Kentucky’s First Lady Glenna Bevin and the Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) Sec. Vickie Yates Brown Glisson today announced a new website aimed at helping families more easily navigate the foster care and adoption process.
Glenna Bevin
“We want to make the foster care and adoption process as easy as possible for families,” First Lady Bevin said. “Every child deserves a loving home.”
The new site at adopt.ky.gov and is linked to the CHFS site to provide helpful adoption and foster information.
First Lady Bevin said her office worked closely with the CHFS Department for Community Based Services to create a website that clearly shows each step to becoming a foster or adoptive parent.
“It’s much more user-friendly, with better organized information, making it easier for families to navigate the foster care system,” First Lady Bevin said.
First Lady and Gov. Matt Bevin are advocates of adoption and foster care. The Bevins have nine children, and four are adopted.
Sec. Glisson said the new website is an important first step toward making the adoption process less stressful and confusing.
“For prospective parents wanting to complete their ‘forever families,’ the steps of adopting can seem endless,” said Sec. Glisson. “This improved website is meant to make the process understandable from the start by explaining options and providing contacts to ask for help.”
DCBS Commissioner Adria Johnson said there are about 8,100 children in Kentucky foster care, and many of them are awaiting adoption.
“Foster care is meant to be a temporary setting until families can be safely reunified,” Johnson said. “But when children cannot return home, we work to find loving, permanent homes for them. This new website has revitalized the entry point for families to learn about opening their hearts and homes to a vulnerable child.”
The new site also includes regional contact information – for families in every county – and a link to the Special Needs Adoption Program photo search database, where families can use criteria like gender, age and siblings to search the listings of children awaiting adoption.
“It’s important that families seeking to adopt find the child match who is right for them.” Johnson said. “This initial database search, with guidance from DCBS caseworkers, can help parents find children who are a good fit for their families.”
Families can also learn more about foster care and adoption by calling 1-800-232-KIDS (5437).
The website was designed in conjunction with the First Lady’s Office and Kentucky Interactive at no additional cost to taxpayers.
Cabinet for Health and Family Services
This is amazing and wonderful and much needed!
Why don’t u first clean up the EVIL CPS so good families don’t have to go through what my son his fiancé and all of us have . I have no respect for your foster system. You tried to steal my granddaughter
They need to also help the families who were approved for the child’s placement with family while the are making improvements
My granddaughter was taken by CPS in Kentucky. I’m a registered nurse with no criminal convictions, never even a traffic ticket, and CPS would not give me my grandchild. I lived in California and was involved in adopting my grandson, his full sister, and their half sibling in California. While I was doing that my granddaughter in Kentucky was adopted to non-family. I moved to Kentucky from California last year so that the siblings could be close together. But this has changed my family forever. Unbelievable and not to mention 14th and 4th civil rights violations. I came to visit the child when she was first taken into custody and I was told that grandparents have no rights. Here’s a statistic that can be found on the Kentucky government website, at this time or April 1 of this year there were 8188 children in foster care. Out of all those children only 311 children were placed with family. How was that possible? If each child had two grandmas that would be over 16,000 people. So you tell me what’s going on here? I asked for a homestudy and I was told that Kentucky would have to do an interstate compact for that and they were just not going to do that. Before the child’s adoption I had visited her several times. I have it all documented on film. She was placed in a wonderful home, but she should’ve been with us because we are her biological family. I also have a DNA test to prove that.