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Bree Clawson, Swain County DSS director, is pictured at her office.
Jessica Webb
editor@thesmokymountaintimes.com
Swain County Department of Social Services workers are no strangers to a lack of local licensed foster care homes, but a statewide reduction in homes is making things even worse, with some youth having slept at the DSS office or in hotel rooms long-term.
“Swain County DSS does not have any licensed foster homes, the two we had for two years were both out of Jackson County,” said Bree Clawson, Swain County DSS director.
While there are about seven licensed homes in the county, two are with private agencies and the rest are through Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
Swain County DSS tried to encourage more homes and even employed a licensing agent for 5 years, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.
A lack of local homes can mean children don’t get to stay within their community.
Family, friends, anyone they know who qualifies can be considered for an unlicensed kinship placement as the first choice, but if there isn’t anyone, the children will go outside Swain County—as far west as Andrews and as far east as the coast, Clawson explained. Several are in the Charlotte area now.
Currently, there are about 58 Swain County children in foster care—more than surrounding counties of the same size. Statewide, there are about 11,000 children in the foster care system.
The problem is two-fold, more children have entered foster care over the past decade, and there’s been a drastic reduction in homes statewide since the pandemic.
Foster Care Capacity data shows the number of foster care homes in North Carolina decreased by about 20 percent in the past four years.
Before the pandemic, there were 7,185 licensed foster families in the state with just 5,500 by the 2022.
“I’ve seen us try to work in-home cases a little bit longer to get intensive in-home services (with a therapist that comes in) to try to keep kids out of foster care and keep them safe at the same time,” Clawson said.
Many of the clients DSS serves live in poverty, and the biggest contributing factors for removal from the home seem to be substance abuse, mental health issues and domestic violence.
“It tends to go hand-in-hand with all the cases,” Clawson said, adding the pandemic exacerbated some of those challenges.
Now, some of the relief people saw through added supports like Medicaid and food stamps, have expired, potentially increasing stressors. Clawson is hopeful that Medicaid expansion coming for North Carolina will help.
Many parents’ access to Medicaid and other supports are further reduced if their child comes into custody.
“For the longest time, if a kid comes into custody those benefits would cease, it makes it harder for them to go therapy or substance abuse treatment because they wouldn’t have Medicaid as a way to pay for it,” Clawson explained. There are some bills in the state legislature that would reverse that rule.
Some kids stay in the system for a long time, too. On average, Swain’s children are in the program a little over 2 years despite the state standard of 1 year to permanence. Clawson said factors include the high demands of the cases, lack of participation from the families early on and a bogged-down court system, especially in the far-west that has lawyers traveling across seven counties.
Without a home
“We’ve had a couple of kids that have gone without a placement,” Clawson said.
“Some of them, the longer they are in care, the more issues they have, and the two I’m thinking of specifically have been in our custody for 10 and 9 years.”
Both local teenagers have gone through a lot of placements.
When the providers refuse to take them or there just isn’t a place for them, they default back to DSS. The office started with an air mattress in the conference room for them. Then, they turned to hotel rooms.
“We started renting rooms, and that’s okay for a day or two, but it became days into weeks into months,” Clawson said.
County Manager Kevin King eventually worked with a local realty office to instead get a real house instead, but it’s far from ideal, for both the children and the county employees who watch them.
Now, the county is exploring the idea of building its own house for when foster care placement can’t otherwise be found. Clawson said they would look to staff it with licensed two sets of foster care parents who switched in and out.
Placement challenges
“I have workers that spend days calling placements, and what we’re seeing more of is some of the higher-level placements are picking and choosing who they want,” Clawson said.
All around, there are fewer foster care homes available. One national study by iFoster shows the number of foster care homes in the United States dropped 23 percent between 2021 to 2022, after they had been going up until the pandemic.
When it comes to congregate care providers, the drop is even more dramatic—with 275 in the state in 2020 and just 102 in 2022, according to Foster Care Capacity.
When a placement says no or a child is kicked out of a foster care home, that’s when DSS has to step up and become the caretaker.
“That’s when we start getting those gaps in care,” Clawson said. “Any minute now, we could get a call that says, come get this kid.”
Technically, they are supposed to get a 30-day notice, but that rarely happens.
“I don’t know what the solution is,” Clawson said. “A revamp of the system definitely needs to happen because what is going on right now is not working, it’s a disservice to our children.”
Exploring solutions
iFoster released the ‘2023 Lived Experience Guide to Fixing Foster Care’ on May 24, the guide, which compiles the voices of 6,000 youth, caregivers and frontline workers across the United States, offers recommendations to the system nationally.
Seven major themes emerged, according to the agency, with recommendations for each:
- The Child Welfare System needs to be child-centric,
- Prevention must focus on poverty alleviation,
- Auto-enrolment in services, both during and after foster care,
- Caregiving should be treated as a profession,
- Invest more in frontline workers,
- Child welfare doesn’t end at exit, and
- Self-sufficiency exits are a choice, preferred by youth over reunification and adoption.