Five new positions in Lynchburg’s human services department aim to keep children out of the foster care system and provide more support to families already in it.
Four of the new roles create a task force in the city’s Child Protective Services unit designed specifically to help families affected by substance abuse. The fifth role focuses on supporting community members involved in kinship care — when relatives, stepparents or close family friends step in to take care of children.
The positions are funded by the state Department of Social Services and a local match from the state’s opioid abatement fund, making them stably supported for the foreseeable future, department leaders said. The extra support comes at a time when the number of children in the foster care system is growing statewide, and experts point to parental drug abuse as a leading cause.
With new staff hired and program implementation underway, April Watson, the city’s deputy director of human services, said the department is busy planning how the new team members can intervene in the community before situations escalate to the foster care system.
“There are people out there that need help, but they are scared of the system, and we want to change that narrative. We want to change that conversation. We don’t want people to be scared to ask for help,” she said. “The sooner you ask for help, the sooner we can help you, and then hopefully either the problem goes away or it never grows to the point where we need to intervene [with foster care].”
CPS task force for substance abuse
Three family services specialists and one supervisor have been added to the city’s CPS team this year to form a task force to address substance use in Lynchburg’s families. They join an existing CPS team of 10.
After a statewide analysis of local human services caseloads, state officials decided Lynchburg needed those four additional positions to meet the city’s need and awarded the department about $375,000 to help fund them, said Preston Sellers, the department’s director. The funding will be around for the foreseeable future, Sellers said, because Lynchburg’s formula now includes the new positions. But, like all social work positions, the new roles need a local match, which normally averages around 15% or 20%, he said.
Sellers found that match, about $69,000, without dipping into the city’s general fund by turning to opioid abatement dollars.
The state’s Opioid Abatement Authority distributes funds — collected from settlements paid to Virginia by prescription opioid manufacturers and distributors — to localities to help remediate the opioid epidemic. The money can be funneled toward a variety of efforts that prevent, treat and support recovery from opioid use disorder and co-occurring addictions and mental illness.
The creation of the task force includes specialized training to ensure that social workers are up-to-date with best practices for working with families affected by substance use disorder, Watson said.
The expansion of the CPS team comes at a crucial time as caseloads are increasing, Watson said. Lynchburg human services reported 166 children in foster care in January 2021 and 226 in January 2026, according to data from the state Department of Social Services. Last year, the city averaged 88 valid complaints per month, Watson said — meaning reports that fall within the proper jurisdiction of CPS and meet the legal definition of abuse or neglect.
A majority of those cases involve substance use disorders in one way or another, Watson said. More specifically, Sellers said, Lynchburg has consistently been one of the Virginia localities with the highest numbers of infants born exposed to substances over the past five years. In 2022, Lynchburg reported the highest number of substance-exposed infants of any Virginia locality, according to the state Department of Social Services. Babies who are born affected by legal or illegal drug use in utero or show signs of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder can qualify as substance-exposed infants, according to the state’s CPS manual.
That means it’s time to get creative with care, Watson said. Her goal for the CPS task force is to focus on prevention initiatives to help parents get the resources they need before children have to be removed from a home. Support will take different forms depending on the family, she said, such as connecting a new mom with rehab after her baby shows opioid withdrawal symptoms from in-utero exposure, or educating parents on how children can be exposed to marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs second-hand when they are used at home.
Kinship navigator
Another strategy for keeping children out of the foster care system, Watson said, is to support family members to step up when biological parents can’t provide care.
“[Kinship care] is something we’ve prioritized over the years, because we know that kids do better when they’re with family, and those placements are more likely to last,” she said. “They’re more likely to keep siblings together. They’re more likely to have a cultural connection or religious connection, to stay in their community and their school of origin, and just to have that sense of identity.”
Kinship care is growing across the state, with 19% of children in the system living with a relative today, up from about 9% who did so in January 2021, according to state data.
Lynchburg received a $95,000 state grant to establish a Kinship Navigator Program, Watson said, to consolidate those efforts into one position. The program has been piloted in other Virginia localities, and the grant was extended to five locations, including Lynchburg, this year. The grant only lasts for one year, but Lynchburg can reapply year after year, Watson told the city’s finance committee when the grant was first awarded.
“It’s fairly stable funding, so the likelihood that it will continue is pretty great,” she said at the meeting.
The kinship navigator, who has already been hired, will take on three tiers of work, Watson said: quick, one-time acts of connecting family members with resources, repeated support for families with bigger challenges, and long-term case management if situations escalate to involving the child welfare system.
In some cases, that support may be financial, Watson said, because the kinship navigator can apply for grants on behalf of families.
“Let’s say there’s a grandparent who is caring for relative children and doesn’t have $600 to pay to get her car fixed, and that’s going to interfere with getting those kids to school and doctor’s appointments,” Watson said. “We would apply on her behalf to the state. So this program gives us additional tools like that to keep families outside of the system, to keep them intact, and to really support them.”
The kinship navigator will also help connect families to resources such as counseling services and peer support groups, Watson said.
“What I found in our work with relatives is that it’s different from your traditional foster care, where somebody comes in because they’ve really thought about it and want to help their community. Versus kinship care, where a person steps forward because their family’s in crisis. The mentality is, ‘If I don’t do something right now, we may lose this child,’” Watson said. “So sometimes they just need to vent. And we have a member of our team dedicated to that now.”