A 16-year-old girl in Louisiana's foster care system looks out at a swamp during a visit with a potential adoptive mother in 2023. The adoption fell through when the state's Department of Children and Family Services would not share the teen's medical records with the prospective adoptive mother. The teenage girl and her potential adoptive mother shared a love of abstract art, a fear of sharks and a deep longing for family.
Karen Angel, 60, hoped to welcome a child into her home in New York’s Hudson Valley after decades of focusing on her career. As she perused an adoption website, in Louisiana stood out to her. The 15-year-old’s profile said she loved school, spending time outdoors and playing with animals.
Angel was looking for a child who was academically inclined, who could join her on long hikes and who would adore her four rescue dogs. On paper, they were a perfect match. Angel sent an inquiry about the girl, reminding caseworkers that she had ruled out taking in children with mental health diagnoses that could put her, her dogs or her home in danger.
The paperwork she received from noted a handful of medical conditions that Angel agreed were manageable. Angel asked to see medical records to confirm those diagnoses and started talking to the teen. They chatted by video for the first time last September, and Angel was immediately impressed with the teen’s maturity.
Their relationship bloomed and a couple months later, Angel and her dogs road-tripped to Louisiana to spend time with the teen. On the trip, a waitress asked if they were mother and daughter. “She had a big smile and said, ‘practically, yes,’” Angel remembered.
But one year after they matched, Angel and the teenager are no longer speaking. The tale of their abortive adoption is just one example of A group of nine foster children across the state saying officials failed to meet their basic needs. They allege that DCFS has over-relied on institutional settings and group homes, instead of finding families for them.
While the teenager who matched with Angel is not a plaintiff, Angel says DCFS has failed her as well. Now 16, the girl has lived in nearly She moved to a group home in 2022. Many of the agency’s problems are due to and But those issues were not what doomed Angel’s adoption: it was the refusal to share her medical records and case file, which experts say are an important step in giving a family as much “This particular foster child has been freed for adoption for seven years and this was the first family that was a possibility for her,” said Kathleen Stewart Richey, Louisiana’s children’s ombudsman, who tried to help with the adoption.
“I don’t think this is an outlier.” A spokesperson for DCFS said the agency could not discuss the specifics of the case due to privacy laws regarding minors in state custody, and declined an interview request for Angel still thinks about the teenager constantly. When DCFS officials announced this summer that they had a , Angel was furious.
“You had a chance to place a teen in the critical age group cited in this article not just in a foster home but in an adoptive home, and you blew it!” she emailed them. The girl Angel wanted to adopt was born in 2007 to a mother who was struggling with alcohol, drugs and mental illness. Her father was out of the picture.
The Times-Picayune | The Advocate is not naming her or her relatives to protect her privacy. The newspaper attempted to contact the teenager but did not hear back. The girl’s aunt took custody of her as an infant and said she was thrilled to take her in because she could not have children of her own.
“She's just one of those children that you looked at and she kind of sparkled,” her aunt said in a phone interview. She described her niece as intelligent, curious and friendly, but said she also had uncontrollable outbursts. DCFS records say that in 2015, the agency flagged the aunt for “physical abuse/tying or confinement and torture” and emotional maltreatment.
Still, caseworkers did not remove her. In 2017, DCFS workers returned and found the girl and her sister locked in a room without access to toilets. The home was infested with roaches, bedbugs and lice.
They put the children into foster care. The aunt said she was in a fog of depression at the time that affected her memory but said she did not recall mistreatment. She said she has not spoken to her niece since she was removed, but that she misses her and hopes to reconnect one day.
“We love her,” her aunt said. “No matter what she becomes, who she becomes, she is a special individual in our heart. Our whole family thinks of her.
” The girl was 10 when she and separated from her sister along the way. Between third and 10th grade, she was shuffled among a dozen DCFS placements and seven schools. Her DCFS paperwork says foster parents cited behavioral issues with her, including lying and stealing.
The teen told Angel that at least one of her previous foster parents beat her. “Without knowing anything else about this girl, I know we have uprooted her life and relationship with anybody she cared about 12 times,” said Jennifer Rodriguez, executive director of the Youth Law Center, which works to improve foster care and juvenile justice systems. “Anyone she considered a sibling, any teacher in a classroom — we’ve disrupted that 12 times for her in a developmental period that is all about trying to figure out where you belong and connect to folks.
That is so harmful.” Rodriguez, a former foster teen herself, said group home placements often indicate that the system has failed a child. In her experience, group homes discouraged emotional connections with staff and forced residents to follow the same rules.
Angel voiced many concerns about the home in north Louisiana — all of the teen’s phone calls were monitored and limited to 15 minutes. The teenagers could not receive incoming calls. When Angel complained, a DCFS supervisor emailed that officials’ “hands are tied when it comes to their house rules.
