Family Pathways in Butler

The number of children in foster care in Butler County decreased 6.7% from 2018 to 2022, according to the newest Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children’s State of Child Welfare report.

The county has also seen a nearly 10% decrease in children reentering foster care during the last five years.

“It’s a really positive point,” said Rachael Miller, policy director for Pennsylvania Partnership for Children. “(Butler County) shows 57.9% of children are being placed in the care of a relative, compared to the rest of state, which sees only 42% of children placed in the care of a relative.”

The annual report examines comprehensive data for Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, including information on Child Protective Services, General Protective Services reports, foster care placements, children leaving or reentering foster care and efforts to help children achieve permanency. The 2023 State of Child Welfare report provides a five-year perspective on the performance of the child welfare system.

“The report highlights both positive and areas that could be strengthened in regards to child welfare involvement,” Miller said. ‘We aggregate by age, gender, race and ethnicity available at county, state and geographical regions.”

Over the past five years, the number of children in foster care, along with the number of children reentering the foster care system, have decreased, while the number of children of entering foster care for the first time has increased 7.1%.

“Children should be placed in a family setting,” Miller said. “It reduces trauma and promotes a better health outcome. Trauma is experienced from the initial reason for the first referral and exacerbated through placement.”

Elan Welter Lewis, founder and executive director at Family Pathways in Butler, said the decrease is part of an effort by the county to keep children who are entering the foster system with family members.

“The workers within the foster care system in Butler will work with you, as hard as you work to do the best for your children,” Lewis said. “They really do care about children and families in this community.”

Lewis has said there has been an emphasis on kinship care, which allows a child to stay with someone close to the biological parents.

“They could stay with someone like grandma or an aunt or uncle or maybe someone they go to church with,” Lewis sad. “It’s someone that the biological parents know really well that steps forward and takes the child and they become a kinship foster parent.”

Miller said that kinship care is often time what is best for children in the foster care system.

“When a child is in placed in foster care, they are disconnected from their community, their friends, family and their school,” Miller said. “They lose their sense of identity and everything that is familiar to them.”

The two largest factors, according to the report, for children being placed in the foster system are parental drug abuse and neglect.

“The big take away there is that children are being placed in the foster care system due to neglect rather than abuse,” said Miller.

Miller said that abuse falls under a set of child protective laws that are “categorically more traditional” while neglect has more to do with social-economic issues.

“Research has shown that access to safety net programs like housing programs, child care and substance programs really reduce the need for child welfare or even government intervention,” Miller said.

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