Kids in Oregon’s rural counties more likely to spend time in foster care

Children in Oregon’s rural counties are more likely to spend at least one day in the foster care system than those living in urban areas, according to an InvestigateWest analysis of public data from the state’s child welfare agency.

Since at least 2020, rural counties have consistently accounted for the highest rates of foster care involvement in Oregon, with some southeastern communities seeing rates three times higher than Multnomah County, the state’s most populous county. Though the total number of kids in foster care statewide has fallen during this time, rural counties saw a slightly slower decline than urban ones.

InvestigateWest analyzed five years of state data on the number of children from each county who spent time in the foster care system, calculating rates based on each county’s population ages 17 and under. The analysis found that on average, rural counties placed kids in foster care at almost double the rate of urban areas.

The analysis tracks with recent research nationwide, which has suggested rural children are more likely to enter foster care than kids in urban areas, and that their parents were reported to child welfare for mistreatment at higher rates . Though the research focused on rural children is limited, experts and providers say their disproportionate representation in foster care reflects broader obstacles that families face in connecting to health care and social safety net services, despite having similar levels of need.

Behavioral health care, financial aid and childcare access have been shown to prevent child maltreatment, or help parents reunite with their kids after removal, by addressing the root cause. When these services are unavailable, concerned neighbors, doctors or teachers can more quickly turn to child welfare to try to help a child and their family. And caseworkers are left with few alternatives to the intervention of last resort — removal and placement in foster care.

“Rural areas have a harder time keeping kids out of the foster care system because of the lack of support,” said Jeremy Harle, executive director of Kairos NW, a youth mental health provider that also runs foster care programs in rural communities along the Oregon coast. “Removal becomes the default response because the community lacks the resources at home.”

Oregon’s Department of Human Services, which oversees child welfare, has tried to expand access to such services as part of a 2024 settlement in a class action lawsuit over alleged mistreatment of kids in foster care. Among the changes, the state has rolled out new financial assistance and intensive support programs aimed at helping families avoid foster care placement, both before a child welfare case is opened and afterwards.

For advocates and providers who work in rural areas, questions remain about whether these efforts to keep families together are reaching their corner of the state. A May report to Gov. Tina Kotek noted that some of these newly expanded prevention programs are currently only available in a handful of counties — mostly along the Interstate 5 corridor.

Emily Cooper, legal director at Disability Rights Oregon, one of the groups that sued, said the state officials are taking the right steps to improve Oregon’s child welfare system. But with services mostly concentrated on the western side of the state, there are still obstacles for struggling families in rural Oregon to get the assistance they need.

“There’s a real promise that kids shouldn’t have to leave their homes and communities to get the services they need,” Cooper said.

Last year, more than 6,900 kids across Oregon spent at least one day in the foster care system, according to InvestigateWest’s analysis of Department of Human Services data. This total includes kids who were only briefly in foster care, as well as those who have been in the system for several years.

The number has fallen considerably in recent years. In 2020, nearly 10,000 children spent time in foster care. The Department of Human Services has credited this decline to expanded preventative services and programs focused on keeping kids in their homes and improvements in staffing and case management.

In 2025, 48% of the children who entered the foster care system — about 3,310 — were from major population centers: the tri-county region making up the Portland metro area; Lane County, where Eugene is; and Marion County, which includes the state capital of Salem.

But when adjusted for population, kids were more likely to enter foster care in all but three of Oregon’s 23 rural counties than they were in the state’s four most populous counties.

Rural communities have consistently accounted for the highest rates of foster care placement in Oregon for at least the past five years, though counties with smaller populations are more sensitive to fluctuation. Most of the rural counties with the highest rates are also considered “frontier” areas, meaning those regions are among the most sparsely populated in Oregon.

Malheur County, in the remote high desert along Oregon’s southeastern border, had the highest rate of kids served by the foster care system in the state in 2025 — roughly one in 35. It’s one of the most impoverished and under-resourced counties in Oregon, where it is not uncommon for families to have to drive more than an hour, over state lines into Idaho, to access basic services.

Two other eastern Oregon counties, Lake and Grant, had comparable rates, with one in every 36 and 42 kids spending time in foster care respectively. In contrast, Multnomah County, home to the city of Portland, saw about one in every 122 kids placed in the foster care system in 2025.

