The trash bags keep turning up.
When kids and families talk about Virginia’s efforts to protect children from abuse and neglect, many of the stories involve trash bags.
They were there on the front porch when Patrick Antkowiak came home from work, a few days after a little boy and girl — brother and sister — arrived from a temporary foster home.
“I didn’t know what they were, but we opened them and saw a bunch of broken toys,” he said. "The kids came out to see: ‘That’s our stuff,’ they said."
Garbage bags, as the 5- and 7-year-old brother and sister would have learned already from their time in foster care, aren’t the only ad-hoc things in Virginia's child welfare system.
The children had been in the foster care system for two years at that point.
They’d been in seven different placements, most of them temporary. The Antkowiaks’ home was their third in the space of just 40 days.
Their social worker did not come with them when they arrived at the Antkowiaks’ home, leaving it to the children’s temporary foster parents — friends of the Antkowiaks — to bring the children over.
Hopes and needs: Meet some foster care kids
Virginia lags by most measures of how well the child protective services and foster care system deal with issues nobody likes to think about.
Unlike most states, the system is run by local social services departments, rather than by the state. Unlike the handful of states that take this approach, state oversight has been very limited.
Social workers have huge caseloads. Their pay is low, and many quit after a year or less on the job.
All that means that responses to reports of suspected abuse or neglect vary widely depending on what side of a county or city line a child lives on.
And it can take years before a child finds a safe haven.
No school, no dentist
Social workers in Roanoke first stepped in with the little boy who court records call L.D. when, in 2015, doctors at his birth reported he had been exposed to cocaine, benzodiazepines, oxycodone and marijuana.
They had what court records described as “numerous” interactions with the little boy before they finally initiated a formal safety plan seven years later, in 2022, detailing conditions the father had to meet to keep the 7-year-old.
It didn’t work.
When social workers removed the boy from the father's home a year later, they discovered that in the course of the years they’d had their numerous interactions with the child and his father, the little boy had had no dental care for four years and had not been enrolled in school since kindergarten in 2019.
'How's David doing?'
"Sometimes our social workers are the ones doing all the talking … they'll go to the foster parents: ‘So, how's David doing today? Oh, he's aggressive. Let's do this,'” said David Billhimer, a Reynolds Community College student who’s recently aged out of foster care.
"But they never come and ask the foster youth, like ... 'How are you feeling? What's wrong? Is there anything we can do?'” he said.
Now an advocate for young people in foster care, he said, “The biggest thing I've noticed is foster kids don't know what benefits are available to them.
“There's benefits that are available on our foster care plan, and everyone's like, 'I don't know, that's available, this is available,'” he said.
“I'm like, 'Well, yeah, you can get a free suitcase' … a foster kid, you get a trash bag, and that means: 'Move out of your place now.’ But a suitcase creates dignity,” he said.
12 reports
Over the two years after one Hampton mother’s two children came back to her from foster care, social workers received at least 12 child protective services' reports of neglect, excessive physical punishment, exposure to domestic violence by the mother’s boyfriend and poor housing, court records show.
Hampton police repeatedly came to the house in response to domestic violence calls.
But the children stayed with her.
They stayed until police responded to a July 2023 call that the mother was intoxicated and acting erratically around the children while leaving them outside during a heat advisory.
It was the police, after arresting the mother for public intoxication, who told social workers that the children, then 13 and 10, needed a new place.
The department placed the children with a family friend.
But when the mother was released from jail, the children went back to her.
It was only three months later, after still more reports that the mother was drinking heavily and hanging around with what the reports described as dangerous people, that social workers finally removed the children.
Social workers tried getting the father to step in, but he completely lost touch after 12 months.
It would take another seven months, until the spring of last year, before the children finally started on the path to be adopted by the family that took them in.
Waiting for word
After the Antkowiaks sent in all the paperwork required to adopt, “We didn’t hear anything, so I called," Becky Antkowiak recalled. "They said they still needed fingerprints. I said I sent them; she said 'Yeah, but I don’t have them.’”
The Antkowiaks went for prints a second time and dropped them off at the social services department.
The lost prints delayed the move-in date by a month.
“We asked for an exception to allow the children to move in before school started, but the social worker refused. We asked for an exception to allow the children to attend the school they'd attend when they lived with us and even offered to provide transportation, but that was also declined,” Becky Antkowiak said.
Through all this, social workers insisted the Antkowiaks could not tell the little children that the couple wanted to adopt them.
They couldn’t even say anything when, at one point, a power outage led the temporary foster parents to bring the children over so everyone could shower; the little boy saw the bedroom the Antkowiaks planned would be his.
“He flopped onto the bed, folded his arms behind his head, and said, 'I wish this could be my room,'" Becky Antkowiak said.
When it finally came time to move in, however, the children were more subdued.
“They didn’t know what to expect. They were frightened. It was another new place,” Patrick Antkowiak said.
From Day 1, Patrick and Becky reassured the children that they were loved members of the family.
But at one point, the social worker told the children “in front of us” not to count on staying, Becky Antkowiak said.
