A disappointing report from the Senate Finance Committee

A new report by the Senate Finance Committee concludes that children in residential treatment facilities routinely suffer harms like sexual and physical abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and lack of needed therapy. Further, it concludes that these harms are endemic to residential care itself. While the fact that some residential care facilities are substandard and cause harm to children is undisputed, the SFC’s study is poorly designed and should not be used as the basis of policy. It is based on facilities run by only four companies and cannot be used to make generalizations about residential care as a whole. Both the study design and the findings of the SFC report appear to stem from a preconceived conclusion and not on a desire to describe the actual landscape of residential care for America’s youth who need intensive behavioral health care.

On June 12, 2024, the Senate Finance Committee (SFC) released a report called Warehouses of Neglect: How Taxpayers are Funding Systemic Abuse in Youth Residential Treatment Centers. The report was based on an investigation of what it calls residential treatment facilities (RTF’s) operated by four large companies, “each owning facilities with a history of public abuse and neglect allegations and a substantial facility footprint.” It does not define RTF’s, but the term clearly refers to facilities that provide behavioral health services in a residential context to children with funding from programs under SFC jurisdiction, mainly Medicaid and foster care funds under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. The four companies include three profit making corporations (United Health Services, Acadia Healthcare, and Vivant Behavioral Healthcare), and one nonprofit, Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health.

The report describes a pattern of poor conditions and abusive practices that the SFC staff observed by reviewing media articles and company documents, supplemented by interviews with senior leaders in the four companies and visits to several facilities not operated by these companies.¹ These conditions and practices include sexual and physical abuse by staff; the inappropriate and often abusive use of restraints and seclusion; staff who are unqualified and inadequately trained staff or who routinely fail to discharge their duties, leading sometimes to tragic results; “non-homelike,” unsanitary and unsafe conditions; failure to provide the treatment that children need and that states are paying for; failure to maintain connections between children and their communities and to make adequate discharge plans; use of technology to monitor children that is more appropriate to detention facilities than therapeutic settings; and the absence of adequate oversight by state and federal authorities.

The report raises valid concerns about private businesses being involved in services to the most fragile young people. Several details stand out, all of them involving the company called Vivant and its CEO, John “Jay” Ripley. Ripley is the former CEO of Precision Tune Auto Care and and cofounder of BGR the Burger Joint. Ripley previously founded Sequel Youth and Family Services, which became known for the death of 16-year-old Cornelius Frederick while being restrained at a Michigan facility in 2020 and allegations of abuse and neglect at other Sequel facilities. In 2021, according to the report, Sequel closed half of its facilities and sold the other half, including 13 facilities that it sold to Vivant, Ripley’s new company. VIvant in turn hired many former Sequel executives and staff. In a video made by the University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business, Ripley explained that “you can make money in this business if you control staffing.” Ripley does not seem like the kind of person who should be running facilities dedicated to healing the most vulnerable young people.

The SFC report might have been a valuable document had it not tried to apply its findings to residential care in general. “Children suffer routine harm inside RTF’s,” the authors write. “These harms include sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and inadequate provision of behavioral health treatment.” Leaving aside the ambiguity of the word “routine” (does that mean every resident or the majority of residents are harmed in such a way?), such a conclusion cannot be drawn from an investigation of treatment centers operated by four large companies. We have no idea what proportion of young people receiving publicly funded RTF care are in facilities operated by these four companies. Around the country, there are residential treatment facilities operated by many providers, including many freestanding facilities that are not part of large chains. Even within the companies reviewed, the report provides no data to document whether the problems exist only at certain facilities or throughout the chains. A facility’s functioning to a large extent reflects its leadership, and there may be well-run facilities among those operated by these companies.

Going even further, the SFC concludes that “the risk of harm to children in RTF’s is endemic to the operating model. The harms children in RTFs experienced are the direct, causal result of an operating model that incentivizes providers to optimize revenues and operating and profit margin. RTF providers offer minimal therapeutic treatment in deficient physical settings with lean staff composed of non-professionals, which maximizes per diem margins…” The report goes on to say that “[a]t its core, the RTF model typically optimizes profit over the wellbeing and safety of children.” But there is no “RTF operating model.” The understaffing and lack of professionals that are common among publicly funded residential providers more likely stem from the low reimbursement rates that that these programs receive, which in turn means that staff receive low pay as well, forcing the facilities to rely on poorly educated and trained staff.

Even more extremely, the report states that “In the best of circumstances, children at RTFs receive care from under-trained and overburdened staff, are given infrequent therapy, sometimes by non-professionals, and are exposed to unsanitary, unsafe, and non-homelike environments.” It is hard to understand how the SFC is capable of describing the best residential programs when its entire methodology consisted of seeking abuses in an extremely limited universe of residential programs.

