Drug addiction epidemic drives foster care crisis in Georgia, US

Georgia is in the midst of a foster care crisis that exceeds the resources of government and private sector organizations to meet the mounting needs driven by the drug addiction epidemic sweeping the nation.

That message came through loud and clear when the Rome Rotary Club heard a report from officials of the Murphy-Harpst Children’s Centers in Cedartown and Rockmart. For more than a century, these centers and their predecessors have provided care for children suffering from abuse and neglect. Children from across Georgia are referred by state agencies to the centers for residential treatment and specialized foster care at the facilities which are affiliated with the Methodist Church.

“Our state is part of a national crisis when it comes to foster care,” said J. Scott Fuller, development and stewardship officer of Murphy-Harpst. He gave the appalling figures: “Two years ago, Georgia had 7,000 kids in foster care, and today there are 14,000 children in foster care. About 46 percent of those kids need the kind of help we provide.”

Another part of this disturbing situation, described by Brian Hampton of the center’s development office, is the lack of care facilities. For example, last year Murphy-Harpst received 1,700 referrals — but could take in only 150 children. Describing the challenges faced by the center, Hampton said, “On average, our children have been in 14 unsuccessful foster home placements.” The children, ages 12 to 18, have suffered “appalling abuse and neglect,” he said. Thanks to the good work of the center, about 80 percent of the children are placed in a group home or with a foster family.

“I personally believe we are successful because we are a faithbased organization,” Hampton told the Rotarians. “We introduce these children to the presence of a loving God. It is hard to persuade a 15-year-old who has been repeatedly beaten and raped that this love is there, but when they see it, it makes a difference. The child begins to heal.”

On a trip last fall to Central Georgia, Bobby Cagle, director of the state Division of Family and Children Services, said then the state was in a foster care crisis. There were 683 children needing foster homes in the area but only 127 were available, WMAZ reported. To cope with the crisis, DFCS has added hundreds of positions in the past several years, but as Cagle said, community support is key.

On that point, churches are a critical element, as illustrated in Muscogee County. There, due to the efforts of FaithBridge Foster Care, an Atlanta-based organization, the number of children in foster care increased substantially in only a year. Churches are recruited in this program, not families, and the churches are responsible for recruiting foster parents and providing community support. A spokesman for FaithBridge underscored the basis of its approach: “The local churches have a biblical mandate to take care of widows and orphans.”

On the national level, Pew Research Center last fall reported: “The nation’s drug-addiction epidemic is driving a dramatic increase in the number of children entering foster care, forcing many states to take urgent steps to care for neglected children.” Addiction to opioid painkillers and heroin were blamed for helping to drive the crisis in many states of the East and Midwest, while abuse of methamphetamines was the major cause in other parts of the Midwest and in the West.

In Georgia, Pew said, substance abuse was involved 40 percent of the time when children were removed from their family. In Ohio, upwards of 9,900 children were in foster care and almost half of them had a parent using drugs. In Massachusetts, with 9,500 children in foster care, the state’s child care advocate said the opioid epidemic has struck “every socioeconomic situation and every city.” In Vermont last December, Gov. Peter Shumlin called for more than $8 million for the state’s foster care system to hire more workers to cope with the growing number of children who were abandoned, neglected or abused by parents addicted to drugs.

Shumlin painted a grim picture. “We’re losing the battle, not winning it,” he said. “The children are the biggest victims. We’ve lost babies to parents who beat them, strangle them, bang their heads against the floor, sexually abuse them. And it’s happening because of opioid addiction.”

Tragically, the picture is still much the same now. Brian Hampton of Murphy-Harpst zeroed in on the needs. “There are a lot of kids not being served,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

But Murphy-Harpst and other private and state agencies cannot do the work without help — from our churches, from our families and from our communities. We all have work to do. Dave Granlund, Politicalcartoons.com