Name: Anais Cornfeld
Social Justice Group: Child Welfare, Foster Care and Adoption
Date of Fieldwork: February 9, 2022
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Alessandra Brunialti, and Paul Yager: LREI Parents
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :
On Wednesday, February 9th, We met with Alessandra Brunialti, and Paul Yager, who are LREI parents at the school. We had an in-depth conversation on their experience in fostering and adopting. They adopted their children from Sheltering Arms; Child and Family Services. They currently live in New York with their two children. They entered the system’s process almost a decade and a half ago.
It was no surprise to learn that fostering and adopting is no easy task. There are many ways that a person can adopt or foster. You can adopt kids through the state, or privately through a non-governmental organization. Alessandra and Paul adopted both their children through the state of New york. To first become a foster parent, one must register for a license, which process takes around nine months. Background checks, fingerprinting, and criminal records all need to be collected during the process, and home and family inspections also occur. This also must be completed to renew the license granted annually. While taking care of a child, home inspections happen once a month, and search the house to make sure the house is clean, there are working fire alarms, there is food in the refrigerator, and proper rooms.
Agencies prepare families to become immediate foster parents. They must be ready to take in a child who was taken into foster care as quickly as possible. When a child gets removed from their home, the city looks at lists of available foster homes and calls them. Not much information is given except for sex, religion, and disability. The day after the phone call the agency comes and delivers the baby to them. Frequent checkups must be done with the agency.
The main focus of CPS and many other organizations is to reunite them with their birth families. These matters are taken to court and a judge decides if the birth parents are stable enough to be reunited. The baby, mother, and other parents get attorneys to represent them, but foster parents do not. Birth families only have 15 months to prove that they can create a safe and supportive home for their children. If not with their parents, CPS often tries to seek out family members who can take them in. During and after the child is being fostered, the birth parents have visitation rights which both they, and the foster parents need to uphold. This is a parental requirement if they want to obtain full custody again. Other requirements are: obtaining a stable source of income, receiving help and getting clean for any addictions or mental illnesses, and attending prenatal classes. The parents can terminate parental rights if they cannot meet the requirements for full custody. All of these requirements are valid in the state of New York, but many states have very different requirements.
Alessandra and Paul also shared a lot of very valuable facts and insight on their opinions on the way the foster care and adoption process and the system work; they note that poverty and extreme living conditions really hit the system the hardest. It is far less common for abuse to be the reason for removal and is most commonly because of neglect and the inability to support a child. They also talked about how the three reasons a child will go into the system are: abuse (rare), neglect (more common), and abandonment (in some states it is legal to leave your child in front of a police station, fire station, or hospital and abandon your child). Another thing that we talked about were the parenting classes and techniques learned before becoming a foster parent. Alessandera mentioned how she and Paul learned some very important parenting skills, like how to do CPR and other important things. She said that she thinks every parent should take these classes.
“anyone can become a parent.”
We agreed that parenting classes should be more available and encouraged for new parents. This would be a major step in preventing the problem, rather than just patching the cracks of the foster care system.
