They were strewn across couches and folding chairs in the children’s recreation room of their facility. As if on cue, the social workers took strategic bites of pizza. Mouths too full to respond, they glanced at one another with bemused smiles.
Only one responded. “Your readers want a step-by-step guide for that process? Oooh, me too. That’d come in handy.” A couple of them giggled.
Another added, “I do this for a living, and I’ve not seen an adoption happen twice the same way.” Around the room, heads began to nod.
Keeping that caveat in mind, we can describe a few common patterns. Here’s what the group came up with:
Social workers get involved when a teacher, neighbor, or other adult calls and reports something wrong in the home. The most common complaints include: there’s no running water or food in the home; the kids are neglected, showing up to school hungry, dirty, inadequately clothed; it appears that somebody is hitting or otherwise hurting them, and the child has told an adult or the adult has observed repeated injuries.
Following up on these complaints, Child Protective Services (CPS) visits the house. If a worker for this division of DSS sees evidence of something wrong—injuries, overt fear beyond shyness, severe hygienic neglect, to name a few—they can choose between putting a safety plan in place or removing the child.
Elizabeth (“call me Liz”) is a Family Preservation Services worker. She explains, “CPS prefers not to take a child without warning. We want first of all to leave the child in the home if that’s realistic, not just that day but always. To do that we create a family management plan. This involves the family in making decisions about how best to keep the children safe in the home while correcting problems that may take longer to resolve. That is our first goal.”
Failing that, the social worker on the scene will ask the mom or dad if there’s a relative who could come take the children to their house and look after them until things at home can be cleared up or fixed. In rural parts of Coalton, it is common for extended-family members to live near one another, so Mamaw or Sis may show up within minutes. The children go home with them so long as the answers to a few simple safety questions are satisfactory, and if required they promise that the person who has caused the removal doesn’t go near the kids.
Only at times of crisis does a family specialist (the job title varies) take a child out of his or her home or extended family immediately. Even if it looks as if removal may come later, the safety plan serves as a holding pattern, and the social worker may still try to pull people together for a family-management-plan meeting, asking various extended-family members to hold one another accountable for behaviors or attend counseling on anger management or other topics. Meanwhile, parents fearful of losing their children sometimes disappear between CPS visits.
If a child must be moved and a relative is not available, the ultimate goal is to find a place that will be more stable than the one the child is leaving. The CPS worker will call her supervisor, who will authorize the removal and an emergency placement or a short/long-term foster, as appropriate. The office has lists of prospective homes on file. Ideally, there will be time to do a little matching. In reality, most social workers carry a handful of names and phone numbers in their heads, of people whose homes the social workers know have spaces, or of families looking to adopt who will take in kids on short notice and have worked hard to ensure one of those memorized numbers is theirs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, CPS people don’t want to drive back to an office with children terrified into hysterics kicking the backs of the car seats, puking and pooping in distress, if they will have no place to take them from there. The CPS worker hopes to limit the children’s sense of unrest. It’s not easy to be the person trying to reassure distraught young’uns when they see you as the person who just yanked the rug out from under their lives. That’s not a pleasant situation for anyone.
There are exceptions, Liz adds. She has removed kids who were “so used to it, they sat waiting for me with their siblings lined up alongside them, each one of them clutching their favorite toy. They knew what was coming. Some have clung to my neck as I carried them out, saying, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ One child handed me a piece of paper, cool as a cucumber, and said, ‘I’m supposed to tell you to call Mee-maw.’”
Nine of Liz’s home visits to date have resulted in removals, and she can remember every single one of them. “You do not forget.”
A CPS worker will remove a child immediately if there seems to be imminent danger, including hunger, severe illness, threat of flight, or visible signs of abuse. Workers don’t often have police backup but could call for it, depending on the reputation of the family, whether there have been prior complaints and visits, and how the family reacted to those—assuming any of that information is known. Not all visits are prebriefed. Notes are not always available at the time a call is made.
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?”
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