Children Needing Residential Care
Many adoptive families are now reporting horror stories of having to have a "Child in Need of Protection or Services" petition filed in order for their adopted son or daughter with multiple issues to receive residential care.
Are there other ways less incriminating ways that families can access funding for residential treatment when it is not safe for their adopted child to live at home?
posted by Claudia at 10:06 AM
4 Comments:
Jeannette writes:
As part of our national resource center on adoption assistance, NACAC collects information regarding residential treatment and how states fund it for children with special needs. Some states DO NOT require children to be committed to the state or county’s care in order to receive help. In Maryland, for instance, there are certain circumstances where the child’s care in a residential treatment facility may be funded without committing the child to the custody of the state agency.
If parents or professionals are interested to see what their state’s policy is regarding this, go to http://www.nacac.org/subsidy_stateprofiles.html and then click on your state and look to Question 12.
Laura suggests:
This is a very tough issue because nothing in the provisions of adoption support (subsidy) provide for residential treatment for adopted children. In our system, an adoptive family who needs residential treatment must do a private referral and pay themselves or come back into the system, which is not what they really want to do just to get services for their child. Recently, families have even had trouble getting back into the system in order to access residential treatment. The work we need to do at this point is to enhance the services we have post adoption. Whether we do this by grants or other creative funding sources, our data tells us over and over again that we need to have services available as adopted children with special needs grow up. We have identified FAS treatment and educational advocacy as two major areas of adoptive services we need to focus on. Perhaps a better way to address this topic is to have people identify resources that are needed for adopted children and offer suggestions on how we can go about getting them implemented. Maybe if join together in this quest, we might be able to make a difference.
Faye offers:
In PA, children with a mental health diagnosis may be able to receive a Medicaid card (independent of the family's income) giving access to the state mental health services. If families need help in negotiating this system, please contact me.
In our state it even goes county to county as to whether you can get your child into needed residential treatment. My son has a lengthy history of issues and has been admitted numerous times, but I have a friend whose son is a psychopath - he is 7 and is now sexually acting out on the daughter in the home. She has reached out to the mental health agencies and social services. All have turned a blind eye, telling her that she will have to pay for it... In my mind, a psychopath will do more damage than a bipolar child.... Her son has already sexually assaulted a child in school.
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