Kennedy Krieger’s Therapeutic Family Care (TFC) program is providing loving homes to children with special needs. There is a range of services for the children that require temporary or permanent out-of-home placement.
Since 1986, TFC has served more than 100 children each year and more than 56 that have been referred to TFC have been adopted, 41 of them by their foster parents.
Children are placed from counties such as: Baltimore, Somerset, Montgomery, Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, Frederick and Cecil County. Over 149 children were referred last year.
Robert Basler, program director, TFC program says, “We are a treatment foster care program, that recruits, trains and licenses foster care parents to specifically provide services to youth with special needs. The children would have historically been placed in institutions. We provide the same level of services, but what a family can provide.
“We serve kids who have disabilities such as spina bifida, autism, cerebral palsy, kids with intellectual limitations, medically fragile, kids who have emotional or mood disorders and have suffered from neglect,” he said.
Basler says that before becoming a foster parent, the family goes through 24 hours of training, then an extensive home study where the family members are interviewed. They go through health and fire inspections, and once they go through the whole process and are certified, then they can take placement or provide respites (taking a child for the weekend and giving the parents a break) for other families who have kids placed in their homes. The parents are also required to get 24 hours per year of on-going training in order to maintain and increase their skills and knowledge.
“We want them to be well-trained to provide care for kids with special needs,” explained Basler.
The TFC program is in need of foster parents for their program.
“We always need more parents. We have about 100 kids in our program, and we would take more kids, if we had more parents. This can be very demanding on our foster parents, but also rewarding. We are recruiting all the time,” said Basler.
TFC is also a licensed adoption agency. “Probably five to 10 times a year, a foster parent will adopt kids that are placed with them. As a result of that, we tend to lose some foster parents. We also try to provide support to the parents, while the kid is in their home. They will have a clinical social worker assigned to them, who will work with them and their foster child in their home,” said Basler.
“For the most part, the kids do very well. There is always a kid who may have trouble adjusting to foster homes. Our kids tend to have stable placement and the goal is ideally for them to go home to their birth parents, or to be adopted. Most of the kids that we discharge go on to one of those places. For those who end up with us and don’t have a family or get adopted stay with us until they are adults, which is another challenge that we have to work with. For those that age out of the foster care system, that is a challenge for us. We do as many things as we can to help them become as independent as they can be as adults, or provide them with services as adults. For those that qualify, we find homes for them as adults,” he said.
Diane Stegman, a social worker for the TFC program said, “We are looking for families who have patience. Our kids have variousneeds. We are looking for someone who can advocate for children. We work as a team here. We look for parents who love kids. It is important to care about children coming into your home. They need to have a sense of belonging and they need to feel part of a family.”
Families who become a foster parent receive a stipend and a board payment. There is also a number to call 24-hours-a-day seven days a week, if situations ever arise and they don’t know what to do, they just pick up the phone and someone will respond within minutes.
“For a program like this to work we need foster parents, who are willing to open up their homes for kids. Families can do a lot by becoming foster parents,” says Basler
To become a foster parent call the recruitment line at 443-923-3811. For more information on the TFC program visit www. kennedykrieger.org.
Meet the Schuylers, a TFC foster care family on page 11 in this issue.
