Alison Sherman has a tough job.

Her office is actually up in Plymouth, which is a generally pretty Twin City suburb.

Work brought her south to Austin on Thursday, in the rain.

She was invited by the Lions Club to talk about Kindred Family Focus. It was her first time making this presentation, she said after apologizing for maybe the third time for her PowerPoint slides going the wrong way.

“I’ll get better at this,” she said.

Her message wasn’t glossy, but it was clear: Children are in trouble. Lots of them. It’s getting worse. The opioid drug crisis is driving more children into foster care, but there are not enough foster parents.

On top of that, government funding is inadequate, she said, making it harder to save the children and feeding a cycle that will only put more children in danger down the road.

Kindred Family Focus says it is Minnesota’s largest private, nonprofit foster care, adoption, and home-based care agency. Sherman’s job Thursday was to send out the call for help whether in the form of additional foster parents or donations.

A former foster parent told her that her presentation would scare potential foster parents away. The rewards of helping children, and by extension their families, is incredible.

That’s true. No question.  But I’m wary of too slick of a recruitment effort?

Mower County Health and Human Services handles foster care here. On its web page about foster parenting, it  proclaims “Children desperately need foster families now!” 

Click on the link and you can read an op-ed by the state’s Human Services Department director, Emily Piper, noting that in the past three years, the number of children in Minnesota’s foster care system on an average day has increased by 51 percent, from about 6,200 in 2013 to about 9,400 in 2016.

“I know foster parents face challenges caring for children who are hurt and angry,” she wrote. “I greatly appreciate all they do to help children get the critical care they need until they can safely reunite with their families – which most do – or, when necessary, find permanent families – often through adoption.”

Being a foster parent is darn hard. That should not be glossed over. It was one of the greatest things I’ve done in my life, but thank goodness for unvarnished training  Dakota County provided. You need to be optimistic but you need to be ready. You should not do it if you might bail. These kids deserve better.

My wife and I only did respite foster care for a little while before our children were born. Our job was to give families in crisis a break. We had only two opportunities to help. The first lasted only a few days, long enough for me to introduce the young man to the art of sinking  a canoe. Not intentionally. I wonder if he ever stepped foot in a boat again.

The second was on and off for months. He was an elementary school kid, with issues that bordered on autism. We had to learn how to hold him so he would not hurt himself. We had to potty train him. We also added in teaching him his ABCs. I put letters up around the house and we made a chasing game out of it.

We had good and bad days. Some of the worst, though, were days when his bedroom was empty. Getting him back home was our job, but missing him was tougher than any of the other bad days.

Being a respite provider, we were able to take care of him on and off when his mother needed a break. That was a blessing.

There is a crisis and more foster parents are needed. For those of you considering it,  be certain you are doing it for the children, not the gloss.  There are fantastic success stories you can be told. You might experience one. But, you will fail if it’s about you.

It’s a tough job, but a fantastic mission.

Now, something completely different

We ran a story yesterday on how Hennepin County has put a pay phone back in one of its government buildings. So, I followed up on the local angle and learned Mower County does not have pay phones in any of its government buildings. The Mower County Government Center has a land line in its main lobby that is available for public use for local calls only.

If you really miss pay phones, however, there is a place down I-90 in Wisconsin where you can find quite a variety. It’s Phoneco Inc. in Galesville, Wis., and it’s fascinating.

Owner Mary Knappen says they have quite a variety, but don’t have any wooden phone booths in mint condition. They do have one in need of repair.

Of the rest, “some are wired to work and some are not wired,” she said. Not everyone wants a working pay phone.

Reach  Editor Christopher Baldus at chris.baldus@austindailyherald.com.