Casa Bonita – The Daily Screed

While I’m angry at the world, let’s try some CASA stories. You won’t respond, so I’ll continue to feel alone on it, but maybe yelling about it will make me feel better.

I had a case involving a young mother, 17 when she was first pregnant, and already homeless, because it’s legal to discriminate against minors, and because legal parents are granted broad authority but never held responsible for their choices. While she was in the hospital they convinced her to move in with her own mother – threatened to take away the child if she didn’t find a home in the next few days – but that only lasted a couple of weeks before it failed for all the old reasons.

So she was homeless again, like she was the whole time she was pregnant, and they took the kid. DSHS found a family placement who was willing to help but did not get along with anyone else involved, were forced to put their own plans for children on hold, and who found being involved with dependency court a big challenge. This is when I joined the case, as a Court Appointed Special Advocate, with the kid still under 2 years old.

As the kid got older it became more obvious that they would need special care. An amount that was plausible in-home, but an amount that would make it implausible to provide care for other young people, and that made it very difficult to use typical day care services. The kid had been kicked out of several, and their placement was overwhelmed, trying to keep their jobs while providing foster care for a kid the state assigned them on no notice.

There are some programs for assistance in such cases. Not great help, but some money and maybe access to specialized child care. I diligently assisted with applications for all of them, which is itself a daunting process. But none of it worked. They could get money, but only like $125/week, and it required one of them to quit their job to qualify. They could get specialized day care, but only at a single facility nearly 40 miles from their home. And all of it under ongoing supervision by the state (including my court-ordered involvement), because this is foster care. The state is claiming rights as a parent – DSHS has to approve all actions – but not taking responsibility for actual care.

Eventually mother got pregnant again, and was likely to continue being in the situation where she wouldn’t be allowed children, which triggered the foster placement to withdraw. They couldn’t be asked to keep waiting to give up the child they raised for more than 2 years, while the court continued to drag their feet on adoption. They couldn’t be asked to take another infant – and who knows how many more over the years – when they were already overwhelmed. They couldn’t be asked to keep putting their own family plans on hold. So they announced that they would not be taking the second child when it came, and asked that a permanent placement be found for the older one so they could step down.

To be clear, I’m pretty sympathetic toward the foster placement. They did have to step away eventually, but they stepped up when the other options were worse and they stuck with it for a long time despite promises of relief and lots of harassment and labor as part of the fostering process. And when they withdrew it actually kicked off some of the first real action in years in terms of finding an adoptive placement – something the dependency court had been happy to ignore for years. In theory there’s an “upper limit” of 3 years for young people in a dependency case, but in practice that’s probably about average – some cases get resolved in only a year or so, but lots of them take 4+ years regardless of the law.

So the new baby came, was illegally seized from mother at the hospital, then returned to her when her lawyer complained (weeks later), only to have DSHS harass her about her living situation and other aspects of her life for months. They made her leave her living situation because one of her roommates had a petty criminal record. Mother’s social worker told me that mother was “too boy crazy” – some form of homelessness slut shaming as far as I can tell – as part of that situation. Eventually she was moved into a group home where she had 3 other shared-bedroom roommates (all with their own infants and their own issues) and various requirements for their (technically not religious) program to “help” her. She was required to have a job to keep her housing, but desire hosing several infants the program didn’t include any child care. And eventually they took baby back away.

During this same period there was actually effort to place the older child. At first they were moved to rent-to-own homes, in an attempt to get them directly into a permanent placement despite the short notice. This sometimes works with infants, but it’s unlikely to work with 3-year-olds, and it wasn’t great. 4 homes later they were still being bounced around. 2 of the homes actually agreed to adopt them, but the state insisted that they be placed with their (not yet born) sibling, and those homes decided, after living with the situation for a while, that they couldn’t take this high-needs child and also a new infant, so they were disqualified by official patriarchy policy.

Eventuality DSHS kicked the case over to the “adoption unit” and a new social worker. For a while in fact there was no social worker assigned at all, just temp coverage from the department supervisor, which was even worse. But I did get them moving again, and they invited me to placement interviews, in which candidate parents show up to DSHS, having already completed a home study, and 2-3 people (mostly not very familiar with the case) read from a script of questions and then decide which people will be assigned the kid(s) in question. They literally asked me to round-robbin these prefab questions with them, and then after we saw like 3 families were supposed to pick one. I tried to protect the kid from the parents who said out loud they though kids had too much protection from violence, but that’s about all the influence I could exert.

Then the DSHS staff picked one of the other two and told me to call his current placement – one of the rent-to-own familes who wanted this kid but couldn’t take two – and tell them they weren’t going to adopt. DSHS figured it be better coming from me, since they weren’t really familiar with this case and hadn’t met the people involved. I promised to do this but never did – never intended to – and left it to the department to work out.

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Would you believe this was a serial? Maybe that’s a way I can try larger work, and break out of this idea that I need a conclusion to each one of these.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.