Opioid crisis straining foster system
Cases have increased by 32 percent in four years and many involve addicted newborns
The case arrives with all the routine of a traffic citation: A baby boy, just 4 days old and exposed to heroin in his mother’s womb, is shuddering through withdrawal in intensive care, his fate now here in a shabby courthouse that hosts a parade of human misery.
The parents nod off as Judge Marilyn Moores explains the legal process, and tests arrive back showing both continue to use heroin. The judge briefly chastises, a grandmother sobs, and by the time the hearing is over, yet another child is left in the arms of strangers because of his parents’ addiction.
Across the U.S., soaring use of opioids has forced tens of thousands of children from their homes, creating a generation of kids abandoned by addicted parents, orphaned because of fatal overdoses or torn from fractured families by authorities fearful of leaving them in drug-addled chaos.
“This isn’t a trickle. This isn’t a wave. It’s a tsunami,” Moores said of a child welfare system grappling with an unprecedented crush of parental drug cases.
From her first full year on the bench in 2006 through last year, the number of filings for children in need of services more than tripled to 4,649 in Marion County, driven largely by cases involving opioids; a glimpse of a problem that has swept across communities of all sizes.
Behind each of those cases is a child subjected to the realities of life amid addiction: Barren refrigerators, unwelcome visitors and parents who couldn’t be roused awake. Moores is still haunted by the story of a 2-year-old found alone at home with his father’s corpse, a needle still poking from his arm. A neighbor was drawn in by the boy’s relentless wails.
New foster care cases involving parents who are using drugs have hit the highest point in more than three decades of record-keeping, accounting for 92,000 children entering the system in 2016, according to just-released data by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The crisis is so severe — with a 32 percent spike in drug-related cases from 2012 to 2016 — it reversed a trend that had the foster care system shrinking in size over the preceding decade. About 274,000 children entered foster care in the U.S. last year. A total of 437,000 children were in the system as of Sept. 30, 2016.
Though substance abuse has long been an issue for child welfare officials, this is the most prolific wave of children affected by addiction since crack cocaine use surged in the 1980s, and experts said opioid-use is driving the increase.
“It’s been an overburdening of our system,” said Cindy Booth, executive director of Child Advocates of Marion County, which represents kids at the center of drug cases.
The Associated Press delved further into the troubling numbers, examining county-level foster care statistics obtained from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect through the end of 2015. The analysis showed counties with higher levels of opioid prescribing and opioid deaths also had higher shares of foster cases linked to drugs. Last year’s county-level statistics are not yet available.
The data show that foster children of drug users are on average about three years younger than others in the system. Indeed, a wave of babies born to opioid-using mothers has led hospitals to add detox programs for pregnant women and save umbilical cords in case they need to pinpoint what drug an infant was exposed to. Volunteers are enlisted to cuddle heroin-dependent babies, often born premature and underweight with a distinctive high-pitched cry and tremors in their arms and legs.
By the time Rachael Stark arrives at her office at 8:45 a.m., she has already been working for hours. At 2:30 a.m., it was a call seeking an emergency placement for a child. Around 4 a.m., a series of texts alerted her that an alarm went off at a foster home and police showed up. Since 8 a.m., she’s been furiously tapping away at her phone, juggling 15 foster cases. Now she’s splashed with coffee and running late for a 9 a.m. appointment when a state DCS worker calls looking for a foster family for three siblings.
“I’ve got no one,” she reports somberly.
For the past 13 years, Stark has managed cases for The Villages, the largest private foster care and adoption agency in Indiana, which contracts with the state to find children homes. All but a few of her cases involve drugs and of those that do, about half are opioid-related.
The Villages is receiving 30 to 40 percent more referrals than it had been accustomed to, creating a “crisis state,” as agency president Sharon Pierce puts it. Foster parent training sessions, once held monthly, are now weekly; advertising to attract new families has been ramped up. It takes at least three months to recruit, screen and train foster parents, but as soon as they get their state license, the need for help is so great they often receive an immediate call.
“Five or 10 minutes later, that family will have two or three children placed in their home,” Pierce said.
The Villages used to see about 60 percent of children return to their birth families. Today it’s around half that. So the agency turns to successful foster parents to adopt. The problem is that limits the family’s ability to take on another foster child, creating the need for even more foster homes.
Fear and anxiety can amass, academic performance can plunge, feelings of abandonment can run rampant, and the ability to trust can be strained.
“When people ask me, ‘Is foster care good or bad?’ the first thing I say is, ‘Compared to what?’” said Maria Cancian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose research focuses on foster care and the effects on children.
Shawnee Wilson has found herself on both sides of the system.
Wilson’s parents used, and she was 13 when child welfare officials removed her from her home. Now, at 26, she’s trying to beat heroin, having already lost custody of two children and given another up at birth.
Her fourth child, a boy named Kingston, was born just over a year ago, and it took a month for doctors to wean him off the heroin Wilson exposed him to. He is in foster care now in Indianapolis, and Wilson is fighting to get him back.
Despite some relapses, she’s been clean several months and is convinced she’ll be able to keep it up. The clock is ticking. Federal law dictates the loss of parental rights for those whose children have been in foster care for 15 out of the previous 22 months.
Wilson knows how those who don’t struggle with addiction view her, and said it’s hard to explain what compels people to keep using even when it can cost them their children.
“I can’t see the consequences, because all I want is to feel that drug,” she said of when she’s been high. “I want that numbness.”
Back at juvenile court, the waiting room is brimming with people who may wait hours for their cases to be called. Babies screech. Toddlers whine. Adults emerge from courtrooms wet-eyed.
Moores, the plainspoken 62-year-old who leads this division, sees a familiar expression on the faces that pass through; not just parents, but case managers and attorneys and a parade of others who’ve seen their work overtaken by pills and powders. She saw the same blank eyes during a National Guard deployment to Afghanistan, as soldiers returned to base.
“They’re war-weary,” she said.
She counts herself among the battle-scarred, having presided over a court that took 1,270 children from their parents last year, more than triple a decade earlier. Cases roll in to courtrooms that once were classrooms, converted to accommodate snowballing need.