DeKalb County is facing a critical shortage of local foster homes, with only three of the approximately 40 children currently in the foster care system placed within the county.
Samantha Bowman is co-chair of the DeKalb County Foster Friendly Coalition, a new organization designed to help with the issue. Bowman said the coalition is working to change the resource landscape to better support local families.
“They’ve already been displaced from their home and when that happens and they’re placed hours away, they’re also displaced from their friends, their favorite teacher, their favorite class,” Bowman said. “There’s extra trauma within that. And if we can keep our children in our community, that would benefit them tremendously.”
Bowman said the lack of local placement options forces children to be moved to locations all across the state, from Memphis to Mountain City, and create additional trauma for youth already removed from their homes.
Bowman said the number of children in the foster system fluctuates and has reached as high as 60 over the last three years. Bowman said keeping children local allows for more frequent visitation with biological parents, which is often restricted by transportation barriers when children are placed hours away.
“Our kids, they’re our future and they deserve so much more than some of things that they’ve had to go through,” Bowman said. “So we if we can have safe places here in our community and one of the goals of the Foster Friendly Coalition is for the whole county to come together, the whole community to come together to build support and structure so that way if something does happen and children are placed with foster parents that are here, it’s going to be a less less traumatic, hopefully.”
Bowman said foster home requirements include separate bedrooms for foster children and specific safety equipment like smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers. Above all, Bowman said trauma-informed care and being present in a foster kid’s life is one of the most important aspects.
“It is one of the hardest things somebody would do but it’s most rewarding,” Bowman said. “People don’t know what they don’t know,” Bowman said. “So if they don’t know that there’s a problem, if they don’t know that there’s a gap in the things that we need here for our kids then they’re not going to be able to do anything about it.”
Bowman said the community is invited to an upcoming Community Day to learn more about how to support local foster children and families. The event takes place Saturday, May 2.