Saturday, January 30, 2010
Permanency Teaming Prep – Getting Beyond MySpace, Jogging, and McDonalds
We’re gearing up for the fourth permanency-team meeting for one of our teens in foster care. A permanency team is a group of individuals who come together and support a youth in foster care and his or her move toward permanence. Separated from her family and aching to be with them, there were both tears and laughter in the first of our two individual preparation sessions for the larger team meeting. Talk of a potential love, MySpace, the merits of jogging at 6 a.m., and the joy that is “dining-at-McDonald’s” is far easier than talking about birth parents who didn’t show for your recent birthday party, an upcoming court hearing that likely will result in deferring your long-awaited move back into your home community, and your disappointment in the system that seems to fail and frustrate you at every turn. From her mouth are the words: “I don’t care,” but the tears in her eyes betray her.
So many of the kids we work with “shut down” at so many levels: emotionally, mentally, and physically. I love the spirit of this child, now no longer a child – now 17 years old. We have 11 months until she can empancipate herself from the system. Eleven months to deliver what the state promised when they removed her: safety, permanency, well-being, and a a family to call her own. We are working closely to see if she can be reunited safely with a birth family member. We are also working to have a back-up plan in case that can’t happen too – and, if need be, maybe a third and fourth back-up plan. Some agencies might give up on a 17-year-old foster teen whose phrases of choice are sometimes an ongoing stream of “No” and “I don’t care.” At Casey Family Services, we don’t quit.
If you or someone you know has a heart for fostering or adopting teens, please call 888.799.KIDS.
