Too Sad to Say "I Told You So"

Today one of Ana's former foster daughters came for a weekend respite stay. She will 15 years old next week.

Her foster sister is the 13 year old who lived with us until recently. Because of the detrimental effect that her defiance and disrespect was having on the younger kids and the fact that she threatened to make false allegations against us, we reluctantly asked that she be removed from our home. We are licensed with a private foster family agency. Because they have few homes in our county they are not always able to make a good match between the child and the home that they are placed in. All the children placed are higher level of care and are mostly teens. Despite the lack of options the agency is hestitant to release kids from the program and mismatches are made for many reasons that I won't mention (but some of them look something like this: $$$$$$$).

Unfortunately, they went ahead and placed this 13-year-old young lady with a family with less then 8 months fostering experiencing who already foster a teenage girl and a special needs 5-year-old. We brought it up several times that this match would be turbulent and could burn out the new foster parents and destabilize the placement of the other girl. But apparently the "professionals know best" and our warnings went unheeded. We are in fact treated as somewhat troublesome to work with.

Well......exactly what we said could happen did happen. They ran away several times and the 13-year-old has been removed and the other girl now badly wants to move. These are girls who have been in the system a long time and have experienced many, many moves.

I have to scream here for a minute. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

While we know a great many wonderful people who are social workers, the system itself is so aggravating. So many decisions are made for monetary reasons by people with too little time and information. Having an empty bed does not make for a good placement match and new foster parents are too often asked to take kids with problems that are not fully disclosed without the training or experience to deal with it.

We are very worried about the outcome for the 15-year-old who is spending the weekend with us.

I could rant for days on end about this topic it is that frustrating to me.