Social workers talk strides, challenges

Though the Scotland County Department of Social Services social work program measures success by the decline in the number of county children in foster care in recent years, the challenges facing its staff continue to evolve.

Scotland County officials and social services workers met on Tuesday with U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson at Cynthia's Place, a family visitation space behind DSS built with local money in 1996 and dedicated to the memory of county social worker Cynthia Ficklin Wentz.

Hudson also met with children's services departments in Richmond and Robeson counties on Tuesday to discuss those programs' utilization of federal resources in the future.

In Scotland County, the number of children in foster care has fallen from a peak of 83 in 2011 to a range of 30 to 35 at any given time, and the workloads of individual county caseworkers have fallen below the state-recommended level of 12.

But reports of possible abuse and neglect are on the rise, from fewer than 30 per month in 2009 to an average of about 40 this year, necessitating increased focus on investigation and case management.

"That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you start doing that month after month after month, in a year's time you're taking 180 more reports," said April Snead, the social work program administrator at DSS. "We haven't gotten more staff positions to do that work, but we have reallocated staff positions from foster care over to investigations to prevent any county costs but still get the work done."

A few of those reports are redundant, Snead said, and in many cases the families have already been investigated.

"If nothing else, a majority are getting services within the building, economic services, which shows you how poverty is closely related to neglect and abuse," she said.

To keep children out of the foster system, Snead said, social services workers have had to work quickly to find alternative placements with relatives for children found to be in an unsafe situation in their parents' homes.

She added that more children than ever are coming into the system saddled with emotional trauma and mental health concerns, the treatment of which is limited both by Medicaid restrictions and Scotland's remote location relative to providers of certain therapies.

"With a mental health diagnosis and a mental health issue, that's not fixed in 60 days," said Wendy Stanton, children's services supervisor.

"Even the trauma-focused therapists that we do have, they're maxed out. They can't have but so many kids and provide but so much intense treatment to meet all the kids that are in foster care that need it on top of all the ones that aren't in foster care."

DSS also finds itself stretched thin in providing support to teenagers, both as they take a more active role in their placement planning and as they work toward independence.

"The biggest problem I see is, when we have 18 and 19 year olds, they have no place to go," said foster care social worker Robbie Lowery, who works primarily with teens. "We have no resources to put them in independent living cottages because of money. ... We don't have the resources to transition some of our kids to adulthood."

Many teens are eager to leave the foster system when they reach legal adulthood, only to fall back into the destructive family environments that put them in care in the first place.

"Some, they just have to get out there and think 'I can't do this,' and so they come back," Stanton said.