NC social service leaders say more state funding needed for child welfare workers, foster homes
Half the counties in North Carolina lack sufficient social service workers to meet the needs for child welfare and other services. That's according to DHHS Human Services Director Susan Osborne, who asked state lawmakers Tuesday to consider reinstating targeted aid to counties where resources are scarcest.
Osborne said smaller counties are seeing more than half their child protection staff turn over every year. She said high turnover and vacancy rates increase the chances that reported abuse won't be investigated quickly, potentially leaving children in danger, or that existing cases are delayed, leaving children and families waiting months or years for services or foster placements.
Osborne said some rural counties have a starting salary for CPS workers of $39,000 to $41,000 a year.
"That staff is making less than $20 an hour, and that staff can go to Target or Starbucks and start for $20 an hour," Osborne told the legislative panel that oversees health and human services. "We all know that Starbucks and Target have consistent hours, easier jobs, less stress, and less emotionally draining positions."
Until 2009, Osborne said the state funded some positions for counties with few resources, but that program was cut during the recession and never resumed.
In 2024, she says, a flexible funding model would be better, because it would allow counties to use the funding for their greatest need, whether that's raising salaries for CPS staff, hiring family intervention specialists, or adding elder care social workers.
North Carolina foster care in crisis
- 10/2023: Wake County foster kids still sleeping on floors of social services building
- 04/2023: Lawmakers seek overhaul of NC's child welfare system
- 08/2022: Foster children with nowhere to go sleep in Wake County office
Growing need, dwindling resources for children in need
About 10,000 children are currently in the foster care system statewide, according to DHHS Child, Family and Adult Services Director Lisa Cauley.
DHHS data shows children from underfunded rural counties are disproportionately likely to be in the foster system. Cauley explained that's because those counties lack the resources to keep families together, whether that's having a shelter where a homeless family can stay or having intervention staff to work with the family to safely keep the child at home. Case manager turnover, she said, also makes a child more likely to be placed in foster care prematurely.
Meantime, the number of foster homes available in North Carolina has fallen 15% percent over the past five years. Before the pandemic, the state had 7,047 licensed foster homes. In 2023, it had just 6,334.
Cauley said the problem isn't that more foster families than usual are leaving the system – it's that new families haven't been entering the system at the same rate, due to the pandemic and the rising cost of living. That's one reason why more and more children are having to stay in local DSS offices, putting even more strain on them and county DSS staff.
Cauley praised a new pilot project announced last week, the Emergency Placement Fund, that will allocate nearly $8 million to counties to help decrease the number of children sleeping in DSS offices due to lack of appropriate placement. She said some counties may use it to pay foster homes to be on-call for emergency placements. Others may put the money toward creating a new emergency sheltering system.
Another bright spot, she said, is kinship placement. Changes lawmakers made last year have made it easier for relatives of children who need placement to take them in and to receive at least partial compensation from the state for the child's room and board.
Cauley said about 25% of the foster children in North Carolina are in kinship placements currently. The goal is to increase that to 50% over the next few years, a level some other states have achieved, she said.
"Many, many of our kinship care families have already signed up for this. And we hope that more will," Cauley said. "One of the things we know is that when children are with their families, they're less likely to move and they're less likely to experience a behavioral health crisis."
