Snarled in bureaucracy: Couple says state adoption process flawed
NASHVILLE (AP) — Steve and Annette Nole Hall wanted to adopt the 14-year-old girl as soon as they met her and felt her hug them “like she never wanted to let us go.”
But state adoption officials forbid them even to contact her for five months and didn’t tell the girl the couple wanted to adopt her. The teen was so heartbroken that her grades dropped from As and Bs to Fs, Annette Hall recalled tearfully Wednesday.
“They didn’t want to get her hopes up, so they gave her no hope,” she told members of the state Senate General Welfare Committee.
The Halls said they believe the state’s adoption process — particularly for older children — is so bureaucratic and negative that potential parents often give up and the children languish.
“People would do this if they knew how much they were needed, but they come out of this discouraged. Instead of discouraging parents, the state needs to be encouraging them,” Steve Hall said. Tennessee has about 1,200 children in need of adoption and another 9,000 in foster care.
When the Halls first contacted the state in 2002 about the possibility of adopting a child, their calls weren’t returned. When they finally reached someone, they were told not to bother because adoption was a long and grueling process.
It certainly was for the child.
The state was first called to her Middle Tennessee home because of abuse and neglect complaints when she was 3, but she wasn’t placed in state custody until three years later. “The caseworker turned a blind eye. She said the parents didn’t look like the kind of people who would cause problems,” Mrs. Hall said.
The child remained in limbo the next seven years — living in the Tennessee Baptist Children’s Home in Brentwood — because the Department of Children’s Services didn’t end the parents’ legal rights until last year, the Halls said.
The Halls also went through two frustrating years with an inexperienced caseworker who lost their confidential documents amid reams of paperwork.
The prospective parents met the girl in 2003 under less-than-ideal circumstances.
The couple had begun taking classes to prepare them to adopt when they were told to attend a “match party,” where they could interact with some available children.
Steve Hall called it a “cattle auction,” where prospective parents were told to head to a particular hole on a miniature golf course and wait for children to be herded through.
Several teenage boys didn’t even look up as they shuffled by, Steve Hall said. “You could tell they’d been this way before. They thought no one would want to talk to them and they’d just keep on going.”
The story does end happily for the Halls: They gain custody of their daughter Friday and the adoption should be final six months after that — well over a year since they first met.
But the Halls worry that other prospective adoptive parents won’t be so persistent. They’re hoping that by speaking up they can help Steve Hall’s employer, Sen. Doug Jackson, change the system.
“Tennessee has its claws on 1,200 children awaiting adoption … shut off by the process that insensitive bureaucrats created for themselves,” Jackson said. The real question, he said, is how many other children are trapped in foster care because the state won’t terminate their parents’ rights.
Department spokeswoman Margie Maddux could not immediately say, but agrees Wednesday’s hearing raised valid points. New commissioner Viola Miller is restructuring the department, Maddux said.
“We do not believe our people are worshipping paperwork and process, but sometimes they get caught up in it or lost in that. That’s one thing the commissioner wants to change,” she said.
Sen. John Ford, who chairs the committee, promised to have department officials at its meeting next week and agreed with Jackson that a bill giving lawmakers more authority over the department may be in order.
“We have been derelict in our duty. We have abdicated our responsibility to look closer at this,” he said.
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.