Dawn Douglas has worked in the Dane County foster care system for 35 years. A social worker by trade, Douglas has always been passionate about connecting at-risk youth with a loving home.
Now, as the Dane County Out of Home Care Program Specialist, she oversees the county’s foster care efforts, where she spends much of her time recruiting and training the next generation of foster parents.
Today, 220 children are in Dane County’s foster care system. And at the moment, the county is staring down a 10-year low in foster homes, down from 168 foster homes a year ago to approximately 150 now.
Douglas said she hopes her work and the county’s “outside the box” methods can unite foster children with a loving, safe and stable home.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Can you describe the current foster care system, what it’s like and what the process of an individual entering the system is like?
When our initial assessment team gets a referral that they have to go out and do an investigation or a child assessment based on concerns about maltreatment of a child — maybe there’s neglect — they will go out and do that work, but they will then contact us and say, “Look, I've got a family of four kids, ages range from three to 10, and I'm going to need to have a foster home for them.”
Then, our job is to try to locate a resource for those kids. Even when kids come into care, we're still trying to see if there's relatives out there so that we can keep them within their family. If we can’t and the kids stay in foster care, then our goal is to try to reunify them with their parents.
What are some of the most common reasons someone might be placed in foster care?
For younger children, it's usually because of reasons surrounding neglect. Neglect is not supposed to be tied to poverty, but the reality is we do have high homelessness issues. We have parents, because of poverty, they're dealing with alcohol or drug issues to help cope with that, or they might have untreated mental health issues. That's why a lot of younger kids come in — there's not a safe place for them to be cared for by their parents. There's also reasons of abuse. There's child maltreatment. When kids are in imminent danger of their surroundings, that's when we look at putting them into foster care or another alternative placement like relatives.
For some of our older kids, sometimes parents aren't able to provide a level of supervision to keep the community safe. Maybe by the time the kids are 10-12 years old, they're starting to get in trouble with the law because they never really had those limits set. Some of our parents work at night and aren’t available to be there for their kids. So there's a lot of reasons for that.
According to your website, Dane County averages 40-50 teenagers in need of a foster home at any given time. What happens to the teens who age out of foster care?
We can't ever say, “Oops, sorry, we're full, we don't have a placement for kids.” We always find something. We do have a shelter care facility here that's run by the juvenile court systems that sometimes our kids will go until we can locate a longer-term placement.
We're gonna keep them in high school and the foster home until they graduate. Now, some kids, if they're no longer on supervision, they might say, “I'm done with this, I don't want to be in foster care.” We actually have a unit called the Independent Living Skills unit that works with those kids who are aging out and their foster homes. When kids are in foster care after a certain age, I think it's after 13, I want to say they can qualify for like Pell grants for college and helping them get their FAFSA done so they can get into college, and helping them or with job training or skills training or help get at them build up those resources so they have supports as they age out and have a place to live, maybe have a job. That's what we're doing.
How does Dane County bridge the gap when 31% of foster homes are non-white and 65% of the children in foster care are children of color?
I've been doing this a long, long time. I remember a time when foster parents would say, “Yeah, I'm just comfortable taking care of caucasian kids.” That's no longer an option. We expect all of our foster parents to be able to transracially parent, and we ask them about that when we're licensing them. We ask them, “What are you going to do when a child of color comes in to make sure they have appropriate role models? What are you going to do to make your toys in your house look different to be welcoming and accepting of that?”
One of the things we created was a transracial parenting guide. The other thing that we do is whenever a Black child is placed in a white foster home, we put together something called a Box of Black Excellence for them. We put in books and maybe games or toys, depending on their age. We put in where they can go to get their hair done — all of our foster parents have to do an implicit bias test so that we can kind of have a starting point with them about what their life looks like and how they unconsciously feel about people of color. And then we also have them sign a transracial parenting pledge. We're having these conversations with them from the minute I meet with them.
In addition to maybe some of the racial issues, what are some of the biggest issues currently facing the county as it relates to foster care?
We're at an all-time low in numbers of foster homes, and it's concerning to me. There's a lot of reasons probably why, but I would say we're at the lowest point we've been in over 10 years. I think that what was happening is when COVID hit — a lot of counties, other counties in Wisconsin, even nationwide — were losing foster homes right and left, and we really didn't lose that many during that time.
One of the things that we're seeing is our kids, at the time, they weren't in school, and so you didn't have people who are mandated reporters. They weren’t interacting with them having eyeballs on them other than virtually. I think our kids sometimes are in traumatic situations that nobody knew about yet. And now we're starting to see kids with more issues come in as a result of that.
Do you find any issues, either at the state or county level, that make it harder for you to operate?
We obviously have to follow [the state’s] guidance and their rules. I think a lot of times, they want us to do more and more and our foster homes to do more, but we don't always get money to help those resources. Sometimes they do grants, but those are highly competitive. I feel bad for the smaller counties that don't have as many resources as we do, to try to meet those needs.
In Wisconsin, we’re a county-run program except for Milwaukee — they're run by the state, but that's different from other states, and so that's hard. Sometimes we get kids from other states where we have to try and license a relative here, and they don't always understand the other state, or [they ask] “Why doesn't your state just do it?” Well, it's because we're a county-run agency.
What would you say is the most rewarding part of being a foster parent?
I truly feel that foster parents make such a huge difference. And they're changing, they make a difference with our future, our kids, our leaders of tomorrow. A lot of people don't realize that we license same-sex couples, we license single people, we license people that live in apartments, people that rent a townhome. They don't have to own a home, a lot of them do, but they don't have to. They can work and be a foster parent. We have daycare funding available. A lot of them, they're like, ‘Well, I've never parented before.” That's okay, we have a lot of foster parents that haven’t parented before. Sometimes that's good. You don't have any preconceived notions about what you might expect out of that kid.
Nick Bumgardner is a staff writer with The Daily Cardinal covering state news and politics. You can follow him on Twitter at @nickbum_.
