The country’s drug-addiction epidemic is putting strains on foster care services in states hit hardest by the opioid crisis.

Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia have all reported an increase in children entering the foster care system over the last few years at a higher rate than they are leaving.

Kentucky foster parent recruiter Lea Ann Reeves-Gollihue said the number of kids in foster care has reached “a crisis point,” according to the Daily Independent in Ashland, Kentucky.

Reeves-Gollihue, who is employed at the Ashland division of Specialized Alternatives for Families and Youth of America, said there are more than 8,000 children in foster care in Kentucky — compared to the summer of 2012 when about 6,000 youths were in care. 

She attributed the majority of the increase to the opioid drug epidemic. Nationally, opioids — which include heroin and synthetic opioids such as oxycodone — were involved in 33,091 deaths in 2015, more than four times the number in 1999. 

In 2015, the Kentucky alone saw almost 1,300 overdose deaths, about a 25 percent increase since 2013. West Virginia had the highest drug overdose rate in the country in 2014, and the number of drug overdose deaths there more than doubled from 2013 to 2015, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pennsylvania experienced a 34 percent increase in drug overdose deaths between 2013 and 2015, according to the CDC.

The CDC reported that opioids are now the main driver of drug overdose in the United States.

“The problem with heroin is that it’s highly addicting,” Betzi White, a Pennsylvania Children and Youth Services administrator and lead social worker, told the Tribune-Democrat. “It takes over an addict’s life.”

Too often, White said, addicts simply neglect their children, forcing Children and Youth Services to step in. 

Stories about the effects of the opioid crisis on children have been reported across the country, with parents of young children overdosing in stores, at home and in their cars with the child present. The frequency of these incidents led the Washington Post to call them “the new norm” in drug use.

In the midst of parents’ struggle with addiction, children are often removed from their homes and placed in foster care.

West Virginia has also seen a rise in the number of children in foster care. From 2012 to 2016, more than a thousand additional children were introduced into the system, bringing the total to 5,182, a 24 percent increase, according to the West Virginia Department of Human Services. About 42 percent were removed from their homes due to family drug abuse, the West Virginia DHS said.

Nationally, there was a 4 percent increase in the number of children in foster care between 2012 and 2014, adding up to 415,129 children as of Sep. 30th, 2014, according to FosterClub, a non-profit working to place children in foster homes.

Drug abuse is also the number one reason children are removed from their homes in Pennsylvania, according to Cathy Upz, the Deputy Secretary of the state’s Office of Children, Youth and Families.

“There can be more than one reason, but parental drug abuse is the primary reason that children are coming into care,” Upz said.

She also confirmed that the number of children in foster care in Pennsylvania has increased substantially since 2014. Upz said there was a sharp jump in September 2015, but numbers began to drop slightly in 2016.

“From a data perspective, I cannot directly attribute the rise in children in foster care to opioids because we do not track based on specific drugs,” Upz said. “But anecdotally, after working with the counties, we do have good reason to believe that opioid use is directly related to the rise of children in care.”

Upz is hesitant to call Pennsylvania’s foster care numbers a crisis.

“We saw a significant increase in 2015, and we worked with the counties and have seen the numbers going down,” she said. “In Pennsylvania, we had at one point an excess of 22,000 children in foster care and we’re under 16,000 now, but we’re always looking to do better.”

However, officials in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a city in the southwest part of the state, say the drug epidemic has had a dramatic effect on the areas child welfare services.

The increase in heroin abuse is putting immense pressure on the 36 caseworkers and four social workers who work for Cambria County Children and Youth Services, according to White.

White said her department has seen a jump in reports of abuse and initiated cases, including at least one report almost every day involving alleged drug use or dealing in a home with children.

In an investigation done by Teresa Wiltz for PBS’ Stateline, several other states were reporting similar problems. Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Alaska, Kansas, Ohio and Georgia all were found to have more children in foster care due to drug abuse and more difficulty placing them in appropriate homes. 

The Daily Independent in Ashland, Kentucky, and The Tribune Democrat in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.