- Associated Press - Monday, April 3, 2017

GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) - The conversations often begin in coffee shops and local restaurants.

Usually, they involve a young family or a couple who is ready to become parents.

“Good morning or Good afternoon.”

“If you’ve got a moment, we’d like to share with you some news about foster care and the need for new foster parents. If you have a moment to listen, we’d love it. If not, please take a brochure and give us a call,” Byron Dendy or one of his staffers will say.

The routine visits around Greenville are one of many tools that Dendy, the director of foster home recruiting and licensing for Thornwell Homes for Children, and the staff at the state Department of Social Services, are employing to find more families to care for children in need.

Foster care in South Carolina is in a crisis with the demand for housing outstripping availability more than two to one, local agencies who oversee foster care programs say. The problem, they believe, has gotten more dire for the first time in recent years. A 2016 report from the Children’s Bureau shows a similar trend.

At the beginning of March, there were 4,257 children in foster care in South Carolina and only 1,565 regular foster homes available to care for them, according to care2foster.org, an initiative of Fostering Great Ideas in Greenville.

Greenville County had the second highest total of children in foster care. In the county, there were 418 children and 261 homes signed up to take them, care2foster.org said.

Spartanburg County had 490 children in foster care ? the state’s highest total ? but only 131 homes. Anderson County had 265 children in foster care and 90 foster homes.

Across the country, the number of children in foster care increased to 428,000 or about 3 percent more in fiscal year 2015 after declining more than 20 percent between 2006 and 2012, according to data from the federal Children’s Bureau.

“We critically need families,” said Brenda Parks, director of Miracle Hill Ministries Foster Care in Greenville. “If you’ve got 500 children in foster care but you’ve only got 131 families, that’s nearly impossible to do,” she said.

The reasons for the surge of children in need of foster families are varied. But local and national experts say two trends are clear: The incidents of children being removed from homes because of their parents’ struggles with substance increased substantially when compared to other circumstances of children being removed from their homes, the Children’s Bureau report says. In 2012, the report states, 28.5 percent of children were removed from homes because of parental substance abuse. The percentage grew to 32.2 percent in 2015, the agency’s report says.

The incidents of child neglect also grew. During the same time period, the percentage of kids being removed from homes due to neglect grew from 56.4 percent to 60.7 percent, the report shows.

“I’ve always said that what you take care of today, will be with you tomorrow,” Dendy said. “If we don’t take care of children, what happens? They get involved in crime, poverty and those are not what we want for our community or for our country.”

South Carolina has an average of about 325 children entering into foster care or being moved from one foster home to another each month.

To help balance the supply of regular foster homes with the growing number of children who need them, the Department of Social Services is working with a national non-profit, All Pro Dad, to recruit families to care for them, said Marilyn Matheus, DSS spokesperson.

Additionally, Matheus said, the agency realized it needed to offer additional support for foster parents. In 2015, the agency created a new program that it calls Foster Family and Licensing Support Units.

As part of that unit, DSS staffers support foster families (gathering information about the child, assisting with transportation to visits, counselors, etc.), facilitate placements of children into appropriate foster settings, and maintain the licenses of foster families. They also work closely with partner agencies like Miracle Hill, Matheus said.

Foster parents also receive between $332 and $425 a month in stipends depending on the ages of the children they care for.

Parks and Dendy both believe that awareness is an issue.

“I have to believe that there are good people out there, that if God’s folks truly knew that they would respond,” Parks said. “I refuse to accept that if you knew, you wouldn’t do anything about it.”

Dendy said he thinks many people believe fostering is too hard. But it’s not when you have agencies that support you, he said.

“You’re not out there alone,” he said.

A trip to an orphanage in Guatemala led the Rev. Chad Albertson to want to help more children connect with foster parents in Pickens County.

Pickens County had 161 children in foster care in early March, but only 72 regular foster families, according to the care2foster.org March report.

Albertson and his wife, Melissa, say a major barrier to filling that need is housing.

