RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Q: How would you know if an abuse/neglect report were lodged against a foster care family?
Beth: That can come from many places. Sometimes someone will report it to a Social Worker. Let’s say a teacher or a neighbor called the CPS hotline and reported it. It goes to the County and then it comes to us. There’s a process that is set in place with the County that the communication comes full circle. It goes both ways. If it comes to us, then we send the report out.
Q: How do you go about selecting a foster family for a specific child?
Beth: Like I said earlier, in the assessment we ask them what age range, what gender, and what behavioral. Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of doing pre-placement visit between the family and the child and that happens more and more these days. But when we do have that luxury we talk to the kids about what kind of a home you want to be in. Do you want a mommy and a daddy, do you want two mommies, or do you care? What’s your preference? We try to match from there. A lot of times we don’t have the time to do pre-visits.
Q: Do potential foster parents have a say in which child they will get?
Beth: Absolutely, what good would it do if a family wants a two year old and we put a seventeen year old in there, who’s going to win?
COURT PROCESSING
Q: What court documents do you commonly see and work with?
Beth: We get minute orders; that’s what happens at a court hearing, this is when they document all of the directives and outcomes of what happens, visitation. What those parameters are. We get psychotropic med authorization that gives approval from the judge for the kid to take certain medicines. We get court reports occasionally, not always. Most of the stuff is ours going to them to help them versus them giving it to us. When the kid is placed we get information on the kids history, it may not be a court document, it may a County document that’s generated by a Social Worker, not necessarily by the court. When a kid is placed we get history information on them, maybe their previous IEP, some things like that.
EMANCIPATION
Q: As you know, sooner or later a foster child will age out of foster care. Do you have a system in place to (1) aid the foster child/family to adjust to the new change, and (2) do you offer Independent living skills for emancipating youth (see Too old to be a foster child)?
We have a program called Independent Futures that I created and designed in 2001 and it’s still rolling today. It’s fully philanthropy funded. There’s no County contracts it’s all grant and donations which makes it really good. We have about 80 kids that are active in the program in any given day. We also have a contract, which is completely seperate with San Bernardino County to provide independent living active care services for San Bernardino County. We have about 70 kids in that program as well in addition to the Independent Futures youth. I’m also working on another contract to provide independent living services. If you look on our website under Independent Futures, it gives you a pretty good program overview and what we focus on, our concept.
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