ORLANDO, Fla. — Orlando’s leading foster care agency says the system is being stretched.
On any given day, 650 kids are in foster care in Central Florida. And many of those kids are in homes where the foster parents are providing mental, emotional, and financial support. But there are still close to 150 kids who can’t find foster families and are in group homes.
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Embrace Families officials say there is a special need for foster families willing to take older teens.
Since 2018, Shannon Hosie has been a foster mom to close to a dozen teenagers. It’s an age group that takes a special kind of caregiver to help the kids learn independence as they approach adulthood.
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“Getting them on that right track, getting to understand, you know, you need, you need your ID, you need to set up a bank account, you need to be able to handle your finances,” Hosie said.
Every year, close to 50 kids age out of Central Florida’s foster care system, which means they turn 18 without having a permanent connection to a family.
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“Until that number is zero, it’s too many,” said Glen Casel, the CEO of Embrace Families. “We’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s more work to be done.”
Over the last decade, Casel said they’ve successfully decreased the number of kids aging out of the system and bolstered support for older children.
“Ten or 15 years ago, if a child aged out of foster care at 18, that was it,” he said. “They were on the road. And if you can imagine, even just for a minute, trying to navigate that transition to adulthood, obviously, a great number of them failed.”
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A big change now is that foster kids can choose to stay in foster families until they turn 21. And foster families with teens are eligible for extra funding. Or those teens who choose independence, they can get financial support until they turn 25.
In order to continue providing this support to both foster families and teens, Embrace Families says it’s all about funding. This year, the state passed a $150 million increase in funding for the foster system, but Casel said the funding formula means he thinks Central Florida is actually missing out.
Casel said Embrace Families is only receiving 1% of that money.
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“I have done this work for over 30 years, and I have never seen an increase like there was in the last legislative session in 2022. Unfortunately, Embrace Families was largely left out of that,” he said.
Casel said it means Central Florida’s lead foster care agency now has a budget deficit despite the increase. He said they’ve had to raise salaries for case workers to stay competitive but he says it’s been frustrating not being able to do more.
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“It’s been very challenging to sort of watch other parts of the state really be able to invest in the system, which is desperately needed. And we’ve just had to kind of sit on the sidelines,” he said.
Casel said he hopes this is just a one-year issue. He said the agency is already working with partners in the state legislature to fix a funding formula that he said rewards kids in foster care placement and not kids in need overall.
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