After decades of managing the local foster care system, Garfield County is stepping back and transitioning local foster homes to private foster care licensing and child placement agencies.

Child, Family and Adult Services Division Manager Sheila Strouse said the shift began when Hope and Home — Colorado’s largest foster care agency — approached the county over the summer about becoming a provider.

“We weren’t thinking about it at all. We always talk about where we can work more effectively, but we were not having that conversation specific to our foster care program prior to Hope and Home coming to us,” Strouse said. “They planted a seed of what it could look like, and the more we thought about it and the more they talked to us, the more it felt like this would be a good move.”

The county decided to move forward with the switch in July. It will now refer individuals interested in fostering to Hope and Home, though families may choose to work with other licensed agencies. 

“There’s never been a requirement that if you live in Garfield County, you have to be certified through Garfield County,” Strouse said. “We have had foster homes located within Garfield County that were not certified through Garfield County.

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“So for foster parents, the big change for them is having a different certifying agency and having somebody new doing the work that our foster care coordinators would have done,” she added. 

Hope and Home representatives visited Garfield County in late September for a meet-and-greet with current foster families. As of Wednesday, one foster home had fully transitioned and two more were still in the process.

According to Strouse, Hope and Home will offer a higher level of support than the county could. The agency has assigned three staff members to Garfield County, compared with the county’s previous two.

“This is their only job. They recruit, they certify, they support foster homes,” Strouse said. “For us, it was one of our jobs. So having somebody who can focus on this and have it be the only thing that they are doing made more sense.”

Hope and Home is also experienced at recruitment — a task that has been a long-standing challenge for the county.

“We really struggle with recruiting the foster homes that we need, and those are child specific homes, high acuity youth, large sibling groups, Spanish-speaking homes, so they will be able to do that kind of specified recruitment…” Strouse said. “Despite our best efforts — we’ve been working on this for several years — we could not figure out the secret to it. This is their job and they have found the secret to recruiting foster homes.”

Financial savings weren’t a primary driver of the decision, and whether the move will reduce county costs remains unclear. 

“I don’t expect that we’re going to see huge cost savings because, for our county foster homes, there’s a set daily rate for children in foster care for child placement agencies, CPAs, which is what Hope and Home is,” Strouse said. “It’s about double what we would pay, so the cost of care will be more, but we won’t have two full-time employees allocated also.”

There are currently 17 foster children in Garfield County, including youth in transition, compared to 50 children in 2019,  according to Strouse. She said placements have declined due to shifts in funding and a growing focus on keeping children in their homes. 

“In 2020, we had the Family First Prevention Services Act, which then put more focus on children not going into foster care,” Strouse said. “Then we had another Senate bill last year that provided funding for kin outside of the foster care system, which was sometimes the reason that kids had to come into the foster care system — that was the only way that their families could get financial support for caring for them.”

The same trend is reflected nationally — in May, the U.S. Administration for Children and Families announced that children entering foster care had declined in 2023 to 175,282, an estimated 7% decrease from 2022 and a drop of almost 34% from 2018. 

Local foster home availability has also fallen. In 2016, the county had around 37 kinship and foster homes; by July, that number had declined to 12. 

“When we had over 30 certifications, it was a full time job for two people, but 12 is not,” Strouse said. “Those downward trends also impacted our decision. We’re just not using foster care the way that we did.”

“This is anecdotal, but it’s really difficult to do foster care with two working parents, and 20 years ago, more of our foster homes had one parent at home,” Strouse later added. “It’s really difficult to do with two working parents.”

Although the county’s role has changed, residents interested in fostering can still reach out to the Family and Adult Services Division for support.

“They can still contact us. We’ll still connect them with people who can help them if they want to become a certified foster home,” Strouse said. “I don’t think that most people in the day-to-day provision of the services and that the people are going to see a lot of difference.

“I don’t think that our community partners, our stakeholders or our court, or even the families that we’re working with, are going to see a big change,” she added. “It should be a pretty smooth transition.”