Behind Every Line Item Is a Family
The law says keeping a child safely at home comes first. When that step is rushed or skipped, a family’s worst day becomes a case number, a placement code and a bill.
The phone call usually comes before the paperwork does.
A parent hears that their children have been taken into care. From that moment, their life is measured in things they don’t control: the date of the next hearing, the hours of a supervised visit, the result of a drug test, the name of a caseworker who may change before they learn it. I work with families going through this. Over and over, I’ve watched a family’s most personal crisis turn into administrative language and a line on a budget report. A child becomes a placement. A parent becomes a case plan. A visit becomes a billable hour. And again and again, I’ve asked the same question: was there a way to keep this child safely at home? Some children do need to be removed. When a child is being abused or is in real danger, protecting that child comes first, and I’ll never argue otherwise. But removal is supposed to be the last step, not the first. The law says so, and South Carolina’s own budget documents show why it matters to every taxpayer. I spent months reading the state’s own public records: twelve years of spending files for the Department of Social Services, the state’s procurement reports, and the contract pages agencies post online. What I found is a system that spends heavily on what happens after a child is taken, and still treats keeping families safely together as the harder thing to fund.
Home is supposed to come first
Federal law requires every state that takes federal foster care money to make “reasonable efforts” to “prevent or eliminate the need for removing the child from the child’s home.” The child’s health and safety must be “the paramount concern.” That isn’t a suggestion. A judge has to find, within 60 days of a removal, that those efforts were made. If that finding isn’t made, the state can’t claim federal foster care funds for that child for the entire time the child is in care.
In plain language: before the government separates a family, it’s supposed to try to make the home safe. That can mean a safety plan, services, help from relatives, or support with the problems that brought the family to the agency’s attention. The law doesn’t require those efforts in the worst cases, such as when a court finds aggravated circumstances like severe abuse.
But most cases aren’t like that. Nationally, neglect was listed as a reason in 55% of the children who entered foster care in 2024. In 2023, inadequate housing was a listed reason for about 9% of children entering care, and homelessness for 4%. Those categories overlap, and neglect isn’t the same thing as being poor. But many of these families are dealing with problems that help, not separation, could address.
The cheapest placement is the one that never happens
Here’s what surprised me most. DSS has already made the case for prevention, in its own words. In its budget request for the 2026–27 fiscal year, DSS asked for staff to expand what it calls pre-removal Child and Family Team Meetings. These are meetings held before a child is removed, bringing together the family, relatives and other supports to build a plan to keep the child safe. DSS wrote that “8 out of 10 kids that have had a CFTM pre-removal have been maintained with family or kin without the need for foster care, whereas placement costs for a child who enters foster care costs an average of $28,000 and can cost up to $115,000 per year.” Read that again. By the agency’s own account, eight out of ten children who got that meeting before removal stayed with family. Every child who enters foster care costs an average of $115,000 a year. DSS asked for about $1.37 million for 14 staff to expand those meetings. In the same request, it asked for $100,000 for its highest-need counties “to prevent unnecessary foster care entry and improve placement stability.” Along with counseling and tutoring, that money would cover basics: “beds, bedding, housing assistance such as security deposit, utility bills, transportation assistance.” For comparison, DSS’s car wash account recorded $963,444 from FY2022 through FY2025, about a quarter of a million dollars a year since FY2022. It tells you something when a program to help families with beds and utility bills is measured in fractions of the same dollars as washing state cars.
DSS’s own website admits the old way of funding child welfare “incentivized foster care placement and did not provide funding for noncustodial and prevention services.” A 2018 federal law, the Family First Prevention Services Act, was meant to fix that. South Carolina now has a Title IV-E prevention plan, and in 2025 it opened a way for families to get parenting support through community referrals, without a DSS case. But across the country, prevention is still a sliver of the money. In 2023, federal claims for Title IV-E prevention services made up less than 2% of all Title IV-E claims. The tools exist. The question is whether they’re used in every case, before a child is taken.
When the first step gets skipped
When reasonable efforts aren’t made, the family pays first, and taxpayers pay next. I know caseworkers carry heavy caseloads, and many chose this job because they care about children. But the law doesn’t make reasonable efforts optional when the office is busy. A rushed removal of a child from a home that could have been made safe isn’t cost saving. It’s the most expensive choice the system can make, in dollars and in harm.
Once a child is removed, the bills begin. And in South Carolina, many of those bills come with big price tags and little accountability.
When children enter care, they need somewhere safe to sleep that night. In 2015, a lawsuit called Michelle H. was filed on behalf of children in South Carolina’s foster care system. The 2016 settlement promised DSS would stop using its offices as overnight placements and stop housing children in hotels and motels. Between October 2024 and March 2025, 216 children still spent a combined 1,064 nights in DSS offices, hotels, motels or similar settings. A night in an office is a child who doesn’t know where they’ll wake up. A placement move is a new house, new rules, sometimes a new school. The spending records show the other side of that night. DSS has paid for security guards, sitters, short-term beds and one-on-one supervision, much of it through emergency purchases. Those placement-crisis purchases rose from about $880,000 in 2021 to $1.83 million in 2025. Sixty vendors received emergency awards in more than one year. Someone has to watch a child at 2 a.m. But a guard isn’t a home. And every child who never had to leave a safe home is a child who never needs a guard.
