New story at Arkansas Times:
Among the many challenges facing Arkansas’s foster care system, one basic problem looms large: There are almost two children for every foster bed in the state. It’s a shortfall that Gov. Asa Hutchinson acknowledged as a “crisis” in a press conference this summer. One might think that recruiting more foster parents, then, would be the key to keeping foster kids in their home counties and out of group homes or institutions. To that end, the governor convened the “Restore Hope Summit” in August, a two-day event to enlist the state’s religious leaders in recruiting more foster parents for the Arkansas Department of Human Services’ Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS).