Delaware County DSS Is “In Dire Need” of Foster Parents. But Who Benefits When Foster Children Never Go Home?
The county complains of chronic financial shortages while recruiting foster families, advertising publicly funded payments, and operating a system in which temporary foster placements can become permanent adoptions. The conflicts of interest deserve scrutiny.
On October 13, 2026, Randy Shepard's The Reporter published an article about Delaware County Department of Social Services' efforts to recruit foster parents - that is, an advertisement for foster services of the County where Randy's brother Wayne Shepard toiled since 1991, and recently quickly retired in order to go right back into the County government, at a higher level than before, the Town of Hamden NY Supervisor - with election sought by underhanded help from another sibling, Hamden NY new town clerk Cathy Roloson.
Kay VanDusen, representing the DSS Foster Care Unit, had appeared before the Hamden Town Council on October 7, 2026, to explain the county's predicament.
“We are in dire need of foster parents,” VanDusen declared.
This announcement deserves examination in the context of Delaware County's perennial complaints about insufficient public funds, the financial incentives embedded in federal foster-care law, and the county's history of litigation involving the removal of children from their parents.
There is also a question the newspaper did not ask: What happens when the people entrusted with temporarily caring for children have a personal interest in ensuring those children never return to their parents?
And what happens when some of those people are politically connected public officials?
I. Delaware County Has Fewer Foster Children Than Before, but Wants More Foster Parents
According to VanDusen, Delaware County currently has 58 children in foster care, compared with more than 100 in previous years. Gee - is it that the population of the County is shrinking or that the County already satisfied all the scanty multi-hate government officials who wanted to adopt for free from foster care?
I have personal knowledge, as former defense counsel of many years for parents in DSS court proceedings against Delawrae County DSS that this is EXACTLY what Delaware County does with its foster care - while anything related to foster care is barred with a double wall of secrecy: Family Court DSS (Article 10 of Family Court Act) proceedings are barred from public attendance, and FOIL requests regarding foster care are also barred by privacy exemptions.
The county reports 23 traditional foster homes and 27 kinship foster homes. Twenty-five children are placed in traditional foster homes, while 33 are in kinship care.
Nine traditional foster homes, according to Brother Randy's report about Brother Wayne's County troubles, are full, three are on medical hold - an interesting enigmatic statement, and three provide only "respite care", I wonder what kind.
Eight kinship homes are reportedly closing because children are being adopted or returning home.
Notice how adoption and reunification are presented together, without a breakdown of how many children experienced each outcome.
These outcomes are fundamentally different.
Reunification restores a child to the family from which the government yanked that child. Adoption takes the child from their parents forever.
The distinction is particularly consequential when the biological parents have contested the removal in court and the foster parents have sought to adopt the child.
The screwy laws riddled with federal financial incentives provide that - while the burden of proof is ON THE COUNTY DSS - and while County DSS has proven zilch in court yet, County DSS may first steal the child into foster care, hold him/her there for 11 months and then apply for termination of parental rights based on sheer passage of time while, once again, having proven zilch in court against the parent. Happens all the time.
Yet the public is given a facially benign story and a single figure: eight homes closing because children are either being adopted or returning home.
How many children returned to their parents? How many were adopted by foster parents? How many adoptions followed contested Article 10 proceedings? Who WERE those foster parents? Were they the local public officials to whom Delaware County DSS conveniently chose pretty healthy young children, stole them from their parents under false pretenses and allowed their foster-to-adoption for free by those public officials?
Once again, personal knowledge from within such proceedings, happens all the time.
II. Delaware County Is Perpetually Short of Money—Except When It Comes to Financing Foster Care
Delaware County's recurring public complaints about budgetary constraints deserve to be considered alongside the financial structure of foster care.
VanDusen described foster-care payments ranging from about $39 to more than $114 per child per day, depending on the child's level of care.
At those rates, one foster placement maintained for 365 days represents:
| Daily payment | Annual payment |
|---|---|
| $39 | $14,235 |
| $75 | $27,375 |
| $100 | $36,500 |
| $114 | $41,610 |
The reported upper rate exceeds $114, so these calculations do not establish the maximum payment.
