The Procedure

A question adopting families often have is, "What happens from the time we sign an agreement to work with your agency, until we make the trip to Romania?"

1. The Paperwork

A family must present an approved international home study to the agency. We can prepare home studies on for Wisconsin residents. We can also help you select an adoption agency in your state of residence.

If a social worker from our agency has not prepared a home study, a Home Study Review must accompany each file. Basically, the purposes of this review are to indicate that our agency agrees with the favorable report submitted in the home study, and to add any information our agency and the Romanian authorities would expect to see covered in a home study.

Additionally, the file of paperwork must contain birth certificates, a marriage certificate, a criminal record clearance check, medical reports, a financial report, a state approval letter (where applicable), a declaration of adoption and an agreement to comply with the agency's post-placement supervision schedule.

Further information about all of these paperwork items can be provided through our office.

2. Filing the paperwork with the Romanian Adoption Committee

Once our agency receives a completed file, the file is sent to Romania, where it becomes translated and notarized by an official translator and Romanian notary public.

After the Romanian Adoption Committee receives the file, Ms. Tania Radulescu, M.D. the Committee member in charge of U.S. adoptions, reviews it and gives the Van Dyke agency referrals that match the approval in the home study or home study review.

3. Referral

Our staff in the Romanian office screen the referrals, and once a child is located who is in the right age group, is the gender requested by the adoptive parents, has a medical record indicating that the child is healthy, and is apparently adoptable, the referral is sent to our Sheboygan agency.

Sometimes we can gather much of the social information on a child; sometimes we can obtain very little--as in the case of a child whose biological mother left him or her in the hospital after delivery, and had supplied absolutely no correct social information to identify herself.

From the agency's point of view, the criteria that determine whether or not a child is a good match for a set of parents are:

Following an evaluation of these criteria, the child's referral picture and medical/social background are sent to a family. Children are referred to a particular family depending on the couple's request and the order in which their complete file was submitted.

Once a couple receives all of the available information on a child, and agrees to adopt him or her, the Declaration of Adoption and Power of Attorney documents are signed.

4. Letter of Confirmation

Once the parents approve the referral, the District Office of the place of residence of the child will issue an approval. Following this letter of approval this agency requests the Confirmation Letter, or approval of the actual match between a prospective couple and child. This final approval letter is granted by the Romanian Adoption Committee. It can take up to 6 weeks for these two approval letters to be received.

5. Adoption

When the Letter of Confirmation is received, the court is petitioned for an adoption hearing date. Once that hearing takes place, thereby legally granting a specific couple the right to adopt a specific child, there is a "fifteen working days" appeal time that must pass.

6. Travel to Romania

The adopting parents are notified that they were approved in court and can make travel arrangements to receive their child at the end of the fifteen-day appeal period.

A family's actual stay in Romania normally lasts one week. One exception to this length would occur for an adoption taking place in Bucharest, where the time frame is approximately eleven days. Another exception would occur if the date of a Romanian or American holiday fell during the family's stay in Romania.

Caveats

How might this procedure fail to unfold completely?

If a medical condition presents itself, the agency will refer a new child to an adopting couple. We strongly encourage couples, upon their receiving a referral, to take a prospective child's medical report to their own pediatrician--or more than one pediatrician if they wish--to obtain an independent, professional medical opinion about anything that appears on a child's medical report.

Even though the agency would stop an adoption process if a medical condition surfaced which could prevent the finalization of an adoption, we also will accept, wholeheartedly, medical advice as a reason for a couple to reject a referral.

It is never the intention of this agency to place adopting parents in a position of having to anguish over accepting or rejecting a child for medical reasons.

However, children are human beings whose profiles are not always absolutely plain. We believe prospective parents should seek the advice of their own physicians to assist them in deciding whether or not to adopt a child for medical reasons.

Examples of such conditions:

During the Home Study process, we try to find out as much information about a family's expectations, so that we are aware of the kind of child that prospective parents are longing for, and were a child would be most happy.