Transcripts

JOHN BIEWEN: The image of rural America has always been that it's a place where people take care of their own. So theoretically, when kids needed help, when they were abused, or neglected, or got in disputes with their parents, there were friends or neighbors to take them in. Or, as a last resort, foster families, families in which the mother was at home with her own kids, so one more to care for was no big deal. But Chuck Olsen, who is director of Rock County Social Services in the southwestern Minnesota town of Luverne, suggests that if that image was ever the reality, it isn't anymore. He says there's a shortage in his county of emergency foster families.

CHUCK OLSEN: We started out with 16 in 1980. And that gradually dwindled to about five or six in the late '80s. And that's when we began to plan for a different approach.

JOHN BIEWEN: The different approach that Rock and three neighboring counties settled on was that of a group home for emergency foster kids. Clark Guinn directs the Southwestern Mental Health Center in Worthington, which runs the Bridgeway Center Group Foster Home for the four counties. Guinn says the need for a group foster home has grown out of a real change in rural life.

CLARK GUINN: I think in years past, you could have emergency foster care families. We got a lot of them were farm families. And you could put people in, kids into those families in pretty short notice. And I think over the last few years, it's gotten to the point where many of the wives are working, where they didn't work before. And a lot of the husbands actually have second jobs other than farming.

JOHN BIEWEN: In the living room of the Bridgeway Center, a large house near downtown Worthington, two boys play video games, while a couple of older teenage girls sit and read magazines. Shane, a 12-year-old, has been here for three days. He doesn't know how much longer he'll have to stay or where he'll go next.

SPEAKER 2: My mom put me here. Because my mom and dad broke up. And so she needed to go somewhere.

JOHN BIEWEN: Would you rather be here than with a family? Which would you prefer?

SPEAKER 2: Probably with a family.

JOHN BIEWEN: Nancy, who is 15, has been at Bridgeway for three months. She says only that she had problems in the home, and she's waiting for a court decision. How do you like it here?

SPEAKER 3: Well, at first, it was pretty bad, but it's better than nothing. It's better than being on the streets.

JOLENE ANINGA: The average age is 14. And the average stay is 10 to 14 days.

JOHN BIEWEN: Jolene Aninga is the Bridgeway Center's residential director. She says since it opened in February, the center has cared for 46 kids, ranging from six months to 18 years of age, almost all of them from the four southwestern counties that the home serves.

JOLENE ANINGA: Most of the kids come from dysfunctional families, social situations, alcohol abuse, neglect, physical abuse, and families that either don't want to take care of their kids or aren't able to take care of them, either emotionally or financially. The rest of the kids are kids who come from probation, who are removed from their home because of their own behavior.

JOHN BIEWEN: Guinn of the Southwest Mental Health Center admits that a group home like Bridgeway Center is not as good for kids as are individual foster families. But he emphasizes that Bridgeway is short term. Most kids stay at the home for three months or less, and then are either returned to their families or placed with long-term foster families. The number of long-term foster parents hasn't dropped like that of emergency foster parents. So Guinn insists that the creation of the Worthington group home is not a step back toward the time of orphanages, when kids were warehoused in institutions.

CLARK GUINN: This gives the county a little breathing space. They can take some time to evaluate a kid, develop a foster home, put some services in place, maybe in the kid's own home, and then send them back and see what happens, rather than shuffling these kids off to a residential facility, saying, well, this is the only way we can handle them. I think we're looking at handling kids in the community as much as we can. And if we have to send them away, we'll send them away after we've tried everything else.

JOHN BIEWEN: Officials at the Bridgeway Center say the Worthington facility is one of only a handful of group homes for foster kids outside the Twin Cities. But they say given the persistence of family problems and the increased difficulty in recruiting foster families, there may be a need for more such facilities in the future. This is John Biewen reporting.