Because he was removed from our home simply for causing too much trouble for local case workers. If you try too hard to help a foster child, watch out. They may just make your child disappear.
We moved 8 year-old foster son to Tennessee with us last June of 2024. We were in the process of adopting him.
My wife found him when she heard that Florida DCF had placed a 6 year-old boy at a nearby teen group home in Florida. A friend who worked there sent a picture of the little guy to my wife. Because of his small size and cute face, my wife immediately worried he would be in danger of assault surrounded by troubled, teenage boys. She got on the phone with our local network of foster parents and tracked down the case worker assigned to him.
That child was in our care for the next 16 months. But in May of 2024, the TN DCS abruptly decided he must be sent back to Florida, effectively ending our guardianship of the child.
What had we done to deserve such a dramatic, and traumatic move? Why would a boy be taken from the only family he has, with no biological family wanting him, and thrown back into the Florida foster system? What crime had been committed by our family?
Basically, we asked too much for help.
We can pretty much guess what our friends at TN DCS would say about us. They’d say we were wishy washy, because there were times we wanted David to go back to Florida. Honestly, we were torn between loving our foster child and wanting our home to be a place of safety and peace. Our child’s outbursts were sometimes on a daily basis, and often were violent toward my wife.
I defy any husband not to have second thoughts about adopting when that child can erupt at any moment, causing damage and harm.
In fact, I’ve been pretty honest about our struggles in past blog posts here at my website. There are several entries where we were grappling with whether we could handle him. We had friends tell us horror stories of other adoptions of violent children, ending in devastating consequences. We could tell that some felt relieved for us when our foster child was no longer in our custody.
But the problem with all that is this: we were learning how to help him! From working with our tremendous Greeneville City School system, we had gotten him into therapies that were making progress. He had teachers who knew him personally and loved him. And my wife and I were starting to understand the very specific way this one child would need to be parented. It would take a lot of skill and patience, but we had learned him over the year and four months he was with us. We really think we know how to help him now.
Most of all, we think we know what NOT to do now. And that is to ask for any kind of extraordinary help from the foster care system. If you ask too much – if your child isn’t intimidated by a policeman showing up at your door (which is the go-to advice DCS gives for a violent child), then that’s all you’re gonna get. Don’t ask for them to admit your child to any longer-term therapy.
If you do, they will send your child to a little psych hospital in the next town for a week. You know, the one where teens go when they threaten suicide? There, staff will basically watch him, maybe up his dose of meds, and then send him back to you unimproved. And you’re supposed to be satisfied with that.
But if you ask for longer-term treatment, well, that’s gonna cost. And it’s just a foster kid, after all. They all have problems. And if it’s a foster kid like ours that came in from out of state, he’s an even lower priority because they don’t figure he really belongs here after all.
And if you decide you want to try to save this kid from an eventual adult life of institutionalization and/or crime, you’re gonna ask for so much help that they will start seeing YOU as the problem. From stories other foster parents have told us, sometimes they decide to accuse you of some breach in protocol, hoping to scare you back into silence.
In our case, we heard after the fact that one caseworker accused us of having left our child at home alone. She also said we refused to come get him from the hospital, when in fact she called us and offered to bring him home to us since she was there. However, none of this has been made official. They only say this stuff to the other caseworkers in Florida, although by law they would have to have brought an investigation against us for leaving the child home alone. No investigation has been even begun, probably because it never happened. Our foster son was too unpredictable to ever leave home alone. We could never have taken such a risk.
So here we are, having evidently asked for too much, dealing now with the consequences of that sin. The child we had loved for 16 months, that we were already in the process of adopting, is gone. And for us, it feels like our child has been abducted. But the people you’d go to for help to find him know exactly where he is.
Those people in TN refuse to talk to the ones in Florida who want to help the adoption to proceed. Everyone’s circling the wagons because now, to do something about it, they’d have to admit they did something wrong to begin with. So phone calls go unanswered, emails are ignored, and a government bureaucracy conspires to destroy an eight year-old boy’s future by simply ignoring his existence.
I guess that’s what foster kids get for not being able to vote. What do they expect for such a lack of political power?
I’m tired of hearing people say the foster care system is “so broken”. That’s much too generous a term for the level of negligence we’ve experienced. In my opinion, they are criminally negligent and corrupt.
But our anger is only surpassed by our grief at wondering where our angry, broken little boy is tonight. And does he wonder if we’ve forgotten him?
God be with him. God be with all the foster children in our state. And God help us to not be able to live with this dysfunction anymore!
Sincerely,
David and Dawn Gipson
***UPDATE AS OF JUNE 7, 2024
Since taking our foster son away for no reason must have appeared odd even to them, TN DCS have told us we have now been deemed IN BAD STANDING with the state of TN, although no investigator ever spoke with us nor came to our home. The crux of their accusations appear to be that we left our foster son unattended and we made some racial slur toward some unnamed person. The first one never happened – our foster son was too unpredictable to even think of leaving home alone. The second one I find surprising and hilarious since the majority of our family members are either African American or Latinx.
But to both charges I would simply say: they never happened, and they have zero proof.
In addition, the letter contained in today’s email from TN DCS was dated June 7, 2024, EXACTLY 10 DAYS previous to today. Not so coincidentally, the time to contest those findings is 10 days. So today, we received word at around 4pm on the very day any contestation would have to be postmarked. And we wouldn’t have received even this if my wife had not been calling continually to find out why no one had come yet to do our homestudy, having just completed all our TN DCS foster training. No copy of this letter, certified or otherwise, was ever sent to our address.
There has been no investigation, because we have never been included in the process. In our country, simply making an accusation is not sufficient to make any conclusion about them.
By accusing us, their goal is to shut us up. Even they realized that taking the child away a month and a half ago seemed weird. But random accusations are typical when DCS gets tired of dealing with you. Many foster parents stay quiet about DCS because they fear they will no longer be allowed to help the children in their care. If anything, now we have the freedom to speak freely.
Oddly enough, this past Sunday some representatives from a local group home who help with foster children were at our church to ask our congregation for help. In front of hundreds of people, they couple said, “Why don’t you lead us in prayer about fostering Pastor Dave, since we know you are a foster care advocate in our area?”
Oh, the irony. It would be funny, if they hadn’t also said there were hundreds of kids needing foster homes in our county, but only about 40 homes. And at least for the time being, we won’t be one of them.
But we are determined to not let their shaming tactics succeed. My wife endured beatings by this child, and now is being victim-blamed for daring to advocate for him and say he needed more help. We will proudly let everyone know our story, including every state government official that will listen.
Oh, and as any problem our family has with other races, I hope they can look at our family picture and tell us exactly which race we appear to have a problem with? Can’t wait to hear that answer…
