Adoption Agency Ratings

We are using adoptions together for our homestudy but using American Adoptions for our agency. We are very surprised about how long this process is taking to complete our homestudy. I am so glad I have been keeping a journal about our experiences because, It allows me to see how long each step is taking.

My husband and I had ALL of our paperwork together before we started this process and it got sent to our agency last Friday and arrived today a Thursday. The total time has been from 2/19 until today 5/27.

Positives: The social worker was very nice, our social worker allowed her personal schedule to affect our meetings. The staff at Adoptions Together answered our questions very quickly, via email and phone. Very very fast in fact, but the rest of the process has taken forever!!!

I would recommend this company as long as you don't feel embarassed to check up on them like I did, quite often!!!

Good luck to everyone, hope this helps :)

We used this agency for our Home Study since our adoption agency is not in Maryland. We submitted ALL the paperwork except the clearances not required at the time of submission. The process is supposed to take 90 days, so we waited thinking they were working on the Home Study until we heard, after a month, we were finally assigned a case worker to guide us with our paperwork. Supposedly, the first visit is used to instruct us as to how to fill out the paperwork, obviously our newly assigned caseworker did not know we had already submitted all of the required paperwork. We suggested can we skip the first home study visit and call it the second since the paperwork is done. The answer was no. As a result, we burned several weeks waiting for the follow on meetings. Once the required three meetings were completed, we were ensured that the report would be finished within 2 weeks, but it was not. Running out of patience we started emailing our caseworker and the AT offices. The coordinator Nancy Perkins kept telling us it was in process, they never seem to commit to a completion date. It seems to us she did not know what the case worker (sub-contractor) was doing, or that the 90 days had already expired. The Home study was issued with a few errors, that took THREE weeks to correct. The bottom line is, it took two months after the third home study meeting to write a report where an outline was provided by the adoption agency in a fill-in-the-blanks format, and the required paperwork was completed by the client prior to even meeting their caseworker. In our opinion, the process was managed unprofessionally, and quite honestly it seems that what AT wants you to do is to pay the extra $2,600 for an expedited 1 month process.

What started out as a good relationship quickly turned into a bad situation due to the unprofessional approach the agency took in dealing with our progress as adoptive parents. And, we were not the only family affected by their inappropriate and impersonal action. We DO NOT recommend this agency to anyone, especially families that live in Washington, DC.

We adopted 2 children from Guatemala using this agency. The first experience was smooth; the second was painstaking and if we had not been schooled in the first, it could have been a total disaster. The facilitator of our 2nd adoption (not the same person as the first), Anne Polasko, was not competent in the process nor a a seasoned business person to deal with the issues at hand. Can you believe the facilitator for spanish speaking country does not speak spanish?! thank god my husband is fluent....he is the only reasson we got thru this process

Poor management of case both in US and Guatemala. Poor communication. Incomplete and generic updates.
Poor all the way around.