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Whether you have a new placement arriving or sending a foster child home, chances are you will be rearranging bedroom furniture. That is unless you are specifically taking a certain age and gender of children. Over the years of providing foster care, we have accepted boys or girls from newborn through 17. We have five bedrooms that we use for sleeping rooms and we usually have eight children living at home. If a girl moves out and our next foster child is a boy then we would need to rearrange the boy’s bedroom. Sometimes we actually have to trade entire bedrooms.
Allow me to explain. Each child in a bedroom must have 40 square feet of living space according to foster care licensing regulations. For example, if a bedroom were 8-feet by 10-feet, you would have 80 square feet of living space. That means you could have two people sleeping in that bedroom if you have a foster care license. If the bedroom was 10-feet by 12-feet, you could have three children sleeping in it.
We have one bedroom that can only have two people in it and two bedrooms that can have three. Then we have two bedrooms that could legally have four occupants. Say for example that we had our two daughters in one of the bedrooms that foster care allows three children to occupy. If we accepted a sibling group of two girls, we would not be able to put them in that room. Therefore, we would have to trade a bedroom with the three boys to remain in licensing compliance.
Then, when a foster child leaves, the dynamics change again. We had the three boys in one bedroom after we accepted our last foster daughter. She went home last Friday. That meant that the boys could go back to having two of them in a bedroom. Well they wouldn’t want to waste any time you know, so they began moving Friday night.
I remember the days when I was young and LOVED to redecorate and rearrange. Now if you tell me I have to do any of those things, I cry. HeeHee.
At least yours were working on it themselves and helping.
Here, there has to be 50sq ft per child so 8×10 rooms are one kid only. My problem is my rooms are 10×12 and 14×20 and they keep wanting me to take in 6-7 at a time and we keep saying TWO MAX!!
Kim
Hi,
I live in Atlanta. I would like to foster but I can’t seem to get any information. The classes address the children’s feelings. The social workers want to talk about our families’s acceptance. I need to know about schooling and where to get medical exam for the kids. They asked us to consider special needs kids but didn’t explain enough. Also what is the allowance for one child, a sibbling groups or children with special needs? Is it safe to put unrelated children in the same room? How about bunk beds, are they okay?