If you have been a foster parent for a few years then you may have noticed that there is a lot of turnover in foster care workers. I understand why, but it doesn’t make it any easier on the children, the foster parents, or the families. Foster care is an incredibly stressful job that really doesn’t pay all that well. I have seen help wanted advertisements for foster care workers, requiring a master’s degree, offering less money than a nurse or an accountant would make with an associate degree. What could possibly be more stressful than knowing a child’s future, possibly his life, hangs on your decisions and case management?

If you terminate parent’s rights, they call screaming, stalk you, and sometimes threaten to kill you. If you return the child home, you have the foster parents yelling and crying. If you forget a document at court, you have the judge chewing you out. Rarely is there a perfect situation where the foster care worker feels extremely confident in the final outcome of a case.

I bring this up because we are losing our foster care worker at the very end of our case. Our foster daughter, who has been with us for 16 months this time (nine months previously) is supposed to return home on the 23 of May. Our foster care worker is leaving on the nineteenth. I am sure that there is never a perfect time to leave a job either, so I don’t blame her. She needs to do what is best for her family.

However, I am a little worried about having a new person in charge during what is supposed to be the final week. The last foster child we had, a teenager, was all set to go home when we changed caseworkers. The new caseworker refused to send her and really ticked her off. We had the worst time with our teenager after that because she was all ready to go home.

Not only am I concerned about the actual timing of the return home, but about the follow-up supervision. A new person to the case doesn’t know the family or the extended family and therefore, isn’t going to know if something is amiss. You never think about these things as a new foster parent.

nasrulekram's photo stream uploaded January 18, 2008

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