On April 9th, Socastee native Star Obser stated on Facebook that her 16 year old foster daughter was picked up at Socastee High School and removed from her home on Friday, April 8th.
The S.C. Department of Social Services removed the young woman from the home because she converted to Christianity, reported Obser.
Obser is well known and highly regarded in the Socastee Community.
The South Carolina Department of Social Services (SCDSS) is a state-wide organization that oversees child welfare and child care services. They have three branches: the Division of Child Protection Services, the Division of Foster Care, and the Division of Adoption.
According to the organization’s stated mission: The SCDSS works hard to ensure that children are in safe environments and have access to resources they need. The SCDSS is committed to helping children find new homes with foster parents or adoptive families through their divisions on adoption and foster care.
In an email sent by MyrtleBeachSC News, we asked Mr. Leach (SCDSS HEAD), “Does the separation of Church and State not also extend to the state itself? Does the State of S.C. have a right to intervene or supersede in the personal spiritual choices made by a 16 year old young woman? What home did you choose to place this 16 year old in? What criteria did you use in deciding that home was a better fit for this young woman, above the Obser home?”
Michael Leach is the State Director for the South Carolina Department of Social Services. Prior to his appointment, Mr. Leach served with the Department of Children’s Services for more than 10 years, most recently as the Deputy Commissioner of Child Programs.
Mr. Leach has done extensive public speaking related to his experience with the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) tool, Extension of Foster Care and helped the child welfare agency maintain accreditation through the Council on Accreditation. Mr. Leach was also a therapist at the Vanderbilt Child and Adolescent Outpatient Clinic in Tennessee and has experience in facilitating crisis response services at a community mental health center and case management in congregate care.
In 2019, Leach asked the state of S.C. for $127 million annually to help turn around an embattled agency criticized for failing children. In July, 2021, Leach told WYFF Greenville TV, “When you put all these things together, it’s made for a rough 15 months,” said Michael Leach, director of the South Carolina Department of Social Services.
“There’s poverty, there’s drug addiction, there’s domestic violence and neglect,” he said. “You know, in the Upstate, we have a lot of children coming into foster care.”
That is “refreshing,” said House budget chief Murrell Smith, a Sumter Republican whose committee does the first work on the state’s spending plan. “But as I’ve expressed to him: I don’t fund promises. We fund results.”
HOME – IN CONCLUSION
Our publisher and our firm have long held these beliefs:
I believe our spirit is wiser than we are. Every spirit will continually search until it finds the perfect place that it can call home.
We, in fact, do not pick this place. Home is the place that picks us. Home is that place that adopts us.
Many spend lives filled with drugs, cycling through relationships, empty careers, and the pursuit of status only to die never connecting with the one deep place that calls us from within.
Home calls us unto itself. Home woos us.
When we give it permission, our spirit will always take us home. That permission, however, often feels like death itself.
Those who find home, walk in highest authority. For it is at home that we find peace, purpose, meaning and destiny. There is no law, nor earthly system, that surpasses home.
Home is an ancient place that first flows into us, then pours out of us, shining a beacon helping others find their way.
Foster child was brought by the Obser Home escorted by police to pick up the child’s belongings.
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