Drug Testing and the Courts
In many cases, a drug test can decide whether a parent sees their child this month. South Carolina has a mandatory statewide contract for drug and alcohol testing. Yet DSS’s internal accounts record about $17.7 million in laboratory charges from FY2018 through FY2025 under a broad label that doesn’t name the labs. DSS also reported, in the state’s own list of unauthorized purchases, a 2017 failure to use the mandatory testing contract.
In one family I’ve worked with, whom I’ll call A., the drug-test results came on the state’s contracted company’s letterhead, signed by a medical review officer and marked “verified positive.” That signature is supposed to mean something specific. A medical review officer is a doctor whose job is to contact the person tested about a positive result and ask about prescriptions before the result is treated as final. The doctor in A.’s case explained it in court: if someone has a prescription, “we need their pharmacy name and phone number so we can call and confirm.” That call is the only place a prescription can come up. Standard drug-testing paperwork has no space for a parent to list medications, and the federal form specifically tells people not to write them on the copies sent to the lab or the doctor. Instead, the form says the doctor “may contact you to ask about prescriptions.” In A.’s case, that call was never going to happen. The doctor testified that the account used for these tests was set up with “no donor calls,” and that results closed as “non-contact positive” at “zero hours,” with the determination made “with help a the computer system.”
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A. had prescriptions at the time of her test, as she later told the court. No one knew, because the only step designed to ask had been switched off. The pre-printed signature told the court a doctor had reviewed the result. The doctor’s own testimony shows the review was never happened. The state’s contract terms promise certified labs, a full documentation package on request, and lab staff and medical review officers able to testify about how a sample was handled. A signature on a test result should mean someone actually did the work it vouches for. Instead families in South Carolina get a computer generated signature and little else from the MRO.
The child support money families never see
DSS is also South Carolina’s child support agency. From FY2014 through FY2025, it paid the 46 county treasurers about $292.7 million for child support work. Some officials trusted with that system misused it. A former Colleton County clerk of court pleaded guilty in December 2025 to misconduct in office and other charges after investigators said she took child support incentive bonuses. A former Williamsburg County clerk was indicted in 2025 on charges of embezzling about $119,000. Reporters found at least six clerks who paid themselves bonuses from these funds, and reported that the state wasn’t checking.
Those cases involve individual officials, not DSS. But they matter to every parent in family court, not only parents waiting on a support check. By law, the clerk of court is also the clerk of the family court. The clerk’s office files and keeps the papers in every case and signs judgments. When a parent files a motion, it goes to the clerk. When a judge’s order is entered, court rules say the clerk must send notice of it to every party. In abuse and neglect cases, the party on the other side is DSS. So the office that accepts a parent’s motion, and is responsible for making sure that parent learns what the judge ordered, is also an office DSS pays millions to for child support work. A parent fighting DSS for their children shouldn’t have to wonder whether the office handling the paperwork has a financial relationship with the agency they’re up against.
When the money can’t be followed
About $3.9 billion, roughly 57% of DSS’s spending in these files, sits under one broad label: “DSS Case Services.” It covers many programs, not just foster care, but it’s so broad that an ordinary person can’t tell what was bought or from whom.
Some records raise questions no one has answered yet.
One contract from the Department of Mental Health, now part of the state’s Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, lists its $450,000 vendor as a “Department of Social Services” at an address in Waterbury, Connecticut. That address belongs to a private firm that runs Connecticut’s housing voucher programs.
What I’m asking for
I’m not asking anyone to assume the worst. I’m asking the state to put its money where its own numbers point:
-Prevention first. Fully fund and staff pre-removal family meetings, and use them in every case where a child can be kept safely at home. Count it. Publish how many children are removed each year, how many had a pre-removal meeting, and how many stayed with family.
-Help with the basics. Expand help with housing, utilities and beds, the things DSS itself says prevent unnecessary foster care.
-Tell parents their rights. Tell families which lab ran their test and how to get chain-of-custody records.
-Show the agreements. Publish the agreements that send federal money through DSS to guardian ad litem programs, and how counties spend child support money.
The spending records count dollars. Families count days apart. A paid invoice is not proof of a protected child. The best outcome for most children isn’t a well-run placement. It’s a safe home they never had to leave. By DSS’s own numbers, that’s also the outcome that costs the public the least.
The numbers aren’t the whole story. The families are.
Editor’s note: The South Carolina Department of Social Services and the Office of Mental Health were asked for comment on Oct 27, 2026. Any response will be added to this article and to later installments.
Sources
- S.C. Comptroller General, Monthly State Spending Transparency Files, FY2014–FY2025 (Other)
- S.C. Procurement Services, sole-source, emergency and unauthorized procurement reports (Other)
- SCEIS Contract Search (contract detail pages) (Other)
- .42 U.S.C. § 671(a)(15), reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families
- U.S. Children’s Bureau, AFCARS Dashboard, FFY 2024
- .U.S. Children’s Bureau, AFCARS Dashboard, FFY 2023
- S.C. DSS, FY2026–27 budget request (Child and Family Teaming staffing, placement stabilization)
- HHS ASPE, “Title IV-E Prevention Services Make Up Less Than Two Percent of Overall Program Expenditure Reimbursement Claims” (Feb. 2026)
- Michelle H. v. McMaster, Progress Report
- S.C. Procurement Services, statewide contracts (Drug & Alcohol Testing)
- Premier Biotech South Carolina contract terms
- S.C. Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 77(d), notice of orders or judgments:
- SAMHSA, Medical Review Officer Guidance Manual
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