The Adoption Process in Alabama

Adoption is defined as the legal and social process by which a child born to one set of parents becomes the child of another parent or parents. The decision to adopt is a very important one and should be based on clear and accurate information. The Department of Human Resources has the responsibility of securing adoptive homes for children in foster care who become available for adoption through termination of parental rights.

We want to make your adoption as smooth and efficient as possible. That is why we are providing this "Adoption Checklist" for you to keep handy while your family goes through the adoption process. It will help you plan ahead, know what steps will be next and offer helpful hints on making your transition from applicant to adoptive parent less complicated and rewarding.

NOTE: Applications to adopt healthy, Caucasian children under age 6 are not being processed at this time.

STEP 1 - Meeting Adoption Requirements

Your willingness and commitment to being a parent, as well as your ability to love and rear a child who needs you are always the main requirements to successfully adopt a child. However, there are specific basic requirements that every adoptive parent MUST meet:

1.    You must be over 19 years of age.

2.    If married, marriage must be of at least 3 years duration.

3.    If a married couple, one must be a U.S. citizen

4.    You must have adequate housing & personal space for the child or children adopted.

5.    You must be healthy enough to meet a child's needs.

6.    You must be willing to undergo a thorough background check, including criminal history

      STEP 2 - Application Submittal

After you have read the information regarding adoption and feel that adoption is something to which you and your family are deeply committed, you should complete the online inquiry form or call 1-866-4AL-KIDS. At your request, an Application toAdopt will be mailed to you. After completion, you will return the application to the county Department of Human Resources at the address that is provided to you.

      STEP 3 - Group Preparation & Selection

After your Application to Adopt is received you will be contacted about attending Group Preparation and Selection (GPS) meetings. GPS is a program designed specifically to educate potential adoptive and foster parent families on a variety of pertinent topics on their upcoming adoption experience. Topics covered in GPS meetings include discussion of the children available, the impact adoption may have on your family, behavior management techniques, separation and loss issues and more. This preparation program will consist of 10 meetings totaling 30 classroom hours. In addition, the social worker will schedule a time to interview you and other family members in your home.

Throughout the GPS meetings, a mutual selection process will help you and your family decide: if adoption is right for you; what type of child will fit best in your family, and assist you in assessing your families strengths and needs.

STEP 4 - Your Approval as An Adoptive Resource

Once you complete your family profile and home study, this information will be assessed and evaluated and a determination made on your application as an adoptive resource. You will receive correspondence from your County Department of Human Resources confirming your approval.

The time between approval and placement can vary significantly, depending on the child/children who are available and the characteristics of the child/children you are willing to consider. You will receive a copy of the Waiting Children Newsletter, which features some of the children in need of adoptive parents.

STEP 5 - Background Information & Pre-Placement Visits

Adoptive placements are made by the State Office of Adoption. Once you are selected as a potential resource for a child or children, you will be given the opportunity to review background information. Questions and concerns you have about the information will be addressed. If you decide that you may be able to parent the child or children offered, you will meet the children in pre-placement visits. After pre-placement visits, the decision to move forward will allow the child or children to be placed in your home upon the signing of a placement agreement.

STEP 6 - Legal Action

After a child has been placed successfully in your home for at least three months, the next step in the adoption process is the sanction by the court system that the child is legally your own. The social worker will give you the Department’s Consent to Adopt so that you may began the legal process in the Probate Court. An attorney is not always required and this is at the County Probate Court’s discretion.

STEP 7 - Adoption: A Life Long Process

The legal confirmation of your adoption is not the end, but rather the beginning of an experience that is unique. There will be exciting times and there may be challenges. Alabama Post Adoption Connections (APAC) is available to you and your family on your journey. Libraries (offering books, videos and other resource material), adoptive family groups, Buddy Family mentors, trained therapists network, a toll-free warm line for information and referral and camperships are but a few of the ways APAC provides support, education and empowerment to the adoption community. Contact APAC at 1-866-803-2722 and www.casapac.org.