“A lot of families that already have children of their own or have a heart for children just don’t have a place to put them,” he said.

So Albertson’s congregation at LIFEchurch in Dacusville have been raising money to build a residential community for those willing to become foster parents.

The LIFEhouse Children’s Project is loosely modeled after a program in Oklahoma called “Anna’s House.”

The homes, each about 3,200 square feet and with six bedrooms, will be built on 13 acres next to the church on Thomas Mill Road, he said.

The land has been cleared, and the foundation and walls have been installed for the first house, slated to be ready in September. The entire project, which will include a playground, is expected to cost about $2.5 million.

Albertson said they originally thought of building a group home.

But instead of building one group home for $1 million that could only house about eight kids, those chose to build about seven homes and possibly take up to about 40 kids.

Additionally, he said, “The more we began to research and look into different things with policy changes in Columbia, we realized that group homes were not the goal anymore, that the state Department of Social Services was really wanting to place kids into home situations or more home environments than group home settings.”

One thing Albertson and his wife, Melissa, said they liked about the Oklahoma program is that it is set up to help keep siblings together.

“That’s really kind of the heart of what LIFEhouse has grown into, a place to keep the family unit together as much as possible,” he said.

“As of today in Pickens County, there are 130-plus kids still looking for placement and 86 percent of those are sibling groups,” Albertson said. “If we had all seven homes built right now, we would have over half the kids in Pickens County that are in need of care taken care of.”

Because there are not enough foster homes in Pickens, “children are having to be shipped out to other counties. Not only is their home being disrupted, their school is often disrupted,” Melissa Albertson said.

The Albertsons hope other churches will get involved, too.

“We feel like the model we’re developing, another church could pick up,” he said. “They could build just one home that would take care of three to five kids.”

“I think there are over 1,000 churches in Pickens County alone and we still have 137 kids that don’t have a place to call home. I think we can take care of it.”

The church will recruit potential foster parents, who will pay only utilities and other costs for living in the church-owned homes, he said.

Brittani and Corey Reeves, who are members of LIFEchurch, will be the first foster parents for LIFEhouse. The couple has three children but Brittani was not able to have any of her own. They will foster up to four more children after they move into their new home.

“Even though my three (children) call me ’mama’ and I love them like my own, I wanted more,” said Brittani, who feels like LIFEhouse is where the Lord brought her to.

“This is the next step,” she said. “We’re very excited.”

The need for foster homes led Clinton-based Thornwell Homes for Children to expand its services. It is now a child placement agency and has opened an office in Greenville.

“Our focus now is as a child placement agency to license homes to help get a child to their forever home,” Dendy said.

As a county director and a manager at DSS for more than a decade, Dendy said he saw nothing but great things when he placed children at Thornwell.

“Children fared well, the outcome was great and when they were reunified with their parents, they did well,” he said.

Thornwell can take in about 60 children in its on-campus cottages, and probably up to 100 with increased staffing.

So, Dendy said, Thornwell doesn’t have the capacity to take in every child.

“Thornwell can’t have a 300-400 acre campus in every county or jurisdiction in South Carolina. What we can do is recreate what’s in those cottages in foster homes,” he said. “If we can be a model for what foster parenting can look like, then I believe that’s where the success is.”

Another reason Thornwell is now licensing foster homes, he said, is child welfare agencies and experts have determined that children fare much better in foster homes.

Founded as a Presbyterian ministry, Thornwell provides Christian love and support to hundreds of children and families throughout Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Caring for foster children is important, in part, because of God’s mandate to care for orphans and widows, and “we should love,” Dendy said.

Plus, “we have an opportunity to care for children and families. We want both to be healed,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for those of us who have lived well, who have lived decent lives, to be able to help other folks live decent lives.You don’t have to rich to do this or wealthy. You just have to have a heart to provide a safe home for a child.”

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Information from: The Greenville News, https://www.greenvillenews.com

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