COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) - It’s a job some call the hardest in South Carolina government: leading the state’s Department of Social Services.

DSS serves as a catch-all agency for the most vulnerable South Carolinians, who have often fallen through the cracks — with an estimated one in six people who live in the state tapping into its services on any given day.

Now the man who has been at the department’s helm for the last five-plus years is leaving, despite pleas from the state’s top leaders to stay.

“These positions usually, across the country, usually last about 18 months, meaning the stress and the hardships that go along with the work, it is really hard,” DSS Director Michael Leach said in his first interview since his resignation announcement just over a month ago. “It’s exhausting, and I want to spend more time present with my family, and so it’s time to go.”

When Gov. Henry McMaster tapped him to lead the expansive and challenged agency in March of 2019, Leach, admittedly, did not imagine he would still be in that same position five and a half years later.

“I believe I was destined to be here in SC at DSS during a chaotic time when people needed help more than ever,” he wrote in his Oct. 21 resignation letter to the governor.

In that time, Leach has led DSS through the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing crises that followed, from youth mental health to childcare, along with several hurricanes, during which the department is in charge of statewide sheltering needs.

That was in addition to the day-to-day work in normal times of an agency whose responsibilities span from managing the foster-care system to administering billions of dollars in federal food benefits.

“We are a catch-all. When somebody needs help, they call us, whether it’s them or a legislator or a court or somebody,” Leach said. “When something else in the larger system fails, we end up having to take on that need, and we’re OK with that.”

For the man at the top, it has been a 24/7 job, as he said it is for many of the 4,600 employees under him, whom he described as “the hardest-working state government employees around.”

“You have to give everything,” Leach said of his job. “People have to see you, the leader of this organization, there, be part of it all, and thinking through strategy and policy and legislation and budget, and it is never-ending.”

When Leach stepped into the role in 2019, he said DSS was plagued by high numbers of caseloads and a high turnover percentage.

“We were not helping people effectively across the state in any of our program areas,” he recalled.

That included one of the agency’s most significant mandates: managing the state’s foster-care system and ensuring the well-being of the thousands of children in it.

A few years prior to Leach’s arrival, South Carolina was sued for falling short in placing foster children in family-like settings and in not providing them with basic healthcare.

The state is now several years into its settlement agreement from the Michelle H. lawsuit, and the federal judge overseeing it has said South Carolina is making positive progress, though some key improvements still need to be met.

“We’ve exited a bunch of metrics. We have a few more that, in the next year, we can exit,” Leach said, noting there are more than 20 similar lawsuits active across the country involving other states. “But there’s still work to be done to get out of these — these things are about, on average, about 17 years, they usually go on for about 17 years. So we’re about nine years into it, and we’ve made a lot of progress.”

And he said, overall, South Carolina’s foster care and child welfare system has improved.

In just the last year, DSS has recorded both highs in the number of public adoptions across South Carolina and lows in the number of children in the foster care system.

Today, about 3,300 kids and teens are in foster care in South Carolina — about 1,400 fewer than were in the system five years ago, according to DSS.

Leach points to a variety of reasons for that decrease, including providing better services to families on the front end so they avoid situations leading to foster care and improved efficiency within the court system.

“At the end of the day, our goal is to make sure that they have families and have strong families so that they can thrive now and into the future,” he said.

Those trends are among the accomplishments Leach listed off during his tenure, along with multiple changes in state law, including those to provide kinship caregivers with financial assistance and to voluntarily extend foster care, so young people can continue to access state resources past their 18th birthday.

“I’m most proud about the foundation that we have built within this agency and the direction that we are headed and that we can head with knowing that we have the pieces in place now because they weren’t. We had a lot of work to do just to get to the basic foundation,” he said.

Leach’s final day will be Jan. 2 of next year, and he is still determining what’s next.

But he and his family don’t plan to go far.

“Ultimately, I want to figure out how I’m helping the amazing people in South Carolina,” Leach said. “I love it here. We love the people here, and it’s a matter of time in what will come next.”

A key part of the Department of Social Services’ mandate is overseeing South Carolina’s child welfare system, which McMaster has warned is “coming to a breaking point.”

On Friday, Leach discusses whether he agrees with the governor’s stark assessment and what improvements need to be made to fix that system.

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