For the 25 children currently placed in traditional foster homes, a full year of payments at $39 per day would total $355,875. At $114 per day, the corresponding figure would be $1,040,250.
These are illustrative gross payments, not established expenditures for the current placements or the county's net financial burden.
The county also provides or arranges medical coverage, transportation, training, and other services.
Who pays?
That question leads directly to federal law.
III. Federal Law Creates Perverted Financial Incentives For Nonkinship Adoption Out Of Foster Care
Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, codified principally at 42 U.S.C. §§ 670–679c, establishes federal financial participation in foster care and adoption assistance.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 672, eligible foster-care maintenance payments receive federal reimbursement, subject to statutory conditions.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 674, federal funding also supports qualifying administrative and training expenditures.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 673, adoption-assistance payments may be available for eligible children with special needs.
Federal law also provides adoption and legal-guardianship incentive payments to states under 42 U.S.C. § 673b, based on specified performance measures.
The result is a federally subsidized system in which government agencies administer substantial expenditures associated with removing, placing, maintaining, and sometimes permanently transferring children into adoptive families.
These provisions do not establish that Delaware County makes a profit on any particular placement. Federal reimbursement is subject to eligibility requirements, state administration, and cost-sharing rules. The adoption incentives are paid to states, not automatically to individual counties.
But the existence of this financing structure is beyond dispute.
It raises an obvious fiscal question: How much federal and state money flows through Delaware County's foster-care operations, and how does that compare with expenditures on preventing removal and preserving families?
Also note that parents whom DSS targets with removal of children are predominantly poor, lack money for private legal representation in court, and those attorneys who are assigned depend on further assignments to the point of being "timid" on behalf of their clients.
One of them - the recently deceased Gregory Kottmeier - scared his assigned clients into running to hire my husband and myself by telling them, at their first meeting, pointing at the bunch of DSS workers crowded before the Family Court courtroom doors: see that? That is a Las Vegas vanishing act, now you see your child, now you don't.
Summed up precisely - he knew what he was talking about.
Federal law also supports prevention and reunification services, including through Title IV-B and the Family First Prevention Services Act. A complete financial comparison must account for those programs.
The county's budget records should disclose the relevant revenue and expenditure categories.
A government repeatedly pleading poverty should be expected to explain the cost of its child-removal system and the public resources devoted to keeping families together.
IV. Foster-to-Adopt Placements Create an Inherent Conflict When Parents Are Fighting for Reunification
The problem becomes especially serious when foster parents enter the system hoping to adopt.
It is INHERENTLY improper to place a child into foster care - while alleged neglect or abuse of the child at the hands of the parents is still unproven and the statutory goal is to return the child to his parents - into the hands of people whose interests are to SEVER the child's ties with biological parents permanent.
Foster parents have a unique position in the child's life, especially when the child is very young - they are the adults in the child's life, and the parents are away, and the memory may fade, and new, false memories may be installed easily. And they are installed - by foster parents willing to adopt.
Foster parents routinely - while Delaware County DSS condones or encourages such behaviors, fought it in court many times on behalf of many parents - tell children that THEY, foster parents, are foster children's REAL parents, that "IT WILL END SOON", that "DO NOT WORRY", "YOU WILL NOT HAVE TO LEAVE THIS HOME", "WE WILL KEEP YOU FOREVER", "WE ARE YOUR REAL PARENTS". While engaging, behind closed doors of their homes, in this illegal self-serving parental alienation, at taxpayer expense, foster parents have a direct conflict of interest: they SAVE MONEY on adoption on top of being PAID for fostering the child. An easy win-win situation.
And, foster parents seeking adoption often begin undermining the child's relationship with the biological parents, obstructing visitation, or encouraging estrangement, the consequences can be profound.
Many of Delaware County parents who were victims of Delaware County DSS' predatory behavior may identify with what I am saying, on personal knowledge as former defense attorney for such parents.
The child becomes increasingly attached to the foster household while losing ordinary contact with the original family.
As time passes, Delaware County DSS has a yet another trick up its sleeve - it claims that the SEPARATION ITSELF that DSS, together with the foster families willing to adopt, illegally created, may be used to further and perpetuate that separation and argue before the court - in earnest - that DSS- and foster parents-created alienation of the child to his parents is a good ground to terminate parental rights and adopt the child out.