In suggesting that residential treatment is a flawed model that should not exist, the SFC report ignores the important role of residential treatment facilities in the continuum of care for young people with mental illness. The Committee’s own invited witness, Elizabeth Manley of the University of Connecticut School of Social Work, testified about the need for these programs.

Residential treatment facilities have an important role in the provision of care for young people with complex behavioral health care needs when they have a clinical or behavioral health treatment need that cannot be met in a family and community setting due to the intensity of their treatment and supervision needs. In those instances, we need the care to be delivered in trauma-responsive environments that embrace parent and caregiver engagement throughout the treatment intervention and continually focus on best practice. These residential treatment facilities can have a significant benefit to the young person and their family.

The Child Welfare League (CWLA), in written testimony submitted to the SFC, added that residential services are “a small but important part of the full array of services” that must be available to meet children’s mental health needs.” CWLA went on to explain that there “are many providers and programs providing or striving to provide trauma-responsive, time-limited, effective residential care. They are informed by the emerging literature highlighting promising practices in residential interventions..” CWLA cited the Building Bridges Initiative, which is a national initiative working to identify and promote best practice and policy in residential interventions for youth. The initiative has produced a guide called Building Effective Short-Term Residential Interventions. According to this report, a new literature has developed in the last ten years or so which documents promising practices in residential intervention which are associated with positive benefits. These include “actively engaging youth and families, ensuring active school and community connection, and keeping residential intervention as short as possible.” The authors explain that “[c]utting-edge effective residential intervention now means providers are creatively working with youth and families in the home, in the community, and as briefly as possible – often for three months or less.” The guide was developed to help organizations make the transition to the new approach, with case histories of 12 programs that are making or have made this transition.

Ignoring this new literature, the SFC claims that “studies show that home and community-based approaches produce better treatment outcomes than placing children in RTFs, and are more cost-effective than RTF placements.” In the footnote to that sentence, the writers list only one study, which concerns only one type of facility, Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facilities, a particular model the provides the equivalent of in-patient psychiatric services outside a hospital setting to young people under 21 through an agreement with a State Medicaid agency. Moreover, that study does not conclude that community-based approaches produce better treatment programs. Instead, it concludes that “evidence is insufficient to assess which interventions are effective.” It is almost impossible to conduct a meaningful study comparing residential treatment to community-based approaches, since the children who are sent to RTF’s are generally much more troubled or impaired than the children who are not, and it would be hard to control for such differences without doing a randomized controlled trial. That’s why there are few if any studies that shed light on this issue.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that both the study design and the findings of the SFC reflect the Committee’s desire to show that residential care is harmful to young people. The SFC’s anti-residential bias is displayed in numerous passages throughout the report. One particularly inaccurate statement claims that “In some cases….., child welfare agencies place children in state custody without diagnoses in RTFs because they have nowhere else to place them.” As evidence, the report cites a 2013 report that showed 28.8 percent of children in “congregate care” had no clinical diagnoses. But congregate care (a term used to designate any placement that is not a foster home) is a more general term than RTF’s. The earlier report included many other types of facilities including cottage-style homes (often on the site of former orphanages and often providing high-quality family-style care) that are not intended for children with serious behavioral health needs, as well as emergency shelters that some states operate to house children before they are placed in a foster home. Given the relatively high cost of RTF’s, it would be very strange if states placed children in them for lack of another option.

Much more common is the opposite scenario: agencies placing children in foster homes unprepared to care for them, resulting in placement instability, or even letting them sleep in hotels or offices, for lack of residential treatment facilities. Articles about this problem appear frequently, including a recent report from the Midwest Newsroom (a collaboration between NPR and Midwest member stations) on the insufficient capacity of residential care for girls in Missouri and Iowa. The article starts with the story of a young woman who was placed in a residential treatment program called Missouri Girls Town after a traumatic childhood, placement in foster care and a disrupted adoption by a parent who could not handle her rebellious adolescence. This young woman credits Missouri Girls Town with completely changing the trajectory of her life. Sadly, this nonprofit program, which relies on private donations to supplement what it gets from government agencies, was designed to accommodate up to 50 girls but can only take 12 because of “staffing and funding challenges.” Stories like this have been appearing from around the country for years. There is not enough residential treatment for the young people in foster care who need it. Facilities have been shutting down due to failure of state reimbursement rates to keep up with operating costs, as well as the increasing unpopularity of residential care among state officials and legislators.

