can a foster-adoption home study be transferred to another state?

Oh boy, this could be a pain in the neck. The answer is no, yes, and maybe. In general, no, you can't transfer a home study and your training to a new state. However, yes, you could apply with your new state and they may fast-track you based on your homestudy and training. Also, you may be able to keep working with your old state and take a placement through them if you are looking to adopt. This would involve a considerable amount of extra work, but may be a possibility if your old state really needs parents. So, sorry to be so little help, but if you're moving you'll need to talk to a worker right away and see what they have to say. The next call you might want to make would be to your new state and get information from them, too. But, in general I think you're going to make this difficult process even worse.

Wouldn't that entail doing an ICPC though? And I would think they wouldn't do that unless they can't find a home in the same state. I would think that the home would have to be licensed in the new state under that state/county laws. Doesn't each county or state have their own requirements for approval? If they didn't, then there wouldn't be any need for an ICPC.

We moved from CA to TX after being foster parents for 2 yrs. Since CA and TX have different mandatory training, our training had to be done all over. Some states have the same training, like MAPP or I forget what the one in TX is called. If you move to a state that does the same training, most times this does not need to be repeated. Any extra training you have done towards your yearly hours is transferrable as well. Our adoption home study transferred as well, but had to be updated in TX since they wanted to add their own opinions of you and the fact that you moved. At least in our situations, they would have not placed children with us from our transferring state. We were able to take our adoptive placement, since we were waiting on appeals to finalize our adoption. But as for getting new placements from our old state, absolutely not. Unless you are working with an adoption only agency. Basically, plan on redoing everything...I'd call the state you're planning on moving to and compare notes, to see if it's worth it for you to wait until you move to begin the process.

The reason I mentioned working through the old state was that was basically what we ended up doing when we moved from California to Colorado. We were on a waiting list for a child for 2 years, and told them we might be moving before we made a match. LA county at the time said that if we moved, since we were approved with them, they would keep us on the waiting list and when we matched they would make the placement through ICPC. As it turned out, our youngest was placed 3 months before we moved, so we still had to get the ICPC in place to take her with us. It was a pain, but it happened. We didn't finalize until she was 18 months old, in part because of the extra paperwork.

Hi Thanks for all of the tips. Currently, I am looking for a job among only states that happen to abut my current state of CT (b/c I want to stay in the region). So that might make it easier - I could move within my current state. But it sounds as if there are options if I have to take a job a bit outside of this region. I am so new to this process that I don't even know what an ICPC is...I think there are a lot of acronyms that I need to catch up on!! :thankyou:

ICPC=Interstate compact on the placement of children. Here's their website: [url=http://icpc.aphsa.org/Home/home_news.asp]AAICPC | an :: APHSA :: Affiliate[/url]