CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The Children’s Home Society of West Virginia is working to address the dramatic increase of children statewide who are being cared for by grandparents or other relatives.
The increase is largely due to the drug epidemic, according to CEO Steve Tuck.
“A lot of it is identified often with a grandparent raising grandchildren because of drug use by the middle generation,” he told MetroNews during public forum at the Christ Church in Charleston Thursday.
According to data from the Healthy Grandfamilies Project, 85 percent of surveyed grandparents who care for their grandchild say the reason is because the parent has a drug problem.
Other reasons include financial problems, physical or mental disability and military deployment.
These kids often need additional help to overcome traumatic experiences inside the home, Tuck said.
“You’ve seen the tragic stories of a child whose parents overdose and die in their house and they’re in that house,” he said. “Besides just having a place to live, they need some trauma grieving counseling and things like that.”
The number of children removed from homes due to parental drug use increased the most over the last decade from 2013-2016. In 2013, there were about 1,500 child removals. That number grew to more than 2,200 in 2016, according to information from the Children’s Home Society.
Currently, there are more than 22,000 children in kinship care in West Virginia. Kinship care means children are being raised by relatives or, in some jurisdictions, a close family friend. A foster parent is a person who cares for a child, but does not know them beforehand.
Tuck said there are more than 6,000 kids in West Virginia’s foster care system now — an increase from 4,000 kids just a few years ago.
“There were months where it was going up 100 every month. Most of them are in this category (kinship care) because we just don’t have enough foster homes,” he said.
There’s a big need for foster care parents in the state, Tuck said, suggesting kinship caregivers take on that role.
“We want to increase our number of foster care and if that can be a balance of certifying some of the kinship homes that want to be foster parents, we’re willing to do that,” he said.
Tuck said their goal is to inform kinship caregivers about the support and resources that are available to them in their communities. The organization also hopes to identify ideas to recommend to the state Legislature to better support caregivers.