DFACS often has limited choices

Last week, this newspaper carried a story about how the state reached a settlement with a couple whose child died last year in a Nicholson area foster home.

Such stories always generate anger at DFACS. Why were children left in harm’s way?

I’ll admit to similar sentiment, but I’ve a sneaking feeling that I know one of the reasons. There just aren’t enough people willing to take in foster children.

I have no hard data to back that hypothesis, but from time to time I hear or read of appeals for more foster parents — that there are more children in need than there are loving, safe places to put them.

We can look at the death of a child and see how it could have been averted, but we don’t have to deal with the realities DFACS faces. DFACS believes children should stay with family members; most of us would accept that priority, but when that decision goes bad, as it did with Michael Levigne, we don’t know what options DFACS had besides placing him with his grandparents. Maybe if the rest of us opened our homes to foster children, DFACS would have had better options.

In the other case, by all accounts Wendy Osborne was a model foster parent and a good choice by DFACS to care for a baby while the child’s parents worked out issues so they could take her back. Osborne helped train other foster parents, but it was in her care that 9-month-old Jessica Scovil was left in a vehicle and died last year.

It’s easy to blame Osborne — a child died after all — but I can imagine a mother overlooking one child on a hectic day, even to the extent of falling asleep for several hours. Sometimes good parents make bad mistakes. We read with depressing regularity about children who die from or are hurt by carelessness of their parents, but can we say that we’re always vigilant and careful as we point fingers at Wendy Osborne and DFACS? Maybe our children were just lucky.

Judging from the police reports I read weekly, there are a lot of other children who would be better off in foster care, but do we really want the state to aggressively police families with the idea of removing children because they might be at risk? Who makes that call? With whom would we place them?

Until you and I open our homes to foster children, DFACS just has to do the best it can, which, unfortunately, is sometimes not enough.

Mark Beardsley is the editor of The Commerce News. He lives in Commerce.