After a nearly three-year journey with Adoption Star, I opened up their website and saw that my husband and I were removed from the list of waiting families. I immediately called the agency, and bounced voicemail to voicemail. We had just received an email from the agency one week ago stating how their numbers were improving… To which I replied that we had not had a potential profiling email or call from them in over 8 months, to which I didn’t receive a reply back for five days when I emailed again about being removed from the site.
Although I’m complaining here, I’ve been anything but a squeaky wheel to them and have had compassion and understanding while they went through restructuring and essentially a hold on any business. Everyone at the agency is extremely kind, passionate, and heart-felt in what they do, however, adoption requires attention to detail, which is lacking here.
We lost our family advocate in a mutiny of their staff, and they also replaced the director with the son of the founder of the agency. We think this is part of the reason our paperwork expired last fall with no word from the agency. While the new director is a passionate person with his heart in the right place, the transition for waiting families was a complete disaster and we basically lost our contact to the agency without even an email saying goodbye or giving us a new point of contact.
Note: Star replied to our Google review in 11 hours, but it took more than 5 days (3 business days) to get a response about why we were removed from the site. In that response, they never took ownership of any mistakes. They put the blame on us for being emotional about the adoption journey.
Look for an agency transparent about their placements monthly, versus three months into each new year. Look for an agency that doesn’t just have nice people on the phone, but an agency that actually delivers and doesn’t let clients’ paperwork expire. There is a significant amount of paperwork in adoption, and all agencies, including Star, always email you when something is about to be out of date. They dropped the ball on us, and there was zero recourse for us, sadly.
Save yourself the worry that they have another mutiny and lose their staff a second time and stop working for you in the process, or let your home study expire without notification and take you off their list for you to find out for yourself. Find a different agency to work with, please. There are so many out there.
My daughter and her husband signed on with adoption star. A horrific experience. Never contacted. No follow up. No response to phone calls. Contacted only for money. Let us say SCAM!! Stay away.
I started with A-OK program in Adoption Star, completed ANCHOR educational classes, and decided to put myself on hold till next year. The minute I acknowledged my A-OK advocate re my decision, our communication drastically ended. Nobody ever replied to me to say if a hold is possible, or to say simple :" good bye". In any situation, whatever choice people make within their adoption journey, the agency lacks respect to make appropriate closure with people who invested time and money in their evolving business.