a teacher and a foster parent, so I understand her position). Which meant we were certainly being investigated by our agency, and we were potentially being investigated by the state MIC team for an infraction of the rule against corporal punishment, not to mention the potential for ending up on the Central Registry as child abusers. No big deal. And as part of the investigation, Bella had to come out with the licensing worker to participate in the interviews. So much for being her model family!
The whole thing ended up being as much a nonevent as the CPS call. We learned that MIC had screened out the call, meaning that they didn't find anything in the report that led them to believe that it needed to be investigated by the state, and kicked it over to our agency for the special evaluation. So, while we could potentially still be put on a CAP, or corrective action plan, if the agency found that we had broken a rule, and we could still wind up on Central Registry if we didn't comply with the CAP, we didn't have to worry about a state investigation on top of it. First, the workers spoke privately with T-Rox and me about the charge, and we shared our perspective on it, and then they privately interviewed each child in turn. We had spoken again with Stargazer about it earlier in the evening to make her aware that an investigation was happening and the workers would want to talk to her about what had happened, and she shared that a friend of hers had been flailing around and accidentally hit her in the eye, but she didn't want the friend to get in trouble, so she had made up a story about the park, so we recounted this conversation to the workers. The teacher had alleged in her report that I had brushed off the concerns about the eye and changed the subject to homework, which was the most aggravating part of the entire experience - she had asked about the eye and then added some information about makeup work that Stargazer could do over the weekend, and I had responded with curiosity as I hadn't seen a black eye that morning, explained the prolonged absence (we have previously had good lines of communication and this teacher is aware of this particular bit of medical history), and thanked her for the information about the makeup work. Never did I brush off the concern or change the subject. I shared this whole email chain with the workers so that they would have it for their records. I strongly encourage all foster families to be sure that as much communication happens in writing as possible for this exact reason (and because it's easier to find an email or text than to try to remember what was said in a verbal conversation).
So, while I agree professionally with this teacher's decision to report something she saw as a potential concern, it's now put us in a place personally where I have to make some decisions about trust and quantity of communication. I saw us all - teachers, parents, social workers, etc - as being on the same team together working for the benefit of this child we all cared about. I put in a lot of effort at the beginning of the year to loop the teachers and other relevant staff in to the situation of Stargazer being in foster care and pre-adoptive placement and to push for an IEP evaluation for a kid who had never had one before; I wanted to make it clear from the outset that I was in the ring for this kid. We spoke in person at parent-teacher conferences about the health issue, for which she'd been out that entire week, and she encouraged us to keep her home for an extra day and try again on Monday. She was on the IEP team and we spoke at the initial meeting after the evaluation was complete. And when it came down to this incident, she opted to have us investigated. And it's not personal, and, as I say, I understand as a professional why she did it, but that doesn't make it any easier to swallow or to navigate. Emotionally, it may be a bit of a rocky road with this teacher for at least a little while.
When our interviews had concluded and we were back to talking about where we were in the adoption process, Bella tentatively asked, "Was that you who wrote that really nice review of us on Google yesterday?"
"Yes," I replied, laughing.
"I thought it might be, and it was, like, really bad timing, because our director sent out an email this morning to share this really nice review, and I was pretty sure it was your name, and then a couple of hours later I got the notice that you were on a special evaluation, and I was like, 'Oh, no, she's going to take it back now.'"
"Yes, and I was like, 'Oh, no, I just wrote this really nice review and now Bella is going to be so disappointed in her model family!'"
She and the licensing worker shook their heads. "Nope," they said. "Because when you're a foster family, it's not IF you have a special evaluation, it's WHEN."
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