CHARLESTON, W. Va. (AP) – For as far back as she can remember, Beth Todd wanted to be a mom. “I was the little girl who…
CHARLESTON, W. Va. (AP) – For as far back as she can remember, Beth Todd wanted to be a mom.
“I was the little girl who took her dolls everywhere. I had a car seat, I had a diaper bag, I had shoes, I had bottles, I had empty jars of baby food, and I took care of these babies like they were really babies,” she said.
“I even have a little picture of me with this doll that’s called Baby Beth, and that’s kind of what I saw for myself.”
In the earliest days of her adult life, she had a plan, a vision, for how that would all play out. She also thought she’d have almost nine months to prepare for each child to come along, one at a time.
But – as often happens with best-made plans – things didn’t come together the way she’d expected. So when she started dating this great guy in pharmacy school who told her he’d always liked the idea of adopting, well, it was one more thing they had in common.
“I made it clear to Beth, initially, that I had just always wanted to adopt,” Alex Todd said. “It’s something I’ve just felt prompted to do. Like, if there’s this need, and I can help meet that need, it’s something I want to do.”
May not only puts the spotlight on mothers everywhere with Mother’s Day, it’s also National Foster Care Month. In the state of West Virginia, the need for foster care and adoptive parents is overwhelming.
“I have been here for 13 years and, for so long, all of our messaging was 4,000. There are 4,000, we have 4,000 kids in foster care,” said Rachel Kinder, a program director with Mission West Virginia, a nonprofit organization that works to ensure safe and loving families for children through life skills education and foster family recruitment.
“Then around 2016 it hit, like, 5,000. Then it hit 6,000. And now we’re at more than 7,000,” she said.
About 850 of those 7,000 children are from Kanawha County.
Figures provided by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources show 7,095 West Virginia children in foster care placements as of April 30, including 432 out-of-state placements.
“Do we have 7,095 homes for those kids?” asked Kinder. “We don’t.”
The goal for foster care placements is to keep children in their same neighborhoods and schools whenever possible, and to keep sibling groups together. But the numbers are so high now, Kinder said, that the placements are often less than ideal.
“They’re getting placed out of county or across the state or their sibling group is being split up,” she said. “We have had the issue of kids staying in hotels or sleeping in DHHR offices until a placement can be found.”
Some children are placed in short-term facilities, like the Davis Child Shelter in Charleston, or residential treatment facilities when there are specific issues to be addressed. A handful of others are in detention centers, group homes or psychiatric facilities.
Statewide, the figures show 3,397 West Virginia foster care children, about 48 percent, are in kinship or relative placements – including, in some cases, great-grandparents, when there are two generations in the same family unable to provide adequate care.
