About this series: For months I’ve been reading South Carolina’s own public records on its Department of Social Services: twelve years of state spending files, the procurement office’s reports on emergency and no-bid purchases, and the contract pages agencies post online. This four-part series walks through what I found, one thread at a time. Each part stands on its own. Together, they show how money moves through a system that makes life-changing decisions about families.
2 a.m. in a county office
Picture a DSS county office after midnight.
The lights are on. A child, maybe eight, maybe fifteen, is trying to sleep on a couch or a cot. Down the hall, someone is being paid to stay awake and watch. The caseworker on call is making phone calls, looking for a foster home that will say yes.
That scene isn’t a hypothetical drawn from another state or another decade. It’s what a federal court settlement was supposed to end in South Carolina ten years ago.
The promise
In January 2015, a lawsuit called Michelle H. was filed on behalf of children in South Carolina’s foster care system. The federal court approved the final settlement on October 4, 2016.
One requirement was explicit. By November 28, 2015, DSS was to “cease using DSS offices as an overnight placement” and stop housing children in hotels, motels and other commercial settings that aren’t foster care.
That wasn’t a goal to make offices more comfortable. It was a commitment to stop using them as a substitute for a home.
The scorecard
Court-appointed monitors track whether the state is meeting its promises. Their reports are public.
For October 2024 through March 2025, the monitors found the overnight-stay requirement “Not Met.” In those six months, 216 children spent a combined 1,064 nights in DSS offices, hotels, motels or similar settings. That was worse than the period before, when 188 children had 844 nights. Separately, 515 children spent 6,802 nights in emergency placements.
The bill for waiting
When a child has nowhere to go, the system still has to keep that child safe. Someone has to be paid to do it.
The state procurement reports show 49 purchases tied to placement-crisis responses: security, sitters, short-term beds, transportation and one-on-one supervision. Their reported value rose from about $880,000 in 2021 to $1.83 million in 2025.
Many of these were bought as emergencies.
Under South Carolina rules, an emergency purchase lets an agency move fast when a serious, immediate need can’t wait for the normal process. The agency still has to justify it in writing and get as much competition as it reasonably can. That makes sense for a true emergency.
But the procurement reports list 399 emergency entries for DSS. Sixty vendors received emergency awards in more than one year. Some examples:
· SC Youth Advocate Program received about $12.3 million in reported emergency awards across five years.
· Divine Healing Home Health Care received about $1.4 million for emergency sitter services over three consecutive years.
· Chief Services and Security Solutions received about $1.8 million in emergency awards for security across five years.
One emergency purchase describes a crisis. The same emergency, bought from the same vendors, year after year, describes something else: a shortage that’s become permanent, with a budget built around managing it.
The security contract that kept growing
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Chief Services and Security Solutions is worth a closer look, because its records show how many layers one relationship can have.
In 2021, Chief won a competitively bid DSS security contract (number 4400026480), awarded at about $1.76 million over five years. It has since grown to about $3.22 million and been extended through January 2027.
That contract already allows extra officers “for coverage at other DSS locations,” at set hourly rates.
Even so, the same vendor appears:
· in emergency purchases for Upstate security from 2023 through 2026, and
· in three consecutive one-year noncompetitive contracts totaling $700,500.
The state spending files show DSS paid Chief about $2.25 million from FY2019 through FY2025, including about $796,000 in FY2025 alone.
There may be good reasons for separate agreements. They could cover different locations, duties or periods. But when a standing contract already allows extra coverage, years of emergency and no-bid purchases for similar coverage need a public explanation.
I’m not claiming every security dollar was spent because children slept in offices. I don’t know that, and the records don’t show it. What the records do show is a spending structure built around crisis, running alongside a monitoring record that says children kept sleeping where the settlement said they shouldn’t.
What “no-bid” really means
Readers may often lump everything together as “no-bid.” The terms aren’t the same:
· An emergency purchase is for an urgent need that can’t wait.
· A sole-source purchase rests on a finding that only one supplier can do the job.
· A procurement exemption lets certain purchases follow a different approved process.
In March 2023, the state granted DSS an exemption for certain client-services purchases, with conditions and quarterly reporting. Some contracts may have gone through that route. So noncompetitive doesn’t necessarily mean unlawful.
Still, the state procurement reports list 729 DSS entries in the sole-source, emergency and unauthorized categories, worth about $179.2 million. Repeatedly relying on exceptions for needs that last for years tells us something about how an agency operates.
Why this is where the series starts
I started here because this is where money and children meet most directly. Every guard’s shift and every sitter’s hour is attached to a real child spending a real night somewhere that isn’t home.
But the overnight stays are only the most visible part of the story. Behind them is a much larger flow of money, much of it recorded in ways an ordinary person can’t trace.
Next time (Thursday, October 29)
In Part 2, I’ll follow a different kind of evidence: the drug test. South Carolina has a mandatory statewide testing contract. Yet DSS’s own records show about $17.7 million in lab charges under a label that names no laboratory, and a report in which DSS itself recorded a failure to use that contract.
Editor’s note: The South Carolina Department of Social Services was asked for comment on October 27,2026. Any response will be added to this article and to later installments.
Sources
- S.C. Procurement Services, Legal Exemption Table (Other)
- S.C. Procurement Services, audit and procurement rules (Other)
- Michelle H. v. McMaster, Progress Report, Apr. 1–Sept. 30, 2025 (Other)
- SCEIS Contract Search (including contract 4400026480) (Other)
- S.C. Comptroller General, Monthly State Spending Transparency Files, FY2014–FY2025 (Other)
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