It was 1981. Inflation was close to 10% — and hit 13.5% a year earlier. Wages weren’t keeping up. The economy was stagnating in a recession. Pundits coined the term “stagflation.”

Anne Solar was still in her 20s, fresh out of college and beginning as a child protective caseworker with the Fulton County Department of Social Services. She concedes today that the economy wasn’t so much on her mind as the welfare of Fulton County’s children.

But the two are related. Economic stress causes family stress, and sometimes that comes to rest on the children.

And Solar today understands the special bind Fulton County was in. The glove industry — a staple in Fulton County for more than 150 years — had imploded. Factories shut down; companies moved overseas. Glovemakers were out of work and having a tough time applying their skills to other professions.

“I’m not sure I understood the context in which I was working,” Solar said. “I was just excited to have a job, a good job.”

Today, Solar is soon to retire as the social service commissioner, a job she’s held for seven years, moving up the ranks over 43 years. Today, she understands the context.

The need for social service assistance has more than doubled in Fulton County since 2020, state data shows. Supervisors commented recently how much the county must spend to support homeless people.

She sits in a cluttered office. Somehow, she never had the time over seven years to find a blank space of wall to hang the poster of the Adirondacks, but did find a spot so her daughter’s painting of flowers and a blue sky can add a bit of brightness on a gray day.

She has more tools at her disposal now that her daughter is 34 than when the painting was a 6-year-old’s project, or when Solar had to first intervene on behalf of children so early in the 1980s.

“Child protective services was a whole brand-new concept. So were computers,” Solar said. The standards were simple, and low. "You were making sure children weren’t going to die.”

But for some families, that’s a hard standard to meet, and she remembers that first time. The father had no work; the two kids had no food.

“He had relatives near Albany,” Solar said, but no way to get there. She saw two options: “Get him a ride to his family; or get them food. Neither option was available.”

She used the only tool she had left. “We had to take the children,” she said.

Foster care might be the best solution — it might even be the only solution. But it’s never the ideal solution, Solar said.

“Any intercession into the family was considered huge,” she said. “I’ve been around long enough to see they still want their parents.”

But consider the stresses. In this case, the father didn’t react well. He made threats; he was led away in handcuffs, for the sake of a ride or some groceries.

Today, Solar has climbed the ladder and now trains and directs the entire department. She knows the tools she has because she helped develop them.

“As a community, we’ve gotten better. So we have all sorts of resources — food, particularly,” she said. “We could now transport them to relatives.”

But in 1981?

“Because the program was so new, we didn’t have those solutions worked out.”

She has far more to worry about than just children. Think families; think communities. The number of recipients of Temporary Aid to........

© The Leader Herald