Foster homes offer youth safe havens

By Hannah Wever
Review Staff Writer

Published: August 7, 2008

For some children, a home away from home is more than just a cool place to go every once in a while. It’s a bed of your own and a place at the dinner table when caregivers cannot provide. It’s a calm environment and a safe place to stay away from drugs, violators, abusers and addicts. It’s foster care.
According to Orange County Director of Social Services Bob Lingo, there are around 30 Orange County children in foster care at the moment. Some of those children wound up in foster care after their caregiver was incarcerated. Some children are victims of abuse. In some cases, parents simply weren’t able to take care of their children.
“When we become aware of a situation in which a child is in danger,” Lingo said, “and there is no immediate solution to make that child safe, we take that child into custody.”
Lingo said if a child’s safety and wellbeing are in question, social workers first try to locate a family member-an aunt or uncle, or a grandparent--where a child can stay until a dangerous home situation is sorted out. “We want to do everything we can to keep families together,” he said.
But sometimes that’s not possible, he added.
“Sometimes the best place to put the child is with one of our foster families,” Lingo said.
In Orange, there are 10 foster families who take children in long-term, and three volunteer emergency families who shelter children for up to 21 days.
Eva Elm is one of the 10 foster parents used by Orange County Social Services. When Elm started fostering children, she had four of her own children already.
“When we started as a foster family I was working at a daycare,” she said. One of the children at the daycare suddenly needed a long-term family, and Elm and her husband filed an application to become a foster family. Elm ultimately took in that little girl from the daycare center, as well as the child’s brother.
Elm currently has three foster children in her home. One of those has lived with the family since he was a small infant, and now, a few years later, the Elms are following adoption procedures.
Elm described the children who come to her through the foster care system as a ball of yarn with just one thread sticking out. But by the time the child is ready to leave, she explained, the ball has unraveled and there is a beautiful tangle of yarn that you knew was there but couldn’t see.
Lingo said the folks who open their homes as foster families are a “rare and unusual breed.” The quality he marvels at the most, he said, is the ability of foster parents to open their hearts and homes to a child, and then when the time comes, to let the child go.
“It is happiness and it is sorrow at the same time,” Elm said. “It is bittersweet.”
Elm said she recently parted with a child who had lived with her family for four years. As sad as she was to see the child leave, she knew the child would benefit from returning to his relatives, she said.
“I’m not doing this to keep the children, but hopefully for them to return home-to have a happy ending,” Elm said. “I have never, ever, ever regretted taking a child into my home.”
Lingo said Orange County Social Services investigated an average of 15 complaints of child abuse or neglect per month in 2007. That’s an increase over previous years, he said. But perhaps more sobering are the types of cases social workers are seeing.
“The problems are more acute. We’re seeing an increase in the number of kids that have been severely abused or sexually abused. Some of the things happening to kids are unconscionable,” Lingo said.
In a situation in which a single parent is in dire financial straits, social workers will connect the parent with community resources, and only take custody of the child as an absolute last resort.
“We will try our best to avoid having that person give up her child,” Lingo said. Instead, the struggling parent will be encouraged to enter the shelter transitional housing until she can gain a financial foothold. In Orange, folks can get financial assistance with food costs and rent if they qualify. And agencies like the Christian Emergency Council and Skyline Community Action Program (CAP) can help. Lingo said shelters and domestic violence victims’ resources in nearby localities can help, too.
“We’ve taken folks to the Salvation Army in Charlottesville, and the domestic violence shelter in Culpeper,” he said.
Lingo said social workers try to help abused or neglected children before the situation becomes critical. But social workers can’t operate on instinct or suspicion.
“By code, we are only allowed to act when there has been an incidence of neglect or abuse,” Lingo explained. Tips come in from daycare providers, nurses, doctors, teachers and neighbors, and only then can a case be investigated, he said.
“We’ll go out and do an assessment and decide if it rises to the level of abuse or neglect,” Lingo said. “In a serious case, we’ll go out and investigate and if it’s bad enough, we’ll work in connection with the police.”
If social workers determine the child needs to be removed from the home, and no relative can take the child in, the child is placed in foster care. For children with special needs-behavioral, emotional or physical, there is therapeutic foster care. If the child cannot be cared for in foster care, he or she is placed in one of several residential facilities in Virginia, and occasionally, out of state.
Lingo said major domestic problems--drug use, child neglect and abuse--move cyclically through generations. He’s seen two generations of the same family come through social services.
“There is the parents’ dysfunction, and the children growing up learning that dysfunction,” Lingo said.
Orange County Social Worker Carol Sue Graves said by far, most cases arise out of households in which parents are substance abusers.
Graves said social services works with addicted parents during the time when their children have been placed in foster care so they can clean up and assume custody again.
“We work with them, trying to get parents clean, straight and consistently able to support themselves for a year of sobriety, a year of clean living,” Graves explained.
“If you don’t correct it as a family, you are going to fail,” Lingo said.