And, in termination proceedings, the poor parent also has the "services" of the Las Vegas Vanishing Act assigned counsel who, in turn, are often playing into DSS's hands, in fear that otherwise they will never be assigned again and the gravy train of income will stop.
V. Weaver v. Lambert: The Use of Foster Care to Coerce Parents into Abandoning Federal Litigation
The problem is not merely theoretical.
In Weaver v. Lambert, federal litigation involving Delaware County DSS, the conduct described by the Weaver parents presents a particularly troubling example.
According to documents in public access on Pacer.gov, DSS deliberately prolonged the children's foster-care placements while federal litigation was pending.
The Weavers were threatened by Delaware County DSS that their children had passed the 11-month mark in foster care and would be taken permanently and adopted out regardless of the trial's outcome unless the parents abandoned their federal lawsuit, settled with DSS, and admitted guilt.
This mechanism of coercion deserves particular attention because federal law IMPROPERLY INTERFERES in state-law issues and mandates, through conditioning of financial assistance to states, how state courts determine guilt in the quasi-criminal Article 10 (child abuse and neglect) proceedings.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E), states generally must initiate proceedings to terminate parental rights when a child has spent 15 of the most recent 22 months in foster care, subject to statutory exceptions.
No guilt proven - yet a petition for termination is supposedly "PROPER". This is Star Chamber justice under the guise of helping children - and it has financial reasons, now practically openly revealed by Delaware County DSS in their call for new recruits into foster parents - hear, hear, we need to steal some more children to help with our budgets, it will be free for you to adopt children we steal for money and we will pay you extra on top. It is disgusting.
VI. When Public Officials Become Foster Parents Seeking Adoption
There is another conflict that deserves public investigation.
Delaware County DSS - personal knowledge - routinely designates for foster care local prominent public officials willing to adopt for free. Such public officials are allowed to adopt the whole clusters of children, from the same extended families.
Social workers themselves zero in on children they want to first steal using their official position and then adopt.
The arrangement is straightforward: a person with official influence or connections to county government becomes a foster parent, receives a child through the publicly administered placement system, alienates the child from parents, alienation is then used to terminate parents' (poor parents', poorly represented poor parents') parental rights, and subsequently seeks and receives adoption.
Foster-care adoption avoid exorbitant private costs associated with agency-arranged adoption which may cost up to $100,000.
Not for local public officials. For them, adoption is free plus an added bonus of all the perks of foster care payments, and payments and benefits post-adoption from the government.
The disparity in power is obvious.
On one side stands a parent, potentially impoverished, defending against a government-initiated Article 10 proceeding.
On the other stands a foster parent with governmental connections, seeking to adopt the child.
Backing that governmental foster parent is Delaware County DSS, abusing its position of power, for federal financial incentives, and obtaining termination of parental rights through courts based on false testimony. The prize justifies the means.
VII. The Public Cannot Easily Investigate Because the Records Are Confidential
There is a particularly frustrating feature of this system.
DSS can publicly announce how many children it has placed, how many foster homes are available, and how much foster parents are paid.
But requests for records identifying foster parents, children, and individual placement histories face formidable confidentiality barriers.
New York Public Officers Law § 87(2)(b) permits withholding records when disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
Family Court Act § 166 restricts public access to Family Court records, while Social Services Law § 422 protects confidential child-abuse and maltreatment information.
These laws, while having their legitimate objectives, are used by Delaware County DSS to bar from public scrutiny their underhanded child-stealing tactics for financial gain.
VIII. The County's Own Statement About Reunification Deserves Examination
VanDusen told the Hamden Town Council:
“It's always the department's goal for the child to return to parent, that's always our goal.”
She also acknowledged that the goal can change depending on circumstances and how long the child remains in foster care.
That qualification is the key.
The "always our goal" is the statutory requirement which VanDusen cites.
The reality is the opposite.
IX. The Financial Questions Delaware County Must Answer
Delaware County's public narrative contains two recurring themes.
The first is that the county struggles with limited financial resources.