Credit: Alabama Department of Human Resources

Birmingham Adoption Orientation

Alabama's Waiting Children

The concept of a "family" is foreign to far too many children. For reasons beyond their control, they have found themselves living in the foster care system. Many have passed through several homes, enduring neglect and sometimes violence. Others may be considered "harder to place" because they belong to a sibling group or have special needs. Some are older children who have endured the system for years. All of them are souls with a basic longing for a "normal" life. . . for someplace to call home. They all need a family.

Credit: Heart Gallery Alabama website

To view some of Alabama's current waiting children, please visit Heart Gallery Alabama to see pictures, read biographies and hear the voices of these children. Alabama Waiting Children

Kids in the River

Imagine that you and I are walking along a river on a lovely warm and sunny spring day. We are admiring the view over the river. Suddenly, we see something moving in the water and are horrified to realize that it appears to be a baby or a young child. We throw off shoes and jackets and plunge into the water to pull the child out or – if we are physically incapable of doing that – we shout and wave for help and call frantically on our cell phones.

The baby is pulled from the water and is, thankfully, alive. We comfort the child, hold him close to warm him, speak soothingly to him. By now, quite a crowd has gathered due to the commotion and we make way for the emergency medical team, which arrives and begins tending to the child.

Suddenly someone in the crowd shouts and points toward the water. We all look and can’t believe our eyes as we see four more – no – five children being carried along by the current! More people go into the river to pull them out. More cell phones call 911. More emergency vehicles arrive. But even as we pull children to the shore, we glimpse more coming down the river—and more and more.

After awhile, a couple of us, maybe it’s you and I, detach from the crowd on the riverbank and begin walking quickly upstream to try and learn what catastrophe could have occurred up there to cause so many beautiful children to be in the river and in such great peril. We think that maybe we can help. Maybe we can stop kids from falling in the water.

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This is obviously an analogy for our child welfare system. Some of us working in the system are posted on the riverbank to pull the kids out and to safety. These are the child protective services and foster care and adoption caseworkers. Others of us have gone upstream to try and stem the flow of children and keep as many as we can out of the river entirely. These are the administrators and program managers and policy people.

But some children end up in the river anyway and then we all try to do out best to ameliorate their experience while in the water – to see that their time in the water be as brief as possible – to get them into a permanent loving family as soon as possible – the place they will stay in and grow up. This family will know that the trauma of having been adrift in the river took a toll on the child. This family will know they have to spend a lot of time warming and soothing and holding the child so that maybe, one day, he will be able to feel safe again and believe that he is secure.

Not one of us, as we see the children in the river and begin pulling them toward shore, would stop and ask the child his age and inquire whether or not he wanted to be pulled out of the water. Not one of us, upon seeing that the child was a young teenager, would loosen our grip on him and let him float on saying to ourselves, “He’s really too old. He’s been in the water a long time already.”

We presume that this river of ours crosses many state and country boundaries on its travels. Not one of us would stop and inquire which state or country the child was from before bringing him to safety. We would just understand the crisis and jump in. No divisions or barriers or hurdles – very simple: child in the river; pull child to safety!

We who are adoptive parents often speak of our belief that this child who became mine was meant to do so. It seems like such a miracle to us that out of all the children out there waiting for parents and out of all the parents waiting for children, this particular child and I found each other and became a family! We know there is luck involved and timing and a lot of other amorphous factors but it still amazes us how it all came together to make us a family.

We who are adoptive parents know that the children who are waiting for families right now could have been our children so we cannot turn away or write them off. We can’t leave them in the river to just float on by. After all, our kids were there once and we know what that’s like. We also know that we can’t adopt all of them! But we sure can make a commotion and get others to the riverbank to become involved. We know that these kids could have been our children and so we accept the responsibility to see that they become somebody’s children.

AdoptUSKids is up there at the head of the river. We trust others to do the job of keeping as many kids out of the river as possible. We focus on the ones already in the water and waiting for a hand to pull them to shore. There are currently 130,000 American kids waiting. The children need good, dedicated and savvy caseworkers standing on the riverbank to pull them out of the water and then they need educated and wise foster and adoptive families to receive the child from his or her caseworker, take his or her hand and walk him or her home – away from the river for good.

