Adoption 
Adoption is a legal process which permanently gives parental rights to adoptive parents. Adoption means taking a child into your home as a permanent family member. It means caring for and guiding children through their growing years and giving them the love and understanding they need to develop their full potential.
For children in foster care who have experienced abuse or neglect, sometimes it is impossible for them to return safely to their birth families. When termination of parental rights is in the child’s best interest and adoption is the plan, CPS will seek an adoptive family. Kornerstone trains and verifies adoptive families and contracts with CPS to provide adoptive homes for children in the custody of CPS.
Kornerstone verifies two types of adoption families:
1. Foster to adopt homes, also known as “dual-licensed” or “legal-risk” homes.
This dual certification speeds up the adoption process and reduces the number of moves for a child while allowing relationships between the child and potential adoptive parents to grow. These families are willing to accept placement of children into their home who are not legally free for adoption. The child’s foster family will be given first consideration to adopt when a child becomes legally available for adoption. Because CPS must work with the biological family toward reunification or seek a relative placement prior to termination of parental rights, it is extremely rare for an infant to be available for adoption. Only families who are licensed as foster or foster to adopt homes will be able to accept infants for placement through Kornerstone.
2. Adoption only homes.
These families are only approved to take children whose parental rights have been terminated and who are legally free for adoption. For children in CPS care, these are generally children who are either older, part of a sibling group, children of color, or children with special emotional, behavioral, or physical needs, or a combination of these attributes.
Kornerstone charges no adoption fees. However, adoptive parents must pay court costs, which may be reimbursable by the state.