“I think she’d worked so hard to try to reunite the biological family and was disappointed that it didn’t work,” she said.
The four of them kept on building their family, finding support from Shineforth, a nonprofit that offers a range of help for children and families. When their son wanted to be a Boy Scout, Patrick became a Scout leader. His deep dedication to being a real father has made him a rock their daughter relies upon.
“We just saw it as a mission,” he said.
Two sisters
After the two sisters, 17 and 15, told Nelson County sheriff’s deputies their mother had chased them with an axe, and after the deputies found abuse and strangulation marks on the girls, they called the county social services department, expecting social workers to step in.
Instead, a Nelson County social worker told the deputies to call the state hotline and said the local department would not act until it could verify the validity of the girls’ report. The county's acting commonwealth's attorney would write in a letter to county officials detailing concerns about the department's lack of response in recent cases.
The deputies decided matters could not wait.
They took the girls to the University of Virginia Medical Center. There, hospital staff said they made several attempts to tell the Nelson County department that the two had been abused, until the department finally declared that it would not be involved, according to the prosecutor's letter.
The next day, the doctor who had confirmed the 15-year-old had been strangled called the prosecutor to say the girls' mother had called to say she was picking up the girls. The doctor worried the teens would again be abused.
It was only after the prosecutor called the social services department’s attorney that county social workers went to see the girls, but they then told hospital staff that they were not involved and left without any further action or explanation.
Worried that there was nothing to stop the mother from taking the girls, the prosecutor and a sheriff’s office captain went to the county’s circuit court judge to get an emergency protective order.
It was the prosecutor, not the social services department, who then tried to find a relative to take the children, but their older sister, who lived out of state, was unable to do so. She did say she, too, had been abused.
Later that same day, the second day that the girls were at the hospital, a county social worker picked up the girls even as the department told the hospital that it "would not be responsible for anything that happens to the girls" after they left.
The 17-year-old later said the social worker refused to tell the girls where he was taking them before he tried to leave them at their home. When the visibly upset 15-year-old told the social worker she would not go back, he shouted that she had no choice.
But the mother’s boyfriend, who was at the home at that time, refused to allow the girls to stay.
The social worker then took the girls to a family friend, who sheriff’s deputies knew was a drug user.
It was not until the next day, after a confrontation with an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, that the social worker agreed to move the girls to a group home in Lynchburg. The judge who then formally ordered the move said the county department should have done it three days earlier, after the deputies’ first report on their welfare check.
This was one of several stories that finally convinced the county administrator to take charge of the department last year. A state Department of Social Services corrective action plan found gaps in the county department's understanding of safety assessments, the risk factors to be considered in removing children from a home and procedures for foster care and adoption. The plan also addressed failures to have face-to-face contact often enough in following up on an abuse or neglect finding.
'Everything smelled of smoke'
When Norfolk’s social services department dropped off the 2-year-old girl whom Melani Ferrer is adopting, she came with all her belongings in a garbage bag.
“She was malnourished, everything smelled of smoke, her hair was falling out,” Ferrer remembers.
She and her husband had adopted two foster care children before, working through United Methodist Family Services (now Shineforth), so she knew a child’s transition from neglect and abuse to a new home meant dealing with lots of the aftermath of trauma, sometimes for years.
Her son, who came to her at age 9, after five years in the system and seven placements, acted out in ways that the social services department and other homes (and facilities) couldn’t manage.
Ferrer nearly couldn’t herself. Her son acted up in playgrounds with other children and would say weird things in outbursts at school.
But while UMFS and a family support specialist who stuck with Ferrer and her son for years were there with programs and referrals for help, that wasn’t coming from the Norfolk social services department.
“They just weren’t there,” Ferrer said.
“They have these huge case loads, I guess I understand,” she said.
There’s also the challenge of the two-pronged mission of child welfare agencies — keeping kids safe and helping troubled families so children and parents can stay together.
The goal of reuniting children and birth parents doesn't always work. Social workers returned Ferrer's daughter to her birth parents' home after her first foster care placement.
That didn't work.
For the little girl's safety, they had to remove her a second time. It was only after that that Ferrer was able to adopt her.
In her son’s case, his birth mother fought for two years to get him back, challenging social workers' findings and court rulings that it wouldn’t be safe for the child and that her parental rights should be ended.
“At every court hearing, I knew it could end with him going away,” Ferrer said.
“He knew we wanted him … he knew our home was a safe place for him,” she said.
Three years
The Harrisonburg-Rockingham Social Services District stepped in with one mother of three in 2015 because of her substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence and after a short time away, returned the children to her in 2016, court records show.
By that September, social workers received reports that the child was filthy, that police had gone twice to her home in response to complaints about loud verbal disputes.
In October, the department heard that the mother had posted a photo on social media showing her oldest child’s wrists and forehead duct-taped to a chair.
In two separate rulings three years later, in 2019, a juvenile court judge found the children had been neglected and abused because of their mother's continued drug use, poor supervision and the domestic abuse the mother herself suffered. In 2020, a judge entered a protective order for the children against the mother. But they stayed.