The second is that DSS needs additional foster families and offers substantial publicly funded payments to support placements - which means more, not less money is needed to fund the system where DSS removes children from homes and places them with strangers.
Which starts to really, really beg the question: can't the County use LESS money to do MORE in helping the actual parents so that the usual conditions of supposed neglect used by Delaware County DSS to steal children - POVERTY - would be eased for the parents, at least somewhat?
X. Why Pay Scarce Taxpayer Funds To Strangers to Raise Children Stolen From Their Own Parents When the Same Money Or SIGNIFICANTLY LESS Could Help Their Own Parents Directly?
That is the central financial question missing from Delaware County DSS's public appeal for more foster parents.
According to the October 13, 2026 article in The Reporter, Delaware County pays foster families approximately $39 to more than $114 per child per day.
That translates into $14,235 to more than $41,610 annually for one child, before considering additional publicly funded services.
Why couldn't some of that money be used to help biological parents provide safe housing, food, child care, transportation, and other necessities that would allow their children to remain at home?
Consider a family whose principal difficulties arise from poverty, inadequate housing, unreliable transportation, or the inability to afford child care.
Poverty is not neglect. It can be helped - with the same taxpayer money, OR MUCH LESS, used to steal the child from the parents.
At $114 per day, the government can spend $3,420 over 30 days on foster-care maintenance for one child.
That same amount could pay a substantial rental arrearage, restore utilities, purchase essential household equipment, or finance child care that enables a parent to work.
Over a year, $41,610 could materially improve the circumstances of many financially distressed households.
These comparisons expose a public-finance question: Why does government maintain a substantial payment mechanism for substitute caregivers while assistance to the child's own parents operates through different, often more restrictive funding programs?
The answer lies partly in how federal child-welfare financing developed.
That is the central financial question missing from Delaware County DSS's public appeal for more foster parents.
According to the October 13, 2026 article in The Reporter, Delaware County pays foster families approximately $39 to more than $114 per child per day.
That translates into $14,235 to more than $41,610 annually for one child, before considering additional publicly funded services.
Why couldn't some of that money be used to help biological parents provide safe housing, food, child care, transportation, and other necessities that would allow their children to remain at home?
Consider a family whose principal difficulties arise from poverty, inadequate housing, unreliable transportation, or the inability to afford child care.
Poverty is not neglect. It can be helped - with the same taxpayer money, OR MUCH LESS, used to steal the child from the parents.
At $114 per day, the government can spend $3,420 over 30 days on foster-care maintenance for one child.
That same amount could pay a substantial rental arrearage, restore utilities, purchase essential household equipment, or finance child care that enables a parent to work.
Over a year, $41,610 could materially improve the circumstances of many financially distressed households.
These comparisons expose a public-finance question: Why does government maintain a substantial payment mechanism for substitute caregivers while assistance to the child's own parents operates through different, often more restrictive funding programs?
The answer lies partly in how federal child-welfare financing developed.
The Financial Incentives: From Removal to Adoption
Federal law finances several distinct stages of the foster-care process.
Stage | Financial mechanism | Potential beneficiary |
|---|---|---|
Child removed and placed in foster care | Title IV-E maintenance reimbursement | State/local child-welfare system; foster caregiver receives maintenance payments |
Child remains in foster care | Continued eligible maintenance, administration, and service expenditures | Foster caregiver and service providers; government receives qualifying reimbursement |
Child adopted | Subsidized adoption expenses and qualifying adoption assistance | Adoptive parents |
Child adopted with ongoing assistance | Recurring adoption subsidies, potentially through childhood | Adoptive parents |
State exceeds adoption performance benchmarks | Federal adoption incentive payments | State government |
Child safely remains with biological parents | Prevention programs and other family assistance - constantly denied based on claims of ineligibility or other pretexts | Biological family |
The central distinction is that federal foster-care maintenance funding under 42 U.S.C. § 672 is tied to qualifying out-of-home placements. It directly incentivizes non-kinship care.
The Family First Prevention Services Act went even further, expanded federal funding for qualifying mental-health services, substance-use treatment, and in-home parenting programs. With children in foster care of Medicaid, a whole host of "providers" vulture on them, overprescribing whole bouquets of dangerous expensive drugs - covered by taxpayers.
