By Deborah Yetter
The Courier-Journal

Kentucky's demand for foster and adoptive homes is growing faster than the supply - fueled in part by parents' abuse of drugs, especially methamphetamine and OxyContin, state officials say.

The need comes as the state is under increased pressure to expand and improve foster and adoptive services or face the loss of millions of dollars in federal money under tough new standards.

As a result, state child-welfare officials are scrambling to meet immediate needs even as they are working to attract, train and certify more people to take abused or neglected children into their homes.

The state also is under a two-year federal deadline to improve its care of children removed from homes and could lose federal money if improvements aren't made.

Mary Ellen Nold, who oversees the Cabinet for Health and Family Services' program to care for children in state care, said that parents' drug abuse is a key reason for the increase in the number of children coming into the system.

"It's just really, really sad,'' she said. "A lot of times the parents are in jail. Who's going to take care of the child?''

Five years ago, the cabinet had about 5,560 children in foster care or awaiting adoption. It now has 6,471 - an increase of more than 900 while available homes increased by about only 360, Nold said.

"It's not meeting the demand or the number of children,'' she said.

Child welfare workers say that they increasingly are being called to hospitals where drug-addicted mothers have given birth to babies also addicted. Often, social workers take the baby from the hospital, said Kathy Gay, a supervisor for the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services in Eastern Kentucky.

Other children are taken into state care because of neglect when their drug-addicted parents have stopped caring for them.

Workers in Eastern Kentucky have gone into homes where children have no food or clean clothing and children as young as 10 or 11 are trying to care for younger siblings, Gay said.

"The parents, they're so hooked on drugs they don't even realize what they're doing to themselves or their children,'' said Gay, who is based in Breathitt County and supervises workers in an eight-county region.

Use of methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant often made in makeshift labs, is increasing, but OxyContin, a widely abused narcotic, "is the drug of choice'' in the region, she said.

Cases where adults are drug-addicted are the toughest, officials said. "With drug cases, the addiction is so hard to break, we see little or no progress,'' Gay said.

Lt. Gov. Steve Pence, a former federal prosecutor who is also the state justice secretary, has vowed to tackle the state's drug abuse problem and is developing a plan after a series of meetings around the state.

Legislation to establish criminal penalties for adults who expose children to methamphetamine labs - which use toxic and highly volatile chemicals - failed in the final days of the 2004 legislative session.