In 2022, the school system started an interdisciplinary team to focus on the children’s chronic, unexcused absences. The team told the mother to enroll the children in summer school. She did not.
That summer, the social services district received a report that the mother was using methamphetamine in the children’s presence. The mother said meth was not the drug she preferred but eventually admitted to using, and tested positive for methamphetamines, amphetamines and buprenorphine, the active ingredient in Suboxone.
A few days later, the social worker visited again and asked the mother to take another drug test, and asked that the children also be tested. The mother refused.
The social services district finally removed the children from the mother's care on Aug. 5, 2022 — three years after a judge ruled the children had been abused or neglected, two years after a judge issued a protective order for the children and the summer after their chronic absence from school prompted the school to try to step in.
The tornado
“These kids have been through a tornado,” said Debra Hearington, a pediatric nurse practitioner at Children’s Hospital of Richmond’s neurology department, where she specializes in the effects of early deprivation on growth and development and post-adoption adjustment.
Her five sons and daughters came to her through foster care and international adoptions — and even the kids who came straight from the hospital, there’s trauma to deal with.
“They’d been with their birth mother for nine months; they know her heartbeat, they know her warmth,” and they know, even if they’re never able to say it, when that heartbeat isn’t there, she said.
One daughter came after a month in intensive care. “When she came home, she was looking all around, her eyes were wide, and she knew this was a new place,” Hearington said.
As her daughter grew to be a teen, she started wondering about who she was, and about her birth family,” Hearington said. That kind of wondering can often turn into questions like “What’s wrong with me?” or “Am I bad?”
“There was a counselor at school; she had been adopted, too, … My daughter told her she didn’t want to ask me because she was afraid to hurt my feelings,” Hearington said.
“I told her that wouldn’t happen, that I loved her.”
Hearington still remembers taking her daughter to a dance class, where another mother brought her birth daughter and a girl she was fostering.
“I heard the social worker tell her, ‘You can’t be giving her all these middle-class notions; she’ll be going back'” to the child’s birth mother, Hearington said.
“What was she supposed to do, treat one child differently just because she was in foster care?”
'She didn't make any sound'
At first, when the 3-year-old came to the foster family that would eventually adopt her, “We could see she’d mouth words, but she didn’t make any sound,” Amanda Idleman recalled.
“She’d overeat a lot … I think she hadn’t been getting enough before,” even though the local social services department was supposed to be monitoring her in her previous foster care placement.
Idleman thinks the department’s workers weren't really watching the little girl closely enough in that first placement.
“She’s definitely very smart,” and was aware of all the changes. During her first year, she’d ask about her foster parents; she’d especially ask about her foster father.”
The little girl went into foster care when she was 2 years old and stayed there for a year as those parents pushed to place her with relatives in New York.
But social workers assigned to the case weren’t comfortable with that.
That’s when she came to the Idlemans, who said they wanted to adopt her and add her to their family of three kids.
Adoption comes after a legal process, the termination of parental rights of a child’s birth parents.
It’s a process that’s tough for everyone: birth parents, adoptive parents and, especially, the child.
Although the Idlemans were committed to the idea that the little girl was a member of the family, “There was this uncertainty … she was going to school, and she’d ask how come her last name was different, wasn’t Idleman.”
The social worker, meanwhile, kept stalling on the paperwork needed to clear the way for adoption — and at the same time was a looming presence in the lives of the little girl and the Idleman's other children.
“She would make appointments, cancel and make new ones,” and it was a continuing reminder that things weren’t settled, Idleman said.
“Then she’d show up at the door, peeking in … it scared the kids.”
You can't do that
David Billhimer’s first stop in foster care was with his grandparents, but then to a group home.
“I was only institutionalized for maybe like two years, and I was like, I didn't know how I was going to react, because all the friends I had, I had to lose,” he said.
“I was like, I didn't know how to adjust myself to make new friends. ... I didn't want to be alone, so I'd do stuff that was like attention seeking to make new friends, and it wasn't that I was misbehaving. It was like I wanted attention. I wanted to be noticed,” he said.
“It’s like I've only been seen by my therapist, my whoever it is, my caseworker, social worker, and I don't know how to go make these new friends, because these people that work with me, they're paid to deal with me,” he said.
From there, a brief stay with one foster family and, finally, with the family that took him in for the final few years until he turned 18.
“It was just something that happened. Yeah, what did you know, right? Yeah, it was like there wasn't much I could do about it,” he said.
“I know, like growing up, the term that was mostly used was high-risk …. once you heard high-risk, you knew something was going to go down, whether it was going to, like, a facility or being institutionalized again. You knew, like, once you heard those words, high-risk, it was never a good thing,” he said.
“I know when it came to therapy, they're like, ‘Oh, you're at high-risk for this’. I'm like, ‘What if I'm not? … People are like, ‘You can't do this.’ I'm like, ‘Let me show you what I can do ... they're like, you can't go to college, foster kids never graduate,’” he said.
But he’s going to.
Some ways forward for abused and neglected kids
