Private Agency Or DCS? Cecil County, Maryland.

July 28, 2012

@Cherish,

Hello! I am wondering the same thing. We have been approved with our agency for over a year, and are still waiting. We are looking for a little girl age 6 and under. We would take a sib group of 2. We've done a lot of respite, and enjoyed it, but are ANXIOUSLY waiting for our own to fost-adopt.

We've gotten a few calls for other placements, but they have either been:

1. sib groups of all boys....we love boys but have 2 bios of our own, so we would like a daughter.

2. Calls for a placement that we said we'd accept. A date was set up to meet with one of the sib groups...but later cancelled because they were placed with someone else.

My husband and I don't understand this :/

Any advice for us?

Maybe we should try our local DCS when our renewal is up?

I like the people we've been working with, and would hate to switch, but we have been waiting long enough. It seems like all these other families are getting placements and here we are, still waiting.

I appreciate any advice!

Cherish

We did alot of info gathering before deciding to go through our DCBS. I probably spoke to 4 different agencies before deciding. In my opinion the agencies felt too "coorporate". I spoke to one agency rep for about 2 hours on the phone and he was eventually very comfortable with me. While discussing he said that they had recently placed 4 siblings with a family and the family had to buy a van for transportation. Then he laughed and said "well if they had enough money for a van we should probably cut their per diem rate". This surprised me obviously so I just laughed and ended the call shortly after. That was the deciding factor for us.

I'm not sure if this applies to every state but in ours, the families that are licensed by the state get first choice in foster children and if they can't find a home for them, they release the children to agencies to find homes. Seeing that you want mild behavior issues, this may be a factor for you because most agencies receive the "higher level" children because they couldn't be placed in a state foster home.