If the Florida Department of Children and Families has taken your child into custody, you may wonder what your options are. Even if you aren’t able to comply with your case plan, is there a way to get them out of foster care?  In Florida, if you and your family have an open DCF case and your parental rights have not been terminated, you have a right to make a private adoption plan, it’s called Intervention.

Intervention allows a parent to have an impact and say in their child’s future by choosing the hopeful adoptive family that they feel is best to raise their child and to know that they child will not languish in foster care, but have a stable, loving home that they selected. They can request to receive updates and pictures of their child. The benefits of intervention are most often not present if the children are adopted through the state, and the process of a child being adopted from foster care often takes a long time.

Once a parent decides to exert their Right of Intervention, they will sign a consent for their child’s adoption with a private adoption entity. This can be an adoption agency or an adoption attorney.  Once the court approves the intervention and the transfer of custody, the DCF case is stayed (or paused) until the adoption is complete, at which time the DCF case closes.

If your family finds itself in the stressful and scary situation in which your child is in DCF custody, but your rights have not been terminated, and you want to explore the option of Intervention adoption (private adoption while in foster care), please reach out to The Adoption Law Offices of Madonna Finney.

Our firm specializes in Florida adoption law. Madonna Finney is board certified in Adoption Law and has been placing children into loving homes for over 20 years.  Our attorneys and social workers are committed to helping build families through adoption and we have offices in Pensacola, Tallahassee, and Franklin County.

We can be reached at (850) 577-3077

Typically, when the state removes a child from their parents’ custody, the parents are given a list of tasks that they must complete in order for the child to be reunified with the parents. This list is called a case plan, which may include items such as parenting classes, anger management classes, drug screens, etc.  If a parent does not complete their case plan within the set time period, their parental rights may be involuntarily terminated and their children may be adopted by their foster family or another family chosen by the state. Often times, a parent chooses their right of intervention if they do not feel that they can complete the case plan in time, do not feel that they can properly parent their children, or if they decide that it is in the child’s best interest to be adopted by another family.