The old cliche in the child welfare world is that nobody wants to adopt foster teens. They’re too old, too troubled and come with way too much baggage for adoptive parents.

But Darcy Hunt insists that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“When they say nobody wants to adopt teenagers, ok, it’s a blatant lie,” said Hunt, a former police officer, teacher and child protective investigator who with her spouse Kelley, a financial investigator, began the adoption journey 13 months ago.

The Hunts claim Eckerd Connects and its subcontracted agencies in Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties have done nothing but throw up roadblocks to their attempts to adopt a teenaged foster child.

”We almost threw in the towel a week ago,” Darcy said. “But we just can’t be silent about this. The system’s a mess.”

“I hope that this somehow starts change within Eckerd,” said Kelly. “I hope it starts change with the adoption system. It is so broken.”

The couple spoke to News Channel 8 at their Clearwater home last week and described their fruitless attempt to work through the private agency system that is supposed to help foster kids find adoptive parents and “forever families.”

The Hunts say they had to travel to Pasco County to receive adoption training courses due to a shortage of state-required adoption classes in the area and ended up paying close to $1500 for their own private home study when it became clear they’d have to wait another six months for that.

The Hunts showed us the study, which they passed with flying colors. But last week, they learned that Eckerd and its contracted agencies no longer accept private home studies so they may have to start the process all over again. 

Despite spending even more for a private adoption consultant the Hunts believe they have been “blackballed” from the system, not for being a same-sex couple, but for trying to cross county lines in their quest to find the right match from agencies that they say compete with each other for placements of children rather than working together to find homes for teenage foster kids.

“There’s been so many walls built and the second we think we break through something and we get a call back and we think we start moving forward we get hit again with something else,” Kelley said.

They claim the first teenager match arranged by Eckerd turned into a total disaster because it was poorly conceived and executed. “We hadn’t even had dinner with this girl yet they were already setting up a move-in date,” said Darcy. “It was a failure from the beginning.”

As a measure of its organizational success, Eckerd tells 8 On Your Side there have been 600 adoptions since July 2017—20 percent of them involving teenagers in Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough with 56 teenagers currently waiting to find adoptive parents.

But the Hunts insist other members of their adoption training class are hitting the same kind of road blocks.”Pretty much our whole class was intreste din teenagers and as of now I don’t think anybody’s adopted,”said Darcy. “They never got phone calls for home studies.”

8 On Your Side shared their concerns and observations with Eckerd’s new head of child welfare for the Tampa Bay area, Chris Card. “We called them up and said lets meet and talk,” Card said. “And we’re going to make some adjustments in the process.”

After that Monday meeting, Card promised to address some of the Hunts’ concerns. “Some of the experiences they had were unnecessary and we’re going to fix the system so we don’t have those recurring with other adoptive families,” Card said. “We’re going to work with them very closely to make sure we get them matched up with the right child.”

“My message would be this isn’t a business,” said Kelley. “It’s functioning like a business, it needs to be about the kids—if you’re so much about the kids, make it about the kids.”

Tonight at 6 p.m., you can hear  firsthand what this couple says is wrong with the “business” of adoptions, and what Eckerd says it plans to do to make it easier to find “forever homes” for the teenage foster kids who so desperately want one.

 “If you ask them (teenagers) why do you want to be adopted they’re going to say  ‘I want somebody who cares about me,” said Darcy Hunt. “And you’ve got two people right here.”