Adoption statistics from the United States Department of Health and Human Services convey that over 135,000 children are adopted in the U.S. each year. In Arizona, according to the Arizona Judicial Branch website that number is over 14,000. Some are put into the foster care system due to abuse and some are voluntarily relinquished by their biological parents. However, the leading cause of children being placed in out of home care is parental neglect.
One such story involves Sarah Ellison of Winslow. Her story began with a plan for foster care but resulted in her becoming an adoptive parent. She began the process of being licensed to foster children last year. “It took me about three months to get my license to be a foster home. Basically, it was a background check, a fingerprint clearance, home study, classes and CPR/first aid certification. To be completely honest I thought it was very easy,” she said.
Ellison sought a fostering license to be able to take in children in cases of abuse and neglect. “Sometimes,” she said, “kids are taken from their homes in emergency situations, in the middle of the night sometimes. I want to be there for those children. I want to love on kids when they are at their most vulnerable.”
She continued, “I started the process in October of last year. To be honest, I had always wanted to open my home to kids who needed it but when I found out that a relative of mine was going to have a child and that the mother was heavily addicted to drugs, meaning the baby would be born drug exposed, it gave me the push I needed to get it done.”
When that child was born, he was originally placed in a foster home that was not Ellison’s. With a goal of reunification Ellison said, “I chose not to take him when he was removed from the hospital because I wanted him to be near his parents for them to receive services and be able to visit him. I wanted to know that him coming to be with me didn’t hinder reunification and I wasn’t keen on him being transported as an infant.
“I did have a very close relationship with his foster mother and took him for visits regularly until he was about eight months old. I asked him to be moved to my home after his parents stopped coming for visits and it was clear that reunification was not going to happen.”
The boy is now 10 months old and Ellison is in the process of adopting him. In Navajo County the County Attorney’s Office offers services to adoptive parents at no cost. “An attorney is given to the parents and the child when the state takes custody. The attorney general represents the state. I suppose I may need an attorney if things got tricky but as far as I know these adoptions happen all the time without that being needed.”
She explained that she has found the process to be relatively seamless in this particular case with the biological parents agreeing to the severance of their rights to the child. “They (the parent’s attorney) changed the case plan to severance and I believe that will become official in January or February and the adoption will take place soon after that.”
Ellison would like to open her home to more children. She said one of her goals is to eventually have a group home for teens because, as she said, “The world may not change if you adopt a child but for that child, their world will change.”
Adults who were adopted as children often feel the need to find and contact their biological families. Becca Cooper of Winslow is one of those adults.
Cooper was adopted at birth from Hawaii, a state that until recently had sealed adoption records. She said, “My brother and I are both adopted. The fact we were adopted was never a secret; we were each told how special we were throughout our childhood.”
She continued, “But there was always the fact that I didn’t look like anyone around me. My adoptive family’s heritage is German and Irish and I have a very obvious Hawaiian look. For me, adopted identity was complicated. Fitting into a family and being ‘of’ the family were two separate things. There were existential questions of ‘where do I come from and who am I?’ I often asked myself, ‘am I a product of my environment, or my genetics?’
She began the process of finding her biological family multiple times over the years. “I finally decided to try DNA testing and took two tests, Ancestry and 23andMe. The results took forever but once I got them I could hardly stand the excitement. The results were interesting, they verified my ethnic background a(nd) gave me genetic relatives. I was amazed. Not only did I have nearly 900 listed genetic relatives but I found a second cousin that helped me narrow down my birth mother’s side and refined the search to a pair of sisters of which one was most likely to be my mother.”
In December of 2017, Cooper was able to meet her birth mother, Karen Renfro and her half-sister April Verwey after having begun a relationship over the phone.
“The idea of belonging, knowing where I was from all settled down for me to feeling peaceful and thankful. I was able to do the one thing I had hoped for. I told my birth mom thank you for giving me life when you could have chosen differently.”
She continued, “I am eternally grateful for my parents who raised me, loved me, shared their families and stories, shaped my values, wiped my tears and scared away the boogey man. They encouraged me to be the best ‘me’ that I could.”
The foster care system is in desperate need of volunteers in Navajo County. According to CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) of Navajo County, the goal of the system is reunification of families. That happens in nearly 46 percent of foster cases thanks, in part to CASA volunteers and people like Ellison who open their homes to children in need. To volunteer for the CASA program or to find more information on how to become a foster parent, contact the Navajo County Attorney’s Office at 928-524-4026 or CASA at www.casaofnavajocounty.org.
