Dump and Run

Foster families are quite familiar with this technique. CPS shows up with a kid very dissimilar to the one they described and before you know it they are gone. Before I found the right fit for a caseworker, my agency was no help at all. Our agency would tell us that if we refused a placement after we agreed to it that we'd stop getting calls.

They "forget" to tell you what disabilites a child might have. A friend of mine was brought a double amputee, no one had mentioned that this girl had prosthetic legs, there was no mention of it in the paperwork. The girl was wearing pants when they brought her, and the next morning she came out to breakfast in shorts and no legs. Later CPS came by and tried to get my friend to modify her home to ADA standards, including a very costly bathroom remodel.

We were called for an 11 year old deaf girl. Her only problem was that she was deaf. She'd been neglected a little, but otherwise a normal happy girl needing a place to live. What showed up at my house was a fourteen year old girl who had gender identity issues. While it didn't say it in her paperwork, she'd been raped by just about every close relative and when she was sent to a deaf school in another state the abuse continued. She'd spent most of her time since leaving the deaf school in one mental hospital or another. She had a medication list as long as all the other kids in our home combined, but since she had just been released from a hospital and the caseworker didn't bring her hospital meds, Medicaid would not pay for additional meds for the month. It was the third of August. Every August in our state we run out of money for foster care, fiscal year starts in September. CPS provides only essential services, returning calls about a psychotic kid who's trying to kill you is not one of those services. We then became the next family who had to call the cops to get her dragged into a mental hospital in the middle of the night.

Of course this is the way it works. They will tell you whatever they can to get you to take a placement, then they disappear.