Foster Parents Can Help Rebuild Families in Rural Nevada
Imagine a child or teenager in your community. Could be your kid’s friend from school. Or maybe a neighborhood kid. Their parents are struggling — with jobs, budgets, life strains or something worse, such as substance abuse. Things have gotten bad at home, so bad that abuse or neglect is occurring. Authorities intervened and the kids are headed to foster care.
Every two minutes, children nationwide enter foster care, which can be unpredictable, confusing and traumatizing.
Foster families can offer a soft place to land.
May is National Foster Care Month and Nevada’s rural region child welfare agency (all of the state’s counties except for Clark and Washoe) reports 400 to 450 children in foster care. The Division of Child and Family Services, which serves 15 Nevada counties as their lone foster care licensing agency, always needs more licensed foster families.
Foster care, defined
When courts find that primary caregivers have abused or neglected children at home, case managers with the Nevada Division of Child and Family Services will try moving trusted family members or friends into the home, connect families to needed services, or have the children stay with relatives or fictive kin. But when these resources are unavailable or unusable, children are forced to enter foster care.
Most children in rural Nevada foster care will spend about 14 weeks with foster families before reunifying with their first families. About 57% of children entering Nevada foster care will reunite with their first families. “In these smaller (rural Nevada) towns, we have a lot of counties that don’t even have foster families in them,” said Perla Landa-Muñoz, the Division of Child and Family Services’ rural foster care recruiter. “That means when a child is removed from their home, for whatever reason … they are often taken to another rural Nevada town, away from everything they’ve known … their family, their friends, their school, their teachers.”
A continuing need
Children in foster care need strong, supportive caretakers who will work with the children’s biological families and the Division toward first-family reunification.
To foster children in Nevada, adults must be:
• At least 21
• Single, married or domestically partnered
• Working or stay-at-home parents
• Able to demonstrate financial stability to meet family’s needs
• Home renters or homeowners
• Licensed for one to six beds, depending on space availability
Rural Nevada needs homes to foster children of all genders and ages. Foster parents can choose the age range and gender of child they’d be most comfortable parenting. There is a particular need for homes that will accept teens, medically fragile children, LGBTQ+ children and sibling groups with wide age range parameters (e.g., a 16-year-old with a 4-year-old sibling).
Being a foster family means helping a child and rebuilding an entire family unit. “When you foster today,” Landa-Muñoz said, “you are setting your future community of families up for success.”
“The kids need you. None of these kids asked to be in their situation,” said DCFS foster parent Terri when asked what advice she’d give to those considering fostering in rural Nevada. “We need you too. The more foster parents in our community, the easier it is on all of us.”
FIND OUT MORE AT: ruralnvfostercare.com