I Have a Sneaking Suspicion About Our Adoption Subsidy

I hesitated to blog about this for a long time, because it might be possible to ascertain Sunny's home state from this information. However, I think it's worth the risk.

Last month, we got a letter from Sunny's home state. It started talking about the state's budget woes, which we are well aware of.  If it wasn't for their budget crisis, BB would probably be with us now.

The letter asked us to accept a cut in our monthly adoption subsidy. Since interstate general adoptions involve a supposedly ironclad contract when it comes to this subsidy -- as long as we are taking care of Sunny, we are guaranteed to be paid that amount until he turns 18 -- the letter said that we should VOLUNTARILY give up the money.  Why?  Because if enough people didn't give up the money, they would be forced to make vaguely defined "across the board" cuts.  The language was rather slippery and menacing.  The deadline is next month.

I've been trying to figure out what to do about the letter.  Some possibilities:
- We don't sign, and they don't make the cuts (no money lost)
- We sign, and they don't make the cuts (a known amount of money lost)
- We don't sign, and they make the cuts anyway (an unknown amount of money lost)
- We sign, and they make the cuts anyway (a known amount of money lost + an unknown amount of money lost money lost)

Based on that decision matrix, the option of signing looks really, really bad.

I finally managed to get hold of our local caseworker. She told us absolutely not to sign.  She didn't think it was even possible for them to make the involuntary cuts!  Her theory is that they're just trying to help the budget by picking some low-hanging fruit -- that is, scaring a few adoptive parents into signing the letters.

It's so sleazy.


They already cut BB's foster mom's adoption subsidies.  Since her adoptions are not interstate like ours, there was apparently less legal protection. Her income went down a combined total of $1000 a month. Two of her older children have FASD and need a lot of services.

We could get by with a lower subsidy.  But the subsidy helps a lot.  If it wasn't for the subsidy, we probably wouldn't have been able to take a risk on that extremely expensive course of neurofeedback Sunny did earlier this year.  In the long run, special needs subsidies help the state, as long as the parents are ethical and the subsidy is actually helping the child, because the money you invest in children now means less money you have to spend later on.  But the state is obviously desperate and not thinking about the long term.

BB's caseworker wasn't able to give us any advice on Sunny's subsidy letter issue. But I'm a little bit suspicious of the way she's been asking us to give her a subsidy request letter on BB even though we're missing some health paperwork on him.  His foster mom tells me that she's waiting on the results of a blood test to determine whether he has a sickle cell issue. Earlier test results were apparently ambiguous.

I'll write about my thoughts of our Halloween visit later on, maybe tomorrow.