Foster families work to help alleviate crowded foster system

LUMBERPORT – April Ayers got a pretty bad case of “empty nest syndrome” when her oldest son left home for college.

Although this feeling was difficult for her, Ayers found the best way to cope was to find something – or someone – else to fill her time, albeit something that would likely lead her right back to this empty feeling. After speaking with her husband, Ayers decided they should become a foster family.

“When my oldest went off to college, I was starting to feel the biological clock ticking,” Ayers, a native of Lumberport, said. “I needed to nurture somebody, so we started doing foster care, and we got our first placement in September two years ago.”

Through her decision to become a foster parent, Ayers became part of the solution to the growing number of kids going through the foster care system in West Virginia, which is currently at a point of alarm for foster care agencies.

“The rate that children are coming into care, we’re almost as a state running out of resources for foster parents,” Melinda Meredith, state supervisor for Blueprints, said. “We are a little over 6,600 children in care right now out of their home and in some form of placement in-state, and that’s a huge number.”

Blueprints is a foster care and social services agency with an office in Fairmont, which sets foster kids up with foster parents to stay with until their case files can be cleared and they can either return home or be adopted by a family. These agents deal with both foster parents and foster children, in an attempt to assure the safety of a child during a period of intermittence.

“What we do from start to finish is we recruit foster parents,” Gwen Davis, director of Blueprints in Fairmont, said. “Our primary goal is the child. The safety and well-being of a child, so when we recruit foster homes or parents, the whole purpose is to have a safe place for these children to go before they are reunified with their parents.”

The agents at Blueprints work closely with the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR), which has caseworkers dedicated to the foster care system. According to Meredith, this department will work with police and legal agencies to determine if a child must be removed from his or her home for a number of reasons, which could include abuse or neglect.

“Most of the kids who come into our care are being pulled out involuntarily,” Meredith said. “Meaning the department went out and saw that there was some form of emotional, physical, mental abuse or neglect in the form of drugs, or just lack of supervision.”

Both Meredith and Davis agreed that West Virginia could be seeing an influx of kids in the foster care system due to the drug outbreak ravaging the state. With this amount of kids needing help from the foster care system, it is the role of Blueprints and other agencies like it to make sure they have a place to go.

“That is our role, to interact with child protective services and have a place for those children to reside while they’re doing an investigation,” Davis said. “Once that court process proceeds, if the children are able to be reunified and return home, then that’s the ultimate goal.”

While it is the goal of the system to reunite children with their parents once deemed safe, this is not always the case, as the parent could be deemed unsafe to care for his or her child. When this happens, a child could be put up for adoption, which could be another lengthy process.

The agents at Blueprints handle both of these cases, as their goal again, is the safety of the child.

“Some of our parents become foster parents just to be that foster parent until they can go back home,” Davis said. “Some of our parents become foster parents because they want to eventually adopt a child, and we do both.”

Ayers is one foster parent who has filled the role of providing a temporary home for kids but is now on the road to becoming an adoptive parent. Already being approved to be a foster parent, she just has to wait for the green light to adopt.

“As of right now, we think he’s staying unless something changes with his case,” Ayers said. “He was supposed to have been a reunification case, but you never know where those cases are going to go. The department just decided reunification doesn’t work, and we’re just hoping and praying we get to adopt him soon.”

When Ayers was first getting into the foster care system, she and her home were evaluated by DHHR agents as well as agents from Blueprints to assure their eligibility. Having raised kids of her own, Ayers said this process was pretty painless, as they just needed a background check, some letters of recommendation, and an evaluation by agents of Blueprints and of the DHHR.

“It really wasn’t as awful as people say,” Ayers said, about going through the foster parent certification. “Pretty much if you can pass a background screening and you have a stable home to offer the kids; you don’t have to be perfect.”

Davis explained that her organization does not discriminate when it comes to recruiting foster parents, as they just need to pass the requirements and get some training from her agents.

So far, Ayers has cared for several kids of varying ages and situations, from a 5-week-old baby to a 5-year-old. For her, it is difficult to see such young individuals in situations like these, but she tries to make the best of it for all parties involved.

She recalled her time with a 5-year-old boy, whom she met at a hospital.

“We introduced ourselves, I said ‘My name is April and we’re hoping that you’ll want to come home with us for a little bit,’” she said. “We brought him home and the first couple of nights were hard, he cried a lot. I would sit in his room and tell him it would be ok, and ‘As long as you’re here, you’ll be safe and you’ll be loved.’ He settled in, kids are resilient.”

Despite this hardship, Ayers carries on as a foster parent because she feels for the foster children and hopes to make their time in care easier. She hopes others hear her experiences and decide to try getting into the system for themselves.

“It’s hard to take a baby in and lose the sleep and change the diapers and love a baby and then to hand it back over to its mother – it’s hard,” Ayers said. “There are times when it’s really hard because you don’t know what kind of placement you’re going to get.”

For more information on Blueprints including the path to become a foster parent, visit its website at www.myblueprints.org.