May is National Foster Care Awareness Month, and 76 families in Muskingum County have committed time, love and dedication to providing the best environment for children that are not their own.

Currently, 169 children in Muskingum County are involved in the foster care system. Seven of those children are in permanent placement, meaning they are seeking adoption as their parents’ custody has been severed.

In the early 2000s, Muskingum County Children Services began dual-certifying foster parents as both foster-home families and adoptive-home families. Since then, the number of certified homes has grown, as well as the number of children looking for a safe home.

“People that go into foster care, it’s a lot like people who go into the ministry,” David Boyer, Executive Director of Muskingum County Adult and Child Protective Services, said. “It is a calling, it is truly. It’s not just a job, it is literally a heartfelt mission, and it’s a process.”

Oftentimes, Boyer said couples or individuals will think or talk about becoming a foster parent for months, years or even decades before they become certified.

“You’ve obviously got to have a lot of love in your heart and a huge commitment to helping some very, very needy children,” Boyer said. “It’s an acquired ability to welcome a child into your home and to make that seamless and to make that nurturing and to make that positive and productive.”

With 76 foster families in Muskingum County, there are still times that a child needs a home and the closest availability is outside of the county. Unfortunately, the child is sent to a larger city.

“That’s not great practice, and we hate doing that. That’s why having our own stable of foster parents is so important, that we desperately want to keep children as close to everything that they love and that’s near and dear to them.”

Children Service’s works diligently to keep children’s lives as normal as possible when they are taken from their parents, Boyer said. Whether normalcy can be preserved by placing a child in a kinship or with a foster family near their school, friends and sports teams, the child’s best interest is always first priority.

With many children in the foster care system, custody is temporarily suspended from their biological parent or parents while a case plan is worked through, and some issues are addressed. Once that case plan is finalized, children return to their parents.

For families that foster those children, the placement is during the temporary period when custody is suspended. While that foster parent may provide a stable and nurturing household for the child, the goal of Children Service’s is to return that child to their biological parent.

“That’s our goal in 100 percent of the cases. We don’t want to take children permanently, even temporarily,” Boyer said. “We want, they’re your children, we want you to safely and effectively parent your children.”

With the thought of children returning to their original homes, foster parents go through extensive training in order to adequately prepare for foster children. While sending them back to their families may be difficult, Boyer said good foster parents have an understanding of the system’s purpose.

Children Service’s is designed to empower parents to regain control of their lives and their children’s lives.

“It is still their children, and it is their life, and it’s their family and it’s their future,” Boyer said. “And if we don’t want them to have a say in that, then let’s go in and be a bully, let’s be very intrusive. But if we want them to be a partner in their family dynamics turning around and getting better, that’s about empowerment and working together.”

Over the past six years, the foster care system in Muskingum County has catapulted from 22 children in custody to 169 children. In July 2013, just over $239,000 annually was spent on foster care placement. Today, with many more children being placed in foster homes, $2.8 million is spent annually on placement.

“Much of it is because of this opioid crisis, this heroin and fentanyl epidemic that we’re being just bludgeon with,” Boyer said. “I call it a tsunami of children. We are just seeing a tsunami of children coming into care because of drug and alcohol issues.”

During the times that families are struggling with addiction issues, Boyer said the base of foster homes in Muskingum County is strong and fundamental to the operations of Child Protective Services.

One foster mother has fostered nearly 200 children in the 25 years she’s been fostering. Specializing in younger children, Boyer said she never backs down from a challenge.

“It’s almost like she’s Lady Liberty standing out there, give me your tired, your poor, yearning to be free. She takes the tough ones, and she is a miracle worker,” Boyer said.

Another foster family has taken in over 80 children in the nearly 20 years they have been fostering. That family specializes in older children — teenagers.

Two additional families specialize in caring for children with extensive medical issues — holes in hearts, incomplete colons, scoliosis and more. Both of those families have a nurse as one of the foster parents which can assist in providing more specialized care to each child.

While some foster parents are the “archangels” of the “angels on earth,” Boyer said all of the foster families in Muskingum County offer safe, loving and committed environments to any child that enters their home.

“Honest to goodness the truth, we have got the best foster families. We’ve got 76 foster homes within our network right now, and I’m telling you what, they’re good people,” Boyer said. “They are the best of the best. Our agency could not function without them. They are angels on earth.”