BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - There is a critical shortage of foster homes in the state of Louisiana, but for some groups of kids, finding homes is even more difficult.
“It’s important as those who were able to step up to give us a call and apply so that we can give that child normalcy,” said Colby Hennigan, lead recruiter at Methodist Foster Care.
Methodist Foster Care focuses on kids who may need some extra love through what they call therapeutic fostering.
“They are therapeutic because of their behavior, the trauma they received, because they’re a lot more difficult to place because they’re older, our LGBTQ+ community, our special needs community, and kids who are medically fragile,” added Hennigan.
Methodist Foster Care works closely with the Department of Children and Family Services to find homes for kids who need that extra support, because it can be harder to find a foster family willing to take them in.
According to DCFS, there are over 4,000 kids in foster care and less than 2,000 certified homes, and for therapeutic foster kids, it’s only 250 beds.
“It can be for various reasons like I mentioned, age could be a factor, a lot of foster parents and a lot of new parents have an idea that they want younger ones, they want to raise them up, and foster care is a unique environment, you never know what you’re going to be offered and for that factor, we have a problem placing teenagers,” explained Hennigan.
Hennigan says misconceptions about fostering these kids also play a role in finding them a home.
“The word foster care, it’s a gray cloud of just the unknown, people aren’t sure what they’re walking into, they may have heard horror stories from previous foster parents who had a hard time with the system, and they may just think that DCFS is the only route for them, when they think foster care they think state program,” said Hennigan.
Methodist Foster Care’s goal is to make things easier for both the parents and the kids including a streamlined process to get certified in just two months, weekly visits and calls, and a 24-hour hotline for parents. They hope their extra support will encourage more families to consider fostering.
“It could be Christmas morning and if our foster parent needs help, they can call us,” added Hennigan, “Therapeutic can be a scary word sometimes, because what does it mean? But our way of saying it just means extra, our youth require extra care, extra attention, and our parents also require that extra training,” explained Hennigan.
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