About adoption cases

An adoption case can be created for a child when the Department receives custody and the legal status of "DCS Full Guardianship" has been recorded in the child’s court record. The Termination of Parental Rights (TPR), a type of court order, must be completed on both parents. See Record a court order for steps to record a court order. Also, all required assessments must be complete before the adoption case is created. See About assessments for a summary of assessments.

Once you have determined that a child will be adopted, you create an adoption case. No adult is a participant in this adoption case. If a sibling group is being adopted, be sure to determine how many adoption cases will be created. You create an adoption case for multiple children if your goal is to adopt them together. If you know they will be adopted separately, then create a separate adoption case for each child. When siblings are in the same case, the oldest sibling is the case reference person (CRP).

When the adoption case is created, the system copies details from the original case to the new adoption case. Each child in the adoption case is deactivated from the original family case.

Note

When you create an adoption case, the child you add to the adoption case cannot be returned to the original family case. This action is not reversible.     

The adoption case allows you to track the activities related to finalizing each child’s adoptive placement, such as recruitment efforts to find a permanent home, child and family team meetings, putative father search, permanency plan updates, and securing the child's record.

Adoption process tasks

The main processes for completing an adoption in TFACTS are:

  1. Record an adoption case.

  2. Search for and evaluate adoptive families.

  3. Record a confidential court information report.  

  4. Finalize an adoption and close the adoption case.

  5. Approve the adoption case closure.

  6. Record a child's legal status associated with a court ruling.

Putative father search and registration

When a child is available for adoption, a search must be made for the child's biological father. The adoption case worker requests the search to be performed. The Putative Father Worker (PFW) conducts the search, and then the adoption case worker enters search results in the case. If the father has been found and claims paternity, he must be recorded in the system. See the following:

Sibling changes in a case

You can select a child, normally a sibling, from another open case and add that child to the adoption case. The Department must have permanent custody of any child added to an adoption case. See the following:

Records associated with adopted children

After the child is adopted, the system maintains links among the new adoption case and these records for the adopted child: