By the time Nikki Owen was 16, she had lived in more homes than she could count, pinging among relatives, group homes and temporary shelters.
“I was kind of like a hot potato there for a bit,” says Owen, whose mother was unable to care for her due to untreated mental illness.
Owen, now 30 and raising three children of her own in Henderson County, was placed in foster care twice — first at age 8 and again at 13, after the death of an aunt who had stepped in to care for her. What followed were years of instability.
“I stayed with some friends from school,” she recalls. “I stayed with some family. I was in [Black Mountain Home for Children]. It was a group home. I was there twice.”
Owen’s experiences illustrate critical problems plaguing the foster care system in Western North Carolina, particularly in small counties. The region is grappling with a shortage of licensed foster families, an overwhelmed Family Court system and limited housing options and educational opportunities for those who age out of the system. Additionally, staffing turnover at the county Department of Social Services (DSS) offices hampers efforts to train and license new foster families.
Add it all up, and WNC is one of the hardest places in the state for foster youths to find stability, foster care advocates say. This is particularly true in rural counties west of Buncombe, including Jackson, Haywood and Cherokee.
“It’s hard to talk about foster care without talking about some pretty large and complicated systems,” explains Cris Weatherford, director of Jackson County DSS. “It’s a perfect storm of all these systems really not functioning as they’re intended.”
In North Carolina, the foster care system offers temporary care for children who are unable to stay safely with their birth families. While the primary goal is to reunite children with their families, adoption may be pursued if reunification is not possible.
The state employs several forms of foster care, such as traditional foster homes, kinship care, respite care and therapeutic foster care. County DSS offices are responsible for investigating child abuse or neglect, placing children in foster care when necessary and developing case plans to support family reunification. They also license and support foster parents, represent the child’s interests in court and provide services to help older youths transition to independence.
Foster families needed
Weatherford still remembers the long drive east with a 10-year-old girl who had been removed from her home. With no foster families available in Jackson County, he had to take her to Gaston County, hours away from the only life she knew. “She was literally saying goodbye to everything down N.C. 107 — ‘Goodbye Ingles, goodbye Wendy’s’— to all the things she was familiar with,” he recalls.
In Jackson County, where 78 children are now in foster care, only eight or nine are in the local school system, he says. The others have been placed in foster care outside the county. The county has nine licensed foster families, and most foster children are sent to counties three or more hours away. Some have been placed as far away as Arkansas.The issue is compounded by a shortage of therapeutic placements for children with more severe behavioral or mental health needs. “We have to send kids to other parts of the state — sometimes even out of state — because we don’t have the local resources,” Weatherford says. “It can be a mental health issue or just the need for more structured care.”
This disconnect between where children live and where the limited number of foster homes or care facilities are located complicates reunification efforts with biological families, says Gaile Osborne, a longtime foster parent and executive director of the Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina. Osborne lives in the Weaverville area.
“When we ship these kids across the state, that’s making visitation harder for the parents,” she explains. “For a social worker to pick up a child, get them to a visit, take them back, come back home — you’re talking a whole day’s work just supporting a one-hour visit.”
Recruiting new foster families is challenging, partly because of burnout among current families, Weatherford says. “The best recruiting of future foster parents is current foster parents. But 30% of foster parents would not recommend becoming licensed to others.”
The burnout applies to DSS staff, too, Weatherford says. High staff turnover and vacancies in child welfare positions make it difficult to train and retain the staff needed to recruit and support foster families. Training can take up to 30 hours.
“It takes a special kind of person to be out in the community recruiting foster parents,” he says.
Rewards and costs
Osborne has fostered more than 30 children over 15 years, including several who were medically fragile or had significant trauma-related behavioral needs. She and her husband, Thomas, started fostering as a way to grow their family but quickly found themselves committed far beyond their original plan.
The rewards, she says, are real but come with emotional cost, especially when it’s time to say goodbye. “People always ask how we can let a child go. But I ask, ‘How can you say no to a child who needs you?’”
Osborne remembers sitting in the Asheville Mall food court more than a decade ago trying to spark interest in foster care among shoppers. “That doesn’t work anymore,” she says. “Now, we’re getting new foster families through the ones we already have.”
Advocates highlight real stories from foster parents, especially within churches and local groups. Community partners are stepping in, too. One school system sent foster care information through its text alerts, resulting in a surge of referrals. “We’re seeing churches, nonprofits, even schools say, ‘Let’s think outside the box,’” she says.
Another key strategy has been connecting with service-oriented professionals, especially nurses, through conversations during hospital visits with children in care. Osborn praises a growing statewide collaboration of public and private agencies focused on improving foster care recruitment and training in Western North Carolina.
Legal logjam
Another issue plaguing the region is a lack of Family Court judges and court-appointed attorneys who represent parents. The judicial circuit that includes Jackson, Haywood, Macon, Swain, Clay, Graham and Cherokee counties averages only about 2.1 days of court per month, Weatherford says.
About 45% of court cases involving foster care are postponed multiple times. Those delays matter because the goal is to move foster children toward stability as quickly as possible, whether that’s reunification with their families or another permanent placement.
“The system is just bogged down,” Weatherford contends. “Our kids stay in care longer than intended, which means they’re staying in foster homes longer than needed, and that adds to the uncertainty. Children don’t deal with uncertainty well.”
The judicial circuit has almost 400 children in foster care but only nine or 10 attorneys willing to represent parents who have financial need, Weatherford says. Each parent involved in a foster care case is entitled to legal representation, and some cases involve multiple parents per child, making the math untenable.
Court-appointed attorneys for parents are paid $65 per hour by the state, a rate that doesn’t create much of an incentive for highly trained lawyers to get involved. “There’s just simply not enough folks getting good representation,” Weatherford says.
There are efforts underway to address some of these gaps. Virtual courtrooms help reduce delays, especially when children are placed far from their home counties. While not a panacea, the measure has helped speed up some processes.
But Weatherford says more is needed. “I think legislators and the administrative office of the courts need to take a look at our district and look at the data that’s out there and try to come up with a solution, whether it’s splitting our district up into two smaller districts or providing additional resources,” he says.
After foster care
The issues young people in foster care face amid a resource-starved system don’t end when they become adults. To transition some into independence, a state program called Foster Care 18 to 21 offers options from foster care placement to a $634 monthly stipend to help with bills.
But the reality is bleak. One of five foster youths aging out of care at 18 become unhoused within 24 hours, Osborne says.
“It’s a consistent problem across the country, but we struggle even more in WNC,” she explains. “The lack of housing and support systems makes it especially difficult here.”
Post-Tropical Storm Helene housing shortages and rising costs have made finding an affordable place to live nearly impossible for many young adults. Without experience managing credit or applying for rentals, former foster youths are often left without options, she says.
Programs like the Independent Living Services for Foster Children (NC LINKS) offer some help, connecting 18- to 21-year-olds with transitional housing or independent living. Facilities such as Black Mountain Home for Children are part of that network, but space is limited.
Owen witnessed the problem firsthand. “Unfortunately, a lot of my group home mates have struggled with homelessness and substance abuse,” she says. “It’s a cycle.”
That cycle could have caught Owen, too, except for a fortuitous placement with a respite family when she was 16. Respite care is a short-term foster care placement by a licensed foster parent to give another licensed foster parent a break.
“I was considering emancipation because I was just so tired of moving around,” she explains. “But my respite family asked me to move in full time. They wanted to adopt me. I was very, very surprised. Most people want babies. I had kind of lost hope.”
The family adopted her at 17, giving her two stable parents and a younger brother. “They felt like they could be a positive influence in my life,” she says.
Today, Owen is a mother of three and works with adults who have intellectual disabilities. She’s planning to become an Assisted Family Living provider in the future. While she hasn’t ruled out fostering teens herself someday, she focuses now on encouraging others to consider it — and to be honest about what they can handle.
“Some people think they’re going to get a cute little baby and raise it as their own,” she explains. “But sometimes you get a call in the middle of the night for a 13-year-old. And you have to ask yourself, are you ready for that?”
She compares her time in care to a buffet, picking up values, beliefs and habits from each family along the way. “I just took what I needed and left the rest. But not every kid can do that. The wrong placement can do real damage.”
Her message to would-be foster parents is simple: “You never know the impact you’ll have on someone’s life. So be sure you’re in it for the right reasons.”
