‘THIS IS MY HEART’
JEREMY WALTNER – PUBLISHER
Ever since her growing-up years as Leah Uecker, the Freeman native, now Leah Biorn, has adored children.
She babysat. She nannied. She dreamed of being a mother. She decided to become a nurse.
“Caring for children — and even taking care of other people’s kids — that was just me since I was a teenager,” says Leah, a 2010 graduate of Freeman High School who lives in Yankton with her husband, Daniel, and their two young daughters: Caraline, who will be 2 in February, and Charlotte, who was born on Oct. 21.
“This is my heart.”
Is it any wonder, then, that Leah is sharing that caring heart with the world of foster care? Not only have the Biorns been a foster family for the past 3½ years, taking in as many as 30 children of all ages in that time, Leah is a regional coordinator with WRAP Around, a new initiative that works in conjunction with South Dakota Kids Belong that aims to support foster families across the state.
While there’s certainly a need for more foster families in the state — as of October 31 of this year, there were 824 licensed foster homes caring for 1,529 children — “there’s also a large need for better support for the foster parents themselves,” said Leah. “I’m hopeful that down the road this will lead to more people becoming foster parents, just because the need is so high. But in the short term this is giving more people an opportunity to be a part of this need — the solution. That’s what I’m excited about.”
WRAP is an acronym that touches on four ways people can support foster parents like the Biorns and like the two other licensed foster homes in Freeman: Hannah Smith and Anna and Landon Miller:
Words of encouragement: A letter in the mail, says Leah, or a phone call, or a text. “Even if you don’t have a lot of money or extra time,” she says, “you can always send a note.”
Respite: That is, caring for the children. While foster families must be licensed by the state, anybody can provide childcare per a background check. “All parents love to have a break — a date or a weekend off,” Leah says. “Anybody can help for a few hours; give them a ride, pick them up after school …”
Acts of service: Leah says this can be anything from raking leaves to dropping off a meal to fixing something in the home.
Prayer: “We’ll always take that.”
Leah’s immediate goal is similar to how WRAP works in just two other geographic regions in South Dakota — in the Rapid City/Spearfish/Belle Fourche area and in Sioux Falls, where the initiative is led by Ransom Church. She hopes to find teams of four to five individuals, couples and/or families to work together in support of as many area foster parents possible, in the ways WRAP suggests; to serve that family at least once a month; and to commit to at least six months.
Leah will assemble the teams, put them in touch with the foster family through a meet-and-greet and then stay in touch with the foster family on a regular basis “so I know what their needs are — what’s going well, what’s not going well, or what could be helpful,” she says. “The dream is for people like Hannah (Smith) to know that we have their back. Of course, Hannah has her own family and her own closest friends, but it’s nice to have this team of people, as well.”
As foster parents themselves, Leah and Daniel certainly know from firsthand experience how important that support can be.
“Would we love it if you offered to take the kids off our hands for an afternoon? Yes,” she says. “Would we love coffee to show up on our door? Sure.”
But more important than that, she says, is getting more people involved in the foster care community.
“People are always saying to us how they wish they could be a foster parent and then have all these reasons for why they can’t,” Leah says. “For one, you can do it; let me talk to you sometime about becoming a foster parent. But in the meantime, why don’t you be part of WRAP to help care for these children and support these foster families; you can be part of the solution in this way.
“It’s this much of a commitment.”
The world of foster care
Leah’s own commitment to the world of foster care and affiliation with WRAP grew out of her love for children, of course, but also her life’s circumstances. After earning a nursing degree from South Dakota State in December of 2014, Leah moved to Rapid City where Daniel was finishing up his engineering degree from the School of Mines and Technology. The two were married in July of 2016 and moved to Yankton over the holidays in 2017, where he settled in as an engineer for Hydro and she as a registered nurse with Avera.
“As an adult, I realized that my heart for wanting to care for people and feeling comfortable caring for kids just kind of morphed into something else,” she said. “There’s a need to babysit and to care for your friends’ kids and to be helpful in that way, but there’s also this much bigger need to care for these kids who literally don’t have anyone taking care of them.”
“As a nurse, as an adult, and as your worldview expands, you recognize that need and realize that it is something that you can do something about.”
Leah and Daniel ultimately agreed that becoming a foster family was something worth pursuing. They had bought a home, both had good jobs and were, at the time, without kids of their own.
“Being a foster parent is something that I wanted to do, but he was supportive and came alongside me and was willing to do it with me,” Leah says. “There was a lot of asking questions and figuring some things out, but ultimately he was like, ‘OK, I’ll support you. This is a good thing.’”
Leah says she had realistic expectations going in.
“I knew that it would be really hard to see kids who have been neglected and abused or not taken care of for lots of different reasons,” she said. “I knew the types of kids we would care for and how they would have extra needs, and that it would be easy to love them and hard to let them go.
“I knew it would be hard,” Leah continued, “but it was harder knowing what was happening to these kids and that I wasn’t doing anything about it.”
In May of 2017 the Biorns completed the nine-month licensing process — a license that also doubles as an adoption license — and were approved by the state of South Dakota as a foster family.
“We’ve had lots of kids come and go,” Leah says. “We had a 2-day old that we took straight home from the hospital, we’ve had a couple teenagers, siblings groups, and everything in between.”
There have been stays as short as overnights and as long as seven months. All children who come to the Biorns have been taken out of unsafe situations in their own family structures and placed into state custody by the Department of Social Services Division of Child Protection.