Despite the major flaws in the SFC’s analysis, there is little to object to in its recommendations. It’s hard to argue against recommendations that Congress act to improve conditions in congregate care facilities, that the companies reviewed raise their standards, and that states invest in community-based services for children with behavioral health needs and improve oversight over RTF’s. The need to invest in community-based services is particularly important because it might enable some children to be helped before their problems become so severe that they need residential care. It might even prevent some placements in foster care that occur when parents can no longer care for behaviorally challenging their children at home. But the findings of the report remain dangerous even if the recommendations are benign; they can be used to support attempts to defund residential care entirely, which would be disastrous for our most vulnerable young people and their families.

The SFC report confounds a group of residential treatment facilities poorly run by four large corporations with the entire field of residential treatment for youth with serious behavioral health care needs. The report presents a distorted picture of a field that already contains excellent, life-changing programs and where passionate and dedicated leaders are already providing or working toward trauma-informed, short-term, and effective residential services for these most vulnerable young people.

Visits to five facilities that were not operated by the four providers being investigated were used to document physical conditions in the facilities, as well as their efforts to provide education to the residents. The finding of “non-homelike,” unsanitary and unsafe conditions was based on the visited facilities rather than on the four companies that were investigated. ↩︎

The child placement crisis: It’s time to lose the slogans and find real solutions

By Judith Schagrin

A note from Child Welfare Monitor: It is a privilege to publish this important essay by Judith Schagrin. Judith earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in social work (MSW) from the University of Maryland School of Social Work. She unexpectedly found her passion in public child welfare, and more specifically, foster care after helping start an independent living preparation program for young people in care. After a decade as a foster care social worker specializing in adolescence in a large Maryland county department of social services, she supervised two different units before becoming the county’s director of foster care and adoptions, serving in this position for twenty years. She also worked part-time for the Agency’s after-hours crisis response for a decade. For almost 10 years, she served as a respite foster parent for a private foster care agency, and since 2008, has mentored a young person who aged out of care in California and came east for college. In 2001, with a little help from her friends, Judith founded Camp Connect, a weeklong sleepaway camp to reunify brothers and sisters living apart in foster care and provide memorable experiences siblings can share for a lifetime. For the past 23 years – one year virtual – she has spent the week at Camp Connect immersed in the care of Maryland’s foster children and youth.

The closing of children’s mental hospitals in the 1980s, the subsequent closure of detention centers leaving foster care to take up the slack, the movement to shutter all group homes and residential treatment programs and the prohibition of out-of-state placements have created a slow-motion train wreck whose results could have been predicted easily at every new chain in the sequence. Those results include children and youth staying in psychiatric hospitals long after being ready for discharge, “boarding” in emergency rooms and “placed” in hotels at a cost of $30,000 to $60,000 per child per month. From my 35-year vantage point as a caseworker, supervisor, and then running foster care and adoptions in a large Maryland county, I’ve had a front row seat to the evolution of this crisis and the failure to come up with real solutions.

Deinstitutionalization

The first in a series of events that created this crisis occurred in the 1980s, when the deinstitutionalization that began for adults in the 1960’s with the civil rights movement expanded to include children. Until then, youth remained in state hospital facilities for as long as a year or even more. The closure of those state facilities led to the expansion of Medicaid-funded residential treatment centers (RTC’s), that stepped in to provide the longer term care once provided in the state hospitals. In turn, group homes proliferated to meet the needs of youth discharged from RTC’s. The advent of Medicaid was instrumental in expanding prIvate psychiatric treatment options, including hospitals. But over time, Medicaid stopped funding even 30 days of treatment, limiting payment to only a few days of crisis intervention.

Today, many youth, especially older youth, are entering foster care not because of what we traditionally think of as maltreatment, but due to parental incapacity or unwillingness to care for them due to acutely problematic behavior, and behavioral health and/or developmental needs. Services to meet these needs are often missing or inadequate, and parents of children with high-intensity needs cannot find residential treatment except through the child welfare system. Medicaid doesn’t pay for treatment and care in a group home of any kind; access in Maryland requires the child welfare system’s physical or legal custody.

New approach to juvenile justice

In the early 2000’s, a series of Supreme Court decisions brought welcome changes to juvenile justice and shifted the country from the ‘get tough’ approach of the ‘80’s and 90’s to the ‘kids are different’ era. Moving from punishment to rehabilitation and minimizing detention in favor of community services makes sense on both humanitarian and neuroscience grounds. But it meant that youth who once fell under the purview of Juvenile Services now required child welfare intervention when parents or other caregivers were unwilling or unable to continue to provide care. The mother evicted from four apartments because of her son’s property damage; the grandmother who stepped in years ago and is no longer able to cope with her granddaughter after the third vehicular misuse charge and chronic episodes of running away; or a parent with younger children afraid that an older sibling known to have rages and episodes of violence will harm his siblings, are examples of desperate caregivers I have come across.