The only urban county to have a rate on par with those seen in rural counties was Lane County, where one in every 72 kids spent time in the foster care system.

Notably, the three counties that are Oregon’s least populated — Wheeler, Gilliam and Sherman — had the lowest rate of kids in foster care in 2025, though it’s hard to say why that’s the case because the data is limited. These counties each have a small youth population, each under 400. Wheeler and Sherman counties did not see any kids placed in foster care last year. Gilliam, on the other hand, had fewer than six kids enter the child welfare system, so Oregon won’t release the exact number to protect their privacy.

The number of rural kids in foster care is still lower than it was several years ago.

State officials say that in some rural areas, the number of kids placed in foster care sharply increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the foster care population has still continued to decline, and during the three years after the pandemic, between 2022 and 2025, the number of kids in the system statewide fell by about 11%. The decline was slightly less pronounced for rural counties, at about 9%, while the rate in urban counties fell by 12% over the same period.

Between 2024 and 2025, there was a slight bump in the number of children entering foster care across the state, with rural counties seeing a larger increase than urban ones. Department of Human Services officials acknowledged that increase in its May report and said they’re determining whether it reflects an ongoing trend.

A majority of kids who entered Oregon’s foster care system last year were removed from their homes because of a report of alleged neglect. According to the Department of Human Services , caseworkers listed neglect as a reason for removal in about 56% of cases.

Under Oregon law, neglect can look like parents not seeking care when their child has a serious physical or behavioral health need, leaving a child alone and unsupervised for long stretches of time, or exposing a child to substances like drugs or alcohol. It can also include situations when a child has been exposed to potential danger, even if they have not been injured or harmed, such as a caregiver not taking medication to manage a behavioral health condition.

Poverty is one of the main risk factors associated with neglect , although it is not a direct cause. Most U.S. states, including Oregon, prohibit caseworkers from removing a child from their home solely because of economic hardship. But assessing the cause of potential neglect and a parent’s responsibility can be complicated, said Katie Maguire-Jack, a professor of social work at University of Michigan who has studied the rural-urban divide in foster care.

“(It) can be very difficult to disentangle if a parent is acting a certain way because of poverty alone,” Maguire-Jack said. “Poverty tends to coexist with other social problems that can make it difficult to parent a child.”

KayCee Weeks works with parents who have had a child removed from their custody — or who are at risk of that happening — as a program manager at MountainStar Family Relief Nursery, a child abuse prevention nonprofit serving central Oregon. The organization provides outreach and home visits, early childhood therapy, and parenting support classes, among other services.

Weeks, who oversees programs in rural Crook County, said many families she works with came to the attention of child welfare caseworkers because of parenting issues related to economic hardship.

Some parents repeatedly missed their child’s health care appointments, because the provider was an hour away and they could not afford the cost of gas or repairs to a rundown vehicle, Weeks said. Others said they struggled to keep up with cleaning and maintaining their home, on top of everything else that is on their plate.

Weeks works with parents on how to navigate stress and parenting in a healthy way. Many of them are also working through generational challenges and can struggle at first to understand how they are falling short, since their childhood was shaped by similar or worse treatment that had become normalized.

One mom Weeks worked with at MountainStar arrived at the nonprofit having already seen her first child land in foster care. Her own parents dealt with addiction and often left her alone to care for her younger siblings, which resulted in her being placed in foster care as a teen.

Weeks said the mom was doing the “best that she could” to give her kids better care than she had received. But she also battled addiction, and her low income created more obstacles and stress she struggled to deal with. The mom was able to reunite with her child after completing mental health and substance use treatment, then worked with Weeks to build new parenting skills and a support network that would help her maintain sobriety.

“For somebody who probably has a significant trauma history of their own,” Weeks said, “without those additional advocates really helping, that is a really big challenge.”

There could be a number of reasons why Oregon’s rural counties have higher rates of foster care involvement than metropolitan ones. For example, Maguire-Jack said urban areas overwhelmed by child abuse reports may be diverting kids away from the system to manage caseloads. But providers and experts agree that availability of services plays a major role.

