Currently navigating the Texas adoption system. I'm rich enough that I can afford to care for a child. I've got space in my home (literally half the reason I went out and got a house was to have space for a child). But holy fuck, the amount of bullshit bureaucracy necessary just to foster is insane. We've been licensed and waiting on someone in CPS to queue us up for months. There are a thousand little do-dads I need to constantly, independently, re-register every year to stay current. And because the Texas CPS system is chronically underfunded with a comically high turn over, I never actually talk to the same case-worker more than twice.
I explored other options. Besides just making babies the old fashioned way, there's "private adoption" which costs $50k and sounds suspiciously like some sort of puppy mill machine for people. There's foreign adoption, which is cheaper, but which is rife with straight up kidnapping. And there's sectarian adoption (our current preferred option) which amounts to lying to people that I believe in Jesus in order to get the social services necessary for a placement in my home.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes, and I've only got a partial picture of it. Massive turnover at CPS means the bureaucracy is incredibly slow. The political instinct to avoid scandal rather than reduce human misery means it's better to leave kids in legal limbo than place them in a "bad" home that shows up on the evening news. And there's some good-ish news, at least in my home of Harris County. The new wave of Black Lady Democrat Judges who came up through the 2018 wave are far more reluctant to throw people in jail and, as a consequence, throw their kids into the foster system.
The CPS system is bad for a whole bunch of reasons. And pumping people through it faster won't necessarily make it better. But the things that would make it better cost money. Texas State Legislature has been trying not to spend a penny more on CPS than absolutely necessary for decades.
One reason I'm engaging in shitlib electoralism is in the vain hope that flipping the state legislature might change that.
Currently navigating the Texas adoption system. I'm rich enough that I can afford to care for a child. I've got space in my home (literally half the reason I went out and got a house was to have space for a child). But holy fuck, the amount of bullshit bureaucracy necessary just to foster is insane. We've been licensed and waiting on someone in CPS to queue us up for months. There are a thousand little do-dads I need to constantly, independently, re-register every year to stay current. And because the Texas CPS system is chronically underfunded with a comically high turn over, I never actually talk to the same case-worker more than twice.
I explored other options. Besides just making babies the old fashioned way, there's "private adoption" which costs $50k and sounds suspiciously like some sort of puppy mill machine for people. There's foreign adoption, which is cheaper, but which is rife with straight up kidnapping. And there's sectarian adoption (our current preferred option) which amounts to lying to people that I believe in Jesus in order to get the social services necessary for a placement in my home.
Fucking insane.
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There's a lot going on behind the scenes, and I've only got a partial picture of it. Massive turnover at CPS means the bureaucracy is incredibly slow. The political instinct to avoid scandal rather than reduce human misery means it's better to leave kids in legal limbo than place them in a "bad" home that shows up on the evening news. And there's some good-ish news, at least in my home of Harris County. The new wave of Black Lady Democrat Judges who came up through the 2018 wave are far more reluctant to throw people in jail and, as a consequence, throw their kids into the foster system.
The CPS system is bad for a whole bunch of reasons. And pumping people through it faster won't necessarily make it better. But the things that would make it better cost money. Texas State Legislature has been trying not to spend a penny more on CPS than absolutely necessary for decades.
One reason I'm engaging in shitlib electoralism is in the vain hope that flipping the state legislature might change that.
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