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My husband and I are in the process of opening up our home to foster and hopefully adopt at some point.
Some back ground. We have an 8 yr old adopted daughter. 2 dogs (small and medium in size), a cat, and 3 hermit crabs that currently all live with us. We have a 3 bedroom 2 story house with a split bedroom floor plan (we are down stairs and all of the kids will be upstairs). We both work full time. I am a nurse and my husband is an electrician. We have filled out the form about the different things that we are willing and unwilling to accept.
With this background in mind, I am looking for advice on what to ask the case worker when they call for a placement. I want to develop a check off list that I can use to try and get as much info as possible prior to the placement. We would like to try and prevent being blind sided by a placement if possible. I have heard that you don't always get the full story and that if you don't ask they don't offer to tell. Please send any suggestions.
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Check out this placement form developed in Iowa - I'm not there, but I love it! [URL="http://www.ifapa.org/resources/documents/PrePlacementQuestionnaire.pdf"]Pre-Placement Questionnaire[/URL]
They have other forms online too.
[url=http://www.ifapa.org/publications/IFAPA_publications.asp]Publications - IFAPA[/url]
Where I am we get calls with or without background available, so I have a separate list of things I need to know before I accept a placement, and then I use the Iowa form for documenting everything when I met with the child's worker, when the child is dropped off.
The questions I will ask on the phone before accepting placement include the following:
Do they have any disabilities/special needs?
Are they on any medications? (Make sure meds are coming with them if so.)
Known allergies? (We need to avoid pet allergies.)
Are they in school / where are they going tomorrow?
Just coming into care/being moved? Why?
Prior history with foster care? Ever made false allegations?
Known or suspected behaviors/dangerous propensities? History with animals (since we have pets)?
Appointments scheduled (visitation, therapy, court)? (If so, I ask about transportation availability.)
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It depends on what type of placement it is as to whether the SW even can answer any questions. Here you won't get much specific information until you have accepted the placement.
Here they start looking for a home before kids are even taken into care, so you're lucky to even know the correct age and gender of the child. Frequently information they have is wrong.
If it's a placement from another foster home, then more information should be available. But the person calling might only have limited information and not the full case file.
Also, here we don't get a lot of kids coming into care and there are a lot of empty homes, so the placement workers just want to find someone to say yes and they don't want to waste time answering questions. They'll say they don't know and call the next family on the list. In areas where there are a lack of beds, things are likely a lot different.
For us, we've decided on certain things that are absolute deal breakers like violent behavior, fire setting and abuse of animals and I try to ask about any extreme behaviors, but most of the time the placement workers here wouldn't know.
Are you all open to medically fragile kiddos as well? I'm also a NICU nurse and my husband and I foster med frag. infants. My agency doesn't really need prompting to answer questions as all of my kiddos have been discharged from the hospital directly to me so the agency tells me as much as they know and I find out the rest once I go up to the hospital.