Crossing State Lines

Adopting a child from another state through foster care, says Jeff Katz, is very difficult to do. Because there is not one national foster care system, states run independently and often don’t have the time or money to work across state lines. This, he says, can be frustrating for those working in the system, as his story about an incident that happened when he was running the agency in Rhode Island shows:

“I had this kind of thing happen a hundred times. Our agency showed a ‘waiting child feature’ on TV, a ‘Tuesday’s Child.’ It’s common to put a child in a promotional spot for 90 seconds on the local news. One time we featured a six-year-old black boy. After it’s over, I get a phone call from a parent. There’s a hierarchy of where we could get the most phone calls. We didn’t usually have healthy white babies, but the younger and healthier and whiter a baby was, the more calls we got. A six-year-old black boy is harder to place. I get this call from a two-parent black family. Mom’s a lawyer, dad’s a doctor. They say, we’re so interested in doing this. Where do I go, what do I do? My agency was in Rhode Island. They saw it in Massachusetts. They might as well have seen it in Bolivia. The systems don’t interact at all. Rhode Island isn’t legally able to do home studies in Massachusetts. Massachusetts has no interest in doing a study for a family not interested in adopting a child from Massachusetts. I was going to say that the parents were in limbo, but really, it was the child who was in limbo. In a more rational system, we would drive up to Massachusetts with a police escort and scoop these people up.”