” Angel and the teenager both started envisioning their lives together last year. “She said, ‘I should be home by December,’” Angel wrote to her caseworker after one of their calls, describing how the teenager referenced New York. “I think I'm going to cry.
” During Angel’s visit last November, the two went on nature walks, bought matching turtle pendants and went to a jazz concert. Angel emailed herself snippets of conversations that she wanted to remember. “I take my pain out in my poetry and turn it into something beautiful,” the teenager told her.
“I'm going to be the first one in my family to go to college and graduate school and have a career.” Angel said the trip went better than she could have imagined. But she continued to Angel told DCFS workers that her parenting style would differ from the group home’s, and she would encourage the teen to think for herself.
A DCFS supervisor wrote back that she was troubled by Angel advocating for the teen to “question authority.” “She doesn’t get to do what she wants, when she wants without consequences,” the worker wrote. “We would appreciate you being supportive of her placement instead of trying to pit everyone against each other.
” Soon after, Angel found out the teenager’s paperwork required for adoptions across state lines listed different than those she’d previously been told. She was concerned about which ones were accurate and asked for copies of the mental health evaluations. Without those records, she did not feel like she could take in the girl.
She’d gotten medical records and placement histories on her dogs before adopting them, and couldn’t understand why so little information had been made available about a teenager. Angel sent the teenager a map of the Hudson Valley shortly before Christmas, describing the music venues, theaters and art galleries they could visit. “OK, this all sounds pretty amazing,” the teenager wrote back.
“I can't wait.” But by early January, Angel told the worker in charge of her paperwork for the adoption that she needed more records on the girl’s mental health and placement history to move forward. Her New York caseworkers paused her paperwork while she waited — she hoped it was a temporary delay.
Angel told the teenager she was waiting on her records, and she suggested the teen reach out to her attorney as well. Richey said she’d repeatedly reached out to the teen’s lawyer and never heard back. The Times-Picayune also contacted Acadiana Legal Service Corp.
, which is in charge of her case, and did not receive a response. A Louisiana DCFS staffer told Angel’s caseworker in New York that the records were included in a packet they’d submitted in the fall required for interstate adoptions. But Angel said she was not allowed to view them.
Another Louisiana DCFS worker offered to review the teen’s psychological information on a call with Angel but said she could not forward a copy. By that point, Angel no longer trusted the agency’s word and wanted to see records for herself. Her New York caseworker advised her to bail out unless she could see the teen’s psychological history, given the conflicting diagnoses.
Sherry Watters, who spent said that while prospective adoptive parents do not have legal rights to medical information, the agency will sometimes share it to facilitate an adoption. She said it can be a double-edged sword: A foster child could sue over the information being shared, but they could also argue the agency botched their chance at adoption. Now 16, the teen in this case is old enough to have some right who can see her records, Watters said.
“It’s so rare that you find people that are willing to try to adopt teenagers, so you’d think they’d want to facilitate it as well as they could,” Watters said. Rodriguez said some teens worry that their case files highlight their worst qualities. she received in foster care turned out to be inaccurate — a common theme among foster children, she said.
A , Richey remembered a case on the bench where a family returned a child they’d adopted because they did not understand the depths of her trauma. “Anyone who’s adopting a child really ought to know what kind of experiences the child has had, what to expect and when to get professional help,” Richey said. “I really think Ms.
Angel’s desire to have the records were so that she could be prepared to meet this child’s needs. I think the agency felt like her desire to have the records would be to pick them apart.” By mid-January, the teenager had missed three calls with Angel.
Angel emailed her, saying that she may have heard their match wasn’t moving forward and that DCFS was refusing to send her records. The teen responded by asking to cut off contact, saying she heard Angel made derogatory comments about her. Angel said she didn’t, but added she couldn’t move forward without the girl’s records.
The case weighed on her. It , and she worried the teenager would without a support system. She asked DCFS to make good on its previous offer to review the psychological records on a call.
A child welfare supervisor wrote back. Since they’d received paperwork about Angel no longer wanting to move forward and since Angel had rejected the previous offer for a call, she said, her case was closed. Angel had one final call with DCFS workers a few days later, but said they gave no further information about the girl's psychological or placement history.
Meanwhile, Angel discovered that the teen was no longer featured on the adoption website. The teen’s goal was to permanent foster care, meaning the state no longer had to try to find a family for her. Angel emailed the teenager a final time in early February, saying they’d both been misled — Angel about the teen’s diagnoses, the teen about Angel making derogatory comments.
“You and I are both victims of a crappy system,” she wrote. Angel asked to remain friends. The teenager’s response came in all caps: NO.
Angel received an email the next week from a caseworker who asked her to stop contacting the teen. She has not heard from her since..