Barbara Holtan Reprinted from Fostering Families Today - Spring 2003

Barbara Holtan is the Executive Director of The Adoption Exchange Association and the Project Director for The Collaboration to AdoptUSKids

What Adoption Means to an Older Child

Across the state of Alabama, APAC offers several special events free of charge throughout the year to adoptive families and their children. At a recent event one of our APAC staff, Lisa Williams, asked the children to draw/write what adoption meant to them. This is one of the many that were given to Lisa.

Adoption; The Journey of Miracles

We began the journey of adoption several years ago when God opened our hearts to the many faces of Alabama’s waiting children - the faces of children which were not infants or toddlers. Many had physical or emotional concerns, but they were the faces of children in need of a home. We are amazed and incredibly thankful for the family God has put together for us. 

Five of our adopted children were foster parent adoptions. Being foster parents definitely had its challenges. Yet at the same time, the rewards far outweighed the heartaches. Our most recent two adoptions are children who were featured on adoptuskids.org, a website dedicated to finding families for children who are waiting and  longing for permanency.

Our eighth child was adopted in September 2010 on her 16^th birthday. Practically growing up in foster care, she was often told she would not be adopted because of her race and age. “Couples want to adopt healthy newborns,” she was told. As she watched other foster children in her foster home leave because of reunification or adoption, she began to lose hope. She started to believe that being a 15 year old African American would be the barrier to turn couples away from really wanting her.  Little did she know that four hours away, there was a family scrolling through a website where she was featured. When we saw her photo on adoptuskids.org, it was “magnified” among the others. After an inquiry and waiting for what seemed like eternity, the call came that our family was being considered to adopt her. The excitement we felt was almost uncontainable!

The day the social worker told our daughter we “wanted her” to join our family, she laughed and laughed and didn’t believe her! As the worker showed her our photo album and gave her a letter we had written to her, she began to cry… literally weeping tears of joy.  For the first time in her life she felt wanted! Someone INDEED wanted her! A family! A big family, at that! A real family to call her own, a forever home!  For her, it was a “miracle.” Hope is a powerful emotion. It took root deep within our daughter’s heart as she began to prepare for such an incredible, life-changing journey. We can’t imagine being a family without her! 

We’re so thankful for our “rainbow” family.  Such beautiful colors of individual hearts woven neatly together by God to create a family. Our family.

Adoption …… it’s a journey of miracles. 

Credit: Ann Smith, November 2010, originally published in the APAC Newsletter

What Are Adoption Subsidies?

Adoption subsidies are financial payments made on behalf of special needs children who are placed for adoption. Whether subsidy is awarded is based on the needs of the child and there is no income means test for the adoptive parents.

What is a “special needs” child?

In Alabama, a special needs child is a child with one or more of the following conditions:

·         Physical or mental limitations;

·         Emotional or behavioral difficulties;

·         Recognized high risk of physical or mental disease;

·         A member of a sibling group of three (3) or more being placed together for adoption;

·         A child of African American heritage age two or older; and

·         A child of any race eight years of age or older

What is the amount of adoption subsidy?

Adoption subsidy cannot exceed the regular foster care board payment rate. Difficulty of care rates are negotiable based upon the exceptional needs of the child. Whenever foster care rates are changed, subsidies may be adjusted at the time of the yearly rectification.

When do subsidies begin?

Adoption subsidy payments can begin at any time after the adoptive placement. However, agreements for adoption subsidy must be signed prior to the final decree of adoption.

What about Medicaid benefits with subsidy?

Not all children are automatically eligible for Medicaid coverage to continue after adoption placement. In some instances, the child must have a special needs for medical or rehabilitative care. 

How do I apply for adoption subsidy?

A child in the permanent custody of the Department of Human Resources is certified eligible for subsidy by the county social worker. The worker determines if the child is special needs prior to making the adoptive placement. The offer of subsidy is made during the adoptive placement process.

Credit: Alabama Department of Human Resources info packet for pre-adoptive families.