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Opioid Epidemic Causing Desperate Need For Foster Families

The number of Indiana children in need of foster care has increased dramatically in the past few years, and the number of foster families isn't keeping pace with the need.

In 2012, there were just shy of 13,000 children in need of services; last year that number soared to more than 23,000.

To put that in perspective, that's enough kids to fill Indiana University's Assembly Hall almost one and a half times.

Foster Families Scramble To Keep Up With Kids Needing Care

Aarin and Gena Walker of Bloomington love having children in their home. Right now they have two young kids, a boy and a girl, living with them.

"When they're really excited or really happy, the little one will put his arms around me and say, 'you're my foster mama!'" Gena says. "I'm like, 'Yep!'"

The Walkers have been fostering the pair of young siblings for the past four months.

"Well it's hard, being a foster parent is hard," Gena says. "It's stressful because they're not your children and then you get attached, you know?"

Gena is a stay-at-home foster mom. She plays with the kids day in and day out in their rural home. They like to play trains, build forts and feed the chickens out back.

While the Walkers are hoping to adopt the children, the initial goal for all foster kids is to be reunified with their biological parents.

"Everyone who starts foster care is encouraged that you need to go into this understanding that the priority is to try and reunify the child with their own family of origin," Sharon Pierce, CEO and President of The Villages, says.

The Villages is a not-for-profit child and family services agency based out of Indianapolis.

And according to Pierce, over the last decade reunification has happened more often than not. While the department of child services doesn't track this data specifically, Pierce says about 57 percent of the time foster children were reunited with their biological parents.

But that's not the case anymore. Today she says juvenile judges are lucky to approve just 30 percent of children for reunification.

"It is really frightening because it speaks to the fact that families in Indiana are in trouble," Pierce says. "And not just in Indiana, but across the country."

Experts Say The Heroin Epidemic Is The Cause

Pierce says that trouble starts and ends with the heroin epidemic.

"Parents can't escape, it seems, this horrific addiction so families are crumbling and falling apart," Pierce says.

When Child Protective Services, or CPS, learns that a parent can no longer care for a child, that child is placed with a foster family until a judge rules the parents are capable of caring for them again. Sometimes they're with a family for just a few days. Other times its longer.

"This is I think their 4th, no we're their 5th placement, something like that," Aarin Walker says. "So they've been moved around a lot."

If the child is out of their biological parents home for 15 out of 22 months, the biological parental rights are terminated and the child is placed up for adoption. A juvenile judge also has the power to terminate the parental rights at any time if it's in the best interest of the child.

"This is our tsunami, this is our hurricane. We as a state have to have emergency preparedness and response and problem solving so that it never happens again."

For the Walkers, this limbo is hard.

"Its kind of an odd thing because you kind of treat them like they're your kids but they're not you know they're under the authority of the state," Aarin says. "So you're kind of babysitting but it's not a babysitting job. There's kind of a weird in-between thing."

Because there aren't enough foster families to meet the need, there's increasing pressure on judges and current foster families to bend the rules to find more placements, especially when trying to keep large sibling groups together.

"That might mean that we have to go back to the state, Department of Child Services, and say, 'I know this home is only licensed for four children but we think this parent would be great for this brother and sister,'" Pierce says. "So if you can give us an exception so they can have six children then we'll place them there."

Meet another Indiana foster family:

"We've already gotten calls for two more siblings and we're only allowed to have three in this house," Aarin says.

"It was around the same age, another boy and girl, and then a 12 year old," Gena says. "I was like, 'Huh? In our house?'"

Pierce says Indiana's state leaders need to step up and help.

In the past decade, the state has slashed funding for the Department of Child Services administration, case management, and training.

"This is our tsunami, this is our hurricane," Pierce says. "We as a state have to have emergency preparedness and response and problem solving so that it never happens again."

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