Leah says many of the children who are placed with foster families haven’t necessarily been harmed, but simply have nowhere else to go, often because their caregivers have been arrested.
“That’s hard for me to even wrap my mind around,” she says. “If something happened to me and Daniel, there would be someone to take our kids, and it wouldn’t be Child Protective Services. There would be people lining up to take our kids, or your kids, or those who have normal support. These kids come from families that don’t have normal support. Their aunts and uncles and grandmas and neighbors are not a safe option. That’s what the state has decided.”
More often than not, children who are placed in foster care have come out of an unsafe situation that was being dealt with immediately. The Biorns are part of a statewide database that is used whenever a need arises, so they never know when another call will come. Sometimes, Leah says, it feels like a call comes every day, which goes to show how strong the need for foster families really is.
And with statewide data showing twice as many children in foster care as there are licensed homes, “if there’s (an average) of two kids in every home, that means every home is full. That means tonight when they call there’s nowhere for them to go.”
So what then?
“They beg a family to take more,” she says. “Or sit with them until somebody says yes. Or take them to a group home.”
Yet there is no shame in saying no.
“If it’s not good timing or too many kids or more than you can handle, you can always say no,” Leah says. “We’ve said no plenty of times.”
The fact is, being a foster family is disruptive. Most of the time a foster family who says yes has no idea what type of situation that child is coming out of, or even how long that child will be in their care.
“You kind of live from one date to the next,” she says. “A lot of times you know they’re going to be here until the next court date, and then we’ll see what happens and what the plan is, and then go from there.”
It’s that figuring things out on the go reality that is hardest for Leah.
“I didn’t realize how much extra work there would be figuring out doctor appointments and therapy and school and daycare,” she says. “This is just a lot of secretarial work that all parents do over the course of a while, but when the kids show up last night and today I’m figuring out who has to be where, that makes this different from regular parenting.”
“All while knowing they might leave tomorrow or in six months.”
For someone like Daniel, who is a planner, that’s hard.
“But it’s hard for me, too,” Leah says. “When you have a kid placed with you, you have to look at your calendar and sometimes reshuffle. You can’t plan too far ahead. Yes, we go about our life as normal, but also know that we could get a call at any time.”
She says the state likes to keep siblings together if possible, and the Biorns have taken in two or three at one time.
“You can imagine how traumatic it would be to be taken by a stranger from your own parents, even if they weren’t taking good care of you. They’re still your parents and that’s all you know,” says Leah. “Their siblings are really important, maybe even more so than siblings who are being cared for well, because often times their siblings are the ones taking care of them.”
All foster children in the system are on South Dakota Medicaid, those five and under qualify for WIC, childcare is covered by the state and all foster families receive a monthly stipend based on the number of children in their care each day.
And, at least in Yankton, foster families have the resources of after school programs like the Boys and Girls Club.
“That’s a really helpful thing.”
But the more resources the better, and that’s why Leah is so enthusiastic about WRAP.
More on WRAP
Leah learned about WRAP after attending a conference in Pierre hosted by Gov. Kristi Noem this past summer focusing on a nationwide effort called Strong Families Together to recruit 300 more foster families within the year. South Dakota Kids Belong and WRAP is part of that effort.
“Not all of us are compelled to foster or adopt, but we can all care for children in foster care,” says the home page of the state’s WRAP Action website. “If fostering or adopting is not the right fit for your family right now, you can still join the story and help ‘wrap around’ families in your community.”
Leah notes that 50% of people who get licensed to be foster families close their license after their first placement.
“That’s really high and we want to help that,” she says. “The problem isn’t that people decide they no longer care about foster kids; that’s never the reason. It’s because it’s more challenging than they expected, or they don’t have the support they need.”
And WRAP is proving to work.
“I’ve heard some really cool stories from out in the Belle Fourche area about how supported the foster familes are feeling, and after several months, some of the WRAP families have actually pursued getting their own license. They see the need, but also they get to know the kids and realize that these are just kids, and that they can do it. One WRAP family, she says, is actually pursuing adoption.
When it comes right down to it, Leah says, WRAP really is a simple concept and one she has been focusing on as the family takes a break from placement for a short time with the additon of a new baby.
Instead, the Biorns’ attention has been turned to reaching out to churches and communities within the regional territory that extends north from Yankton to Marion, west to Lake Andes, south to the Nebraska border and east to Vermillion.
“Now we’re focusing on getting support for foster parents,” Leah says.
But they have no plans to leave the foster care community and might even one day adopt.
“We have it in the back of our mind with every single kid that gets placed in our family,” she says. “The goal is always reunification into a good situation. Hopefully we can get the parents the help they need to get on their feet and be a stable home, because we want every family to be together. But our priority is the children’s safety.
“Our goal is to care for these kids in the thick of it, when they need it, for as long as they need it, and with the understanding that someday we might get asked to adopt.”
In the meantime, they’ll just keep giving care to those who don’t get it elsewhere.
As parents, she says, “we beat ourselves up if our child falls down and scrapes their knee. My baby’s got a diaper rash and I feel terrible about it.”
That that level of love doesn’t exist in every home will forever be hard for somebody who cares as deeply as the Biorns care.
“It breaks our heart,” she says. “That’s why we do what we do.”
To learn more about WRAP, email Leah directly at leah.biorn@gmail.com. You can also inquire through a form found at americaskidsbelong.org/sd-wrap-action.
