Dwindling Foster Home Program

Orangewood, Orange County’s 170-bed emergency shelter opened last year to ease overcrowding at the old county home for battered, abused and unwanted children, is already too small. Its staff has been putting cots in the gymnasium to handle the overflow.

One reason for the overcrowding is that the county has no other place to put these unwanted children. And as fine as Orangewood is, it is still an institution. And children belong in homes, not institutions.

The lucky children get to live in a foster home with its family atmosphere and foster parents who make life as nearly normal as it possibly can be. There are fewer and fewer lucky children each year.

Between January of 1984 and December of 1985 the county’s foster home program lost 104 families that had previously been willing and able to care for youngsters in county custody. At the same time, the number of children needing such homes increased 15%.

The trend is troubling.

The county Board of Supervisors last May authorized a $30,000 public relations campaign to find more foster parents. And last Tuesday it approved contracting with state-licensed home-finding agencies that will help recruit and train foster parents for children with emotional or medical problems, who are harder to place.

But all children are hard to place, even those without special problems, when residents are content to let the youngsters, most of whom are under age 5, remain in county institutions. Hundreds of families have opened their hearts, and homes, to these children. But hundreds more are needed. Until then, the only parent many children will know will continue to be the county Social Services Agency.