Vancouver, WA- Foster to Adopt Experiences?

I'm also in WA, doing foster-to-adopt. We haven't gotten a placement yet but hopefully we will soon (we had our first "almost" last week!). You absolutely can sign up to adopt without doing "real" foster care in the meantime. If that's what you want to do then it is a good idea to go with an adoption agency. We are with WACAP and they've been very helpful. An Agency will help navigate the foster licensing & homestudy process - classes, paperwork, home visits, etc - and they will act as an advocate with the state to find suitable placement matches, as well as providing support after placement. If you are open to a child between 3-6 years old, you can probably find a post-TPR match. Under 3, you will have to be open to some "legal risk" which means you have the child in your home that they think will go to adoption but until all the paperwork is done there's still a possibility that you could lose them to RU or a surprise kinship placement. You can work through an agency to stipulate just how much risk you are comfortable with, but of course there are never any guarantees. The main thing I can tell you right now is that it takes time. We first applied in May and went through the process - classes, paperwork, home visits, etc - as fast as was realistically possible - it took 7 months. All our documentation was complete & submitted to the state for review before Christmas, it took the state 2.5 months to approve it and issue our licence. As for the quality of the CWs, everyone we've worked with, both at the agency and the state, has been pleasant and competent. They're all very very busy so you have to be pretty good at managing communication and following up (and waiting!), but we haven't run into anybody who was mean, evil or incompetent. Hopefully that continues to be the case.:rolleyes: Good luck!

Thanks for the reply. I am somewhat surprised at the 7 months. What parts of the paperwork took the longest? I was planning to go directly through the system to cut down on costs. Is there a lot that the agency does to help with the process?

The agency has been very helpful. There is some extra cost associated with going through an agency, but I would say it has been worth it. They have everything nicely organized and ordered for you, and will make sure you aren't missing any steps or forms. And they will help a lot with parsing potential placements, and making sure that we don't get deluged with calls for placements that don't fit within our parameters, which is something that I see a lot of complaints about from others on the forums. As for what took so long, it isn't really one thing, it's the sheer number of things. Besides the obvious paperwork - all those essay questions do take some time & thought - there's things like getting your cats' vaccinations up to date, getting the house ready for the homestudy, and fitting the classes into your family's already busy schedule. Here's a blog post I wrote back in September, listing off what we had done through that point, plus what we had left to do: [url=http://domiciliate.blogspot.com/2013/09/adoption-update.html]domiciliate: Adoption Update[/url] There were a bunch more things came up after that which aren't on the list: for instance, we had to write up safety plans for specific potential hazards around our home (pond across the road, fire ring in the back yard, pet tarantula, etc.) and we had to provide proof that we had all been vaccinated for whooping cough. And then there were a few delays due to factors out of our control: we couldn't take the first offering of one class because we had long-booked vacation plans for that week. Our second homevisit had to be rescheduled because the SW was ill. Hubby's FBI fingerprint check came back really quickly but for some reason mine took four weeks. Etc., etc. It's a process. I'm good at processes, so I was surprised that it took so long. About the best advice we got on how long it would take was "the sooner you start, the sooner you'll finish".