Emergancy placement

I think I'm going to be on my own this semester at DFCS. I do what I want!  Seriously, I just walk around and ask people if I can go with them or what they're doing or why they're doing that or can I read your case files?  Some of my classmates talked about how their whole day is planned out and it's all very structured  - not me!

I arrived this morning a little late - around 8:35.  I keep forgetting that my car is going to have an inch of ice on it in the morning and then I took a wrong turn. I don't know if I'll ever be able to put the GPS to rest.  I was so worried about being late and then neither one of my supervisors were there yet. Leigh showed up and told me Isla was home sick with her son.  She sent me to hang out with Rose.  Rose just started in November and  is very cheery and sweet. My favorite kind of person. We chatted a bit about her current case, but she admitted that her day was probably going to be pretty boring. Then Leigh came back and said that Nia was going on an immediate and I could go with her. I asked what an immediate was and quickly responded with...WELL DUH!  It means you have to immediately go to the site.

We loaded up in Nia's nice big SUV and quickly got very lost. We had an address that was something like 23C Yourstreet. Well we found 23 Yoursteet and knocked and no one answered. We asked the neighbor if he knew where this person lived. He pointed us to a house up the road, we knock and he points us to a couple of duplexes. It's amazing how people know each other!

When we pull up a police officer steps outside and tells us what is going on. Mariah, a 16 year old girl, has been arrested. Mariah is no stranger to the police and the officer tells us that he hopes she will be gone for a long time. Mariah's 2 year old son is being raised be her mother. I think Mariah was arrested for beating her mother, I'm not too clear on that though. But to get back at her mother, Mariah told the officers that she didn't want her mom to keep her son. Luckily the baby's father was involved and his mother took custody of the child for the time being. Mariah's mom was crying and you could tell she loved the little one so much.  It was a pretty short visit, Nia just copied down the paternal grandmothers information and then we left.


When late afternoon rolled around a foster care placement case manager (Lucy) called Emile and told him that I was going to need to find a placement for a sibling group who had come into custody that morning. The children had been removed from the duplex right next to Mariah's house - what a coincidence. I was freaking out at this point, because I felt like they were leaving these kids' lives in my hands and that I was not qualified to take on such a huge responsibility. But, I have to learn sometime!  I was given a list of private agencies (I had actually already tried all the foster homes in Sleepy County. [I'm going to call the county Sleepy, because I don't think much ever happens there] The little was tiny and rather pitiful. I think the oldest age on the list was about 11)

Conversations went something like this-

Hi, this is Private Agency Whatever

Hi - I'm Hazel - with Sleepy County DFCS. I'm calling about an emergency placement for a 12 year old girl and a 15 year old boy.

Oh, well they're a little too old. We might be have a home for the girl, but not the boy. I'll call you back in 30 minutes.
Well, they're great kids. They have no known behavioral issues and we really need them to stay together.  They are in court right now and we really need a placement for them for tonight.
NO BEHAVIORAL ISSUES!  Are you lying to me!?
No, I promise I'm not ;)

Well why were they taken into care?
Neglect & parents' substance abuse

Around and around.  Questions that caught me off guard:  Will the children mind being in a black foster home? (they were white) and How big is the boy? 

Eventually, I was able to find two homes for them!  YAY :)  Unfortunately, the closest (where the CM took them) was about 30 minutes away. Not only were the kids going into care, they were going to have to go to a new school in a new city.

I went out with Lucy to the home of the children. When we got there, the building manager had to let us all in. Our group consisted of Harry (the investigator), Lucy (foster care), me, and the sister of the children (age 19) and her boyfriend. The kids didn't even get to pack up their own stuff.

The house was....filthy and sad. No place I would ever want to live, but it was their home and I was sad that they had to leave it.  Since we were not the homeowners, the building manager told us we could only take clothes. The boy really wanted to take his XBOX, but we were told we wouldn't be able to take it from the house. There were no suit cases, clothes were carried out by hand and piled into Lucy's car.  After we had been there about 20 minutes, the parents arrived in the grandmother's truck.

The parents really touched me. They were incredibly sweet and worried and open and...just like anyone you might meet on the street.  The dad was worried about the placement and Lucy told him that I had found a home for the kids. He thanked me profusely and asked if there were other children in the home. I assured him that his children were the only ones there and he was thankful once again. He said he had grown up in the system and knew what could happen when you got a bunch of foster children in one home.

Hmm, I asked Emile about workers being foster parents. He seemed surprised by the question and said that he didn't think most people who worked in DFCS would want to be foster parents because they see enough at the office.