Robbinsville – Graham County – as well as others in the N.C. Parent of Social Services, District 30 – are contending with a larger than average number of children in the foster care system and a lower number of court days per month.
County Department of Social Services Director Cris Weatherford expressed his concerns with the situation during the monthly DSS meeting on Jan. 12. He said the issues have been on-going for some time and that the average number of court dates per month was approximately two.
District 30 includes all seven counties west of Haywood County. Graham currently has 24 children in the system, the lowest in the entire district.
However, the county also has the lowest number of court dates per month, at 0.8.
“It paints a pretty bad picture for the 30th district,” Weatherford said.
He also said many of the children had been in custody for extremely long amounts of time.
“If you look at it, we’ve got 51 kids out of 433 that have been in custody longer than four years, so that’s not good,” Weatherford said.
Of Graham County’s 24 children in foster care, seven each had been in the system for up to 12 months, between 12-24 months, and between 24-48 months, respectively. Three further youth are in the 18-21 program. No Graham County foster children have been in the system for more than 48 months, the sole county in the district not to.
Weatherford also said the situation was making his staff’s jobs more difficult.
“Basically, that’s wasting half of my social worker’s time preparing court summaries, going to have court and then you get in there and 45 percent of the time, their case is continued,” Weatherford said.
He said DSS was looking further into the issue and trying to come up with a possible solution.