Cumberland County has the most foster kids in NC: Nearly 900

That’s enough foster children to fill an entire middle school. The surge in numbers across North Carolina is alarming child advocates who say the state needs to do more to prevent problems that rip apart families.

Report from the Fayetteville Observer (and does not necessarily represent the views of NC Family Forward): http://www.fayobserver.com/news/20170925/cumberland-county-has-most-foster-kids-in-nc-nearly-900

Ricky Powers has spent four years in Falcon Children’s Home, a sprawling foster care complex in northern Cumberland County that houses more than 90 children.

Now 16, he arrived here after both of his parents died within a short time of each other. With long waiting lists and little demand for older children, chances are Ricky will age out of the state’s foster care system before someone adopts him.

Ricky is one of more than 11,000 children in North Carolina living in foster care, a number that has ballooned 25 percent in just five years. It is an alarming indication that this state is not doing enough to prevent the types of problems that rip apart families and further strain an already burdened child welfare system, a Fayetteville Observer investigation found.

“Foster care and adoption are in a state of crisis,” said Brian Maness, president and chief executive of Children’s Home Society of North Carolina, a nonprofit organization founded in 1902 that provides adoption services and prevention programs.

Nowhere in North Carolina is the surge in foster care population more evident than it is in Cumberland County, which has the highest number in the state.

The latest figures show that Cumberland had an average of 872 foster children in 2016 — a 40 percent increase in five years. To put that into perspective, Cumberland has more foster children than students who attend Pine Forest Middle School.

Wake County, home to three times as many children as Cumberland County, ranked a distant second in average foster care numbers: 687. Mecklenburg County, the state’s largest, had even fewer.

Brenda Jackson, the Cumberland County DSS director, said many factors are to blame for more children entering foster care, including opioid abuse, poverty, a still-sluggish economy, mental health problems, domestic violence and a growing number of neglect and abuse cases. A study last year by Castlight Health Inc. found the rate of opioid abuse in Fayetteville to be the 18th highest in the country.

Across the state, research shows North Carolina’s child welfare system is hindered by limited funding for prevention and treatment programs and a lack of oversight and accountability. And while the General Assembly has recently begun to recognize the problems, the reforms have been tediously slow and the number of children in foster care continues to rise.

“The state, at the end of the day, is not a great parent for our kids,” said Michelle Hughes, executive director of the advocacy organization NC Child.

The foster care crisis isn’t just in Cumberland County and North Carolina. It’s happening across the country, which has seen a steady increase in foster children since 2012.

It’s not supposed to be this way. The goal is to reunify children with their parents whenever possible, but sometimes that comes with tragic results.

From 2011 to 2016, the State Child Fatality Review Team investigated 120 child deaths in which DSS had been involved with the family, but the children were allowed to continue living with their parents or caregivers. An Observer analysis shows 31 of the cases were deemed homicides or other unlawful deaths.

The review team has a backlog of 112 child deaths still waiting to be examined.

Children are typically sent to foster care when the court determines that parents or guardians are unfit to care for them. Often it is because of drugs, alcohol or mental health problems. If no stable relatives step up to care for the children, foster care becomes the only safe alternative.

That’s how Miranda Teixeira wound up in Falcon Children’s Home at age 15. She’s 19 now and a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying to become a doctor. She returned to Falcon Children’s Home over summer break because she said she had nowhere else to go. The home, which has been serving children since 1909 in northern Cumberland County, is owned and operated by the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.

For Miranda, education is a way out of her personal struggles, which run so deep that she hasn’t had face-to-face contact with her family in years.

“I can’t remember the last time I talked to them, a year ago maybe, a year and a half?” she said.

Ricky, the 16-year-old boy at Falcon Children’s Home, said religion keeps him going. He found God at the home and now reads scripture every night. He plans to be a computer programmer someday.

Miranda and Ricky are the lucky ones. Despite being separated from their parents by death or circumstance, they have managed to work hard and plan for their futures.

But for every success story, dozens of children will age out of foster care unprepared for the next chapter in their lives.

Many of those children will bounce from foster home to foster home before they are faced with life on their own. State figures show a 10 percent jump in foster children aging out of the system between 2015 and 2016. A state law that went into effect this year boosted the age requirement to leave foster care from 18 to 21 in hopes of giving children a better shot.

Cumberland County received a two-year, $784,000 grant this year from the Duke Endowment to work with those who are about to age out. Jackson, the DSS director, believes the grant will better prepare the young adults to live independently. As it is now, that future is anything but bright.

In 2007, The Pew Charitable Trusts released a national study on the effects of aging out of foster care. Among its findings:

•One in four former foster children will be in prison within two years of aging out.

•More than a fifth will become homeless.

•Only 58 percent will have a high school degree by age 19.

•Fewer than 3 percent over age 25 will have earned a college degree.

Yet North Carolina continues to put children into foster care at a high rate.

Cumberland is the fifth largest county in the state, but its foster child population far surpasses other urban areas. Over a year-long period in 2015-16, a total of 1,233 children were served by Cumberland’s foster program. Cumberland is closest in population to Forsyth County, which served only 237 foster kids during that same period.

At least on the surface, demographics don’t appear to be a significant factor. Forsyth has slightly more children overall. The median household income and poverty rates are nearly identical in the two counties. Serious crimes in Forsyth were slightly higher than in Cumberland in 2015, according to the latest figures.

Despite those similarities, Cumberland investigated 784 cases of suspected child abuse or neglect from October 2014 through September 2015, almost double the 396 cases investigated during the same time in Forsyth, according to Fostering Court Improvement, an organization that tracks child welfare statistics for all 50 states.

Cumberland has more children in foster care than even Mecklenburg, which investigated four times as many child abuse or neglect cases in fiscal 2014-15.

Jackson said she isn’t sure she can explain the differences in foster care statistics between Cumberland and Mecklenburg with absolute certainty. Many factors could be at play, including economic, social and system differences, she said.

“These factors can be very different between one county and another,” said Jackson, who served as a deputy director of Mecklenburg County’s DSS before becoming Cumberland County’s director in 2008.

Jackson said the priority for any DSS agency is to keep children safe and to reunify them with their families whenever possible.

But she said the crushing problems in Cumberland County — domestic violence, drugs, alcohol abuse, post traumatic stress, mental health issues and a lack of treatment and prevention programs — increasingly makes that goal hard to achieve.

“There’s some real challenges in our community.” Jackson said. “DSS doesn’t create those challenges. Our job is to react to those issues and challenges. That’s what we are here for.

“Given what’s happening in our community and communities all around North Carolina and this nation, 900 kids in care says we are doing our job.”

One tell-tale difference can be found between Cumberland and other counties: its high rate of domestic violence.

North Carolina’s court system no longer tracks domestic violence cases. But it did in fiscal 2009. That year, Cumberland recorded 2,209 such cases — almost twice as many as Forsyth County.

According to the Childhood Domestic Violence Association, children living in violent households are abused or seriously neglected at a rate 1,500 times higher than the national average. Those children are much more prone to wind up in foster care.

Cumberland County District Attorney Billy West believes the military’s influence has something to do with the county’s high level of domestic violence — and children in foster care. The average age of Cumberland’s residents is significantly younger, and the population is more transient.

West wasn’t insinuating that military families are more prone to domestic problems, though they do face more stressors, including frequent deployments that cause a spouse to be gone for months at a time. West and Jackson also pointed to young relatives of soldiers who come to visit and decide to stay.

Read the rest of the article at: http://www.fayobserver.com/news/20170925/cumberland-county-has-most-foster-kids-in-nc-nearly-900