That gravy train may also disappear if the child remains at home with his parents.
Thus, a government may have access to a dedicated reimbursement stream after removing a child that is not available to the government if the child remains at home.
Adoption adds another financial dimension
Under 42 U.S.C. § 673, eligible adoptive parents may receive reimbursement of qualifying nonrecurring adoption expenses and ongoing adoption-assistance payments. Recurring assistance cannot exceed the foster-care maintenance payment that would otherwise apply.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 673b, the federal government also makes performance-based - meaning HOW MANY ADOPTIONS AND OUT OF KINSHIP FOSTER CARE PLACEMENTS YOU GOT - adoption and guardianship incentive payments to states.
The statutory formulas include:
$5,000 for each qualifying foster-child adoption above the applicable benchmark.
$7,500 for qualifying pre-adolescent adoptions or guardianships above the relevant benchmark.
$10,000 for qualifying older-child adoptions or guardianships above the relevant benchmark.
$4,000 for qualifying guardianships above the applicable benchmark.
Imagine such financial incentives for CRIMINAL CONVICTION RATES. Actually, there were such scandals reported - when convictions were drummed up to fill prisons and provide free labor for certain corporations.
Here - it is sheer, federal government-authorized and incentivized CHILD TRAFFICKING.
Consider the gist of this so-called legislation: states get more money from the federal government (our own taxpayer pocket, only from another direction, federal) if they get more children separated from their parents.
How do they do that?
Such separations are subject to Family Court Article 10 proceedings where the burden of proof is on DSS - they have to PROVE that something is wrong, they cannot simply tell the court - Your Honor, I have budget constraints, I want that federal money, please do it for me, adjudicate this child as abused or neglected so that I get that money from the feds.
Not openly, they do not say that. But, both DSS and the judges - who ALSO receive part of the federal grants, I researched the subject extensively - do know it and do make it happen.
NYS Legislature is the culprit, too. It put into the Family Court Act so many hearsay exceptions and so much discretion into the sole fact-finder, the judge (no jury) that such proceedings may just as well be called summary rubber stamps for DSS.
What must also be noted - U.S. Congress has expressly established financial rewards for states achieving specified adoption-out-of-foster-care outcomes.
There is no equivalent per-child federal adoption-incentive payment for returning a child to biological parents.
Translation: it is more beneficial for DSS to steal the child, lie in court with eyes on the prize - federal money - than to return the child to the parents, which is the hypocritically stated "statutory reunification goal", announced tongue-in-cheek, with a wink and a nod.
Parental rights are supposedly the most sacred rights.
They have NO protection in New York - and across the country, too, I am part of parents' forums, they report the same happening in other states, federal incentives are the same everywhere.
The question voters and taxpayers, state and federal, should ask Delaware County in return to its urgent call for more foster parents is simple.
Consider two possible expenditures of $30,000.
In the first, DSS spends the money maintaining a child in a non-relative foster home while the biological parent contests removal.
In the second, DSS uses $30,000 in lawful, appropriately funded assistance to stabilize the biological family's housing, transportation, child care, and other conditions, allowing the child to remain safely at home.
If both approaches adequately protect the child, what justifies choosing the first?
The county cannot answer that question merely by pointing to the existence of federal reimbursement. A reimbursed expenditure still consumes public resources, and federal funding rules do not determine which intervention best serves the child.
The larger issue is that financial incentives, permanency deadlines, and foster-to-adopt arrangements create a system where public, taxpayer-supported courts are turned into a criminal child trafficking enterprise.
A system designed to protect children must have safeguards against allowing those incentives to influence removal decisions, prolong separation, or undermine reunification.
The question is plain and simple: if Delaware County, while constantly claiming budget woes, can find $14,235 to more than $41,610 annually to pay strangers to raise one child removed from his parents - at the time NO GUILT IS PROVEN - why can't the County find comparable resources to help that same child's own parents raise the child safely, provide actual helping services to them, educate them in proper child care, preventing removal of children from their loving parents?
Do you think Delaware County will answer?
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