Hundreds of thousands of kids rely on America’s foster care system. West Virginia has the highest rate of foster care placements of any state - four times the national average. Foster care is most often needed because of parental substance use, mental health challenges, poverty and neglect. Six-thousand Mountain State kids are in foster care, but there’s a shortage of licensed foster homes and residential facilities and that’s why nearly 400 kids live in out-of-state institutions. On this Us & Them, an encore episode finds more than half of all states have seen their number of licensed foster homes drop, some by as much as 60 percent because many new foster parents don’t stay in the system for long. 

While official foster care cases are tracked and overseen by state agencies, many types of so-called kinship care are not official or included in state data.