“I don’t think it’s any more about the child welfare system than it is that those rural and frontier communities are just generally underserved by social services,” said Simon Fulford, executive director of Parrott Creek Child and Family Services, a youth services provider in urban Clackamas County that runs residential programs for kids from across the state.

Rural and frontier counties generally have fewer local options for child care, medical care or behavioral health treatment, and service providers are stretching limited resources. The Oregon Office of Rural Health considers any geographic area that is 10 or more miles from a population center of at least 40,000 people to be rural.

Bridget Dazey, executive director of the advocacy group Our Children Oregon, said many rural service providers “wear multiple hats” to meet the community’s needs.

“There’s (fewer) touch points for an individual or family to connect to (social services),” Dazey said.

The lack of services can also make it more difficult for parents to address the problems that led to their child’s removal and reunify with their kids.

For instance, a parent whose substance abuse led authorities to take custody of their child would need to reach sobriety before reconnecting with the child. But some rural parts of the state, namely those in southeastern Oregon, have significantly fewer options for in-patient substance use treatment, as highlighted in a 2024 report from the Oregon Health Authority.

Parents also often have to complete family therapy or supervised visits with their children before they can reclaim guardianship, which can require significant travel if the child was placed in a foster setting on the other side of the state.

“We have kids who, if their family is four hours away, the family can’t afford to come see them,” Fulford said. “Those distance barriers … causes pretty significant disincentives for families to engage in the kind of ongoing care and treatment of their child.”

Dr. Emily Diamond, a clinical psychology researcher and professor emeritus at the Wright Institute in California, said the instability and disruption that come from entering foster care can have deep and lasting impacts on a child’s development and mental health.

Studies have found foster care kids are more vulnerable to behavioral problems because they struggle to form secure attachments or adapt to new environments. When kids don’t get adequate support, those issues can affect their future economic mobility, housing security and health, Diamond said. The longer a child is in foster care, the more acute these impacts can be.

“Children in foster care are often sort of punished for problems that they had no role in creating,” Diamond said. “They had no say in how they came into the world, and suddenly they’re running the race of life with an enormous ball and chain attached to their legs.”

The Department of Human Services has pledged to overhaul the foster care system in response to the 2019 class action lawsuit from a coalition of advocacy groups, including Disability Rights Oregon, alleging the state repeatedly failed to meet the needs of kids.

As part of the settlement reached in 2024, the agency promised to handle investigations into reports of possible abuse or neglect in a more timely manner, improve access to services for children and foster families, reduce the number of vacancies in the child welfare workforce, and invest in more preventative measures.

In its first progress report , child welfare officials said they had fewer cases open for more than 60 days, were retaining more foster families and caseworkers, and were relying less on temporary lodging when a foster placement wasn’t available.

Cooper, the legal director for Disability Rights Oregon, questioned whether the state’s metrics are overstating its progress. A third-party expert, hired by the court to independently assess Oregon’s progress on meeting the settlement terms, is due to release his own report this fall.

Oregon Department of Human Services’ Child Welfare Deputy Director Lacey Andresen said the department has focused so far on fixing basic operational problems, like having enough staff and resources to manage cases in a timely manner.

Once more of that infrastructure and staffing is in place, she said, the state plans to expand its foster care prevention programs. Andresen expects at least one of these initiatives — a pilot program focused on keeping families together when a case is opened through in-home and community supports — to expand statewide in the next few years. Right now, only counties located along Interstate 5 and the Oregon coast are participating.

Andresen said the state’s challenging budget landscape means expanding services further will be difficult. But the child welfare agency is also looking at ways to make funding more flexible so communities can focus dollars toward their most pressing needs, she said.

Fulford, whose organization supports kids from both urban and rural communities, believes Oregon will ultimately need to spend more if it wants to bridge the gap for rural communities.

“The cost of serving a kid in a rural area may feel like it’s twice the cost of a kid in an urban area,” Fulford said. “It’s twice as expensive because it’s just harder to reach that kid.”

Andresen acknowledged Oregon needs to do more to better serve rural communities, namely in services like youth behavioral health care and substance use treatment. But she said the child welfare system can only do so much on its own.

“(Child welfare) alone will never be the answer for getting kids what they need in Oregon,” Andresen said. “Building out support for families … it really is a whole system effort.”

This story was originally published by InvestigateWest and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.