In Maryland, the first alarm that child welfare was ill-equipped to care for these youth was sounded in 2002 by local department directors in a memo to the head of the Department of Human Services. Closing detention centers was a good thing, but alternatives weren’t developed for those youth unable to live at home, and no resources were provided to help child welfare accommodate its new clients. As the closure of state psychiatric facilities and detention beds was widely celebrated, the belief that every youth had a family eager and able to provide a home was more than a touch naive, as would soon become clear.

Group home closures

Another domino fell in the early 2000’s, when group homes, many poorly administered with little oversight, became a scandal in Maryland. A series of articles in the Baltimore Sun exposed the flaws of many group care programs, and some were forced to close. With the scandals around bad group homes, the timing was perfect for state leadership, encouraged by a national advocacy group with deep pockets and the laudable dream of a family for every child, to lead a movement to shutter congregate care placements. Funding constraints, too, forced some providers out of business. Reimbursement rates did not keep up with costs, and some programs closed their doors due to inadequate reimbursement. The state lost roughly 450 beds in five or six years, including entire residential treatment center programs. Rate-setting ‘reform’, which began in October of 2021, will not be completed until July of 2026 if it stays on schedule.

At the same time group homes were being closed in Maryland, state agency leadership began to frown on out-of-state placements for youth with highly specialized needs when no placement in Maryland to meet those needs was available. Public officials with little understanding of placement resources pronounced these out-of-state placements to be evil incarnate, and an overwhelming number of bureaucratic obstacles made them nearly impossible.

With the loss of group homes as an option, we were urged to ‘re-imagine’ care for children, yet discouraged from developing individualized plans of care because insufficient flexible funding was allowed to make that happen. We’re fond of slogans in child welfare, as if words will change outcomes, but too many initiatives are about clever slogans and not about substance. If only we would review every child in group care, we were told, we would realize how many had other options. With consultation from the national advocacy group, we spent hours seriously poring over the needs of our children in congregate care and attempting to find matches with kin or foster families. Not at all surprising to our staff, “low hanging fruit” didn’t exist.

We also initiated a rigorous “Family Finding” practice, in hopes of finding kin willing to become providers with services and supports. What we learned is that youth in congregate care had already exhausted family and “kin of the heart” resources. Today it’s not clear that public officials and child welfare leaders grasp that children and youth wouldn’t be in hotels if there were any kin – fictive or otherwise – willing and able to provide care, or if parents could and would be a safe resource.

Youth with intensive, complex needs

As other doors closed, the child welfare system became increasingly tasked with providing residential behavioral health care for children and youth with high-intensity and complex needs for supervision and treatment. The differences between those involved with the juvenile justice system (and may have gone to detention centers in the past) and those who are not are often hard to discern. Both groups tend to engage in behaviors that pose a serious safety hazard to themselves or others. These behaviors may include physical violence; property damage; compulsive self-harm such as cutting or swallowing objects; chronic truancy; frequent runaway episodes; sexual victimization of siblings; aberrant sexual behaviors such as public masturbation; molesting younger siblings; participating in petty crimes; harming family pets; and generally oppositional and dysregulated behavior.

Contrary to the popular notion that the public child welfare system is tearing families apart, these are children whose families are typically frustrated, exhausted, and often eager to place their child. Some even view foster care as a much-needed punishment, imagining that when the youth is ready to “behave,” they can return home. Of course these young people have many strengths to be nurtured, but they need intensive supervision and therapeutic intervention by professionals trained to evaluate and address their special needs and work with families.

The gist of the matter is that we are serving two different out-of-home placement populations with very different needs. One is a younger population in foster care primarily due to maltreatment stemming largely from parental substance abuse and/or untreated mental illness. The other is older youth with complicated behaviors, and behavioral health needs and/or developmental disabilities. The parents and kin of the older group are asking for placement, not objecting to it, and are typically worn out and adamantly opposed to more in-home services. In spite of the stark differences in these two populations, our policymakers and those upon whom they rely have failed to recognize their needs are not the same.

In Maryland and other states, treatment, or ‘therapeutic,’ foster care stepped in to accommodate this new population of older, harder to serve foster youth. To some extent this approach has been effective as an alternative to congregate care, but it’s not the panacea some would like to believe. The desperate need for foster families willing to care for these youth means there’s a certain amount of pressure to lower expectations and even turn a blind eye to foster parents that do a less than stellar job. Tales of locked refrigerators and youth left sitting on the stoop at the end of the school day until the caregiver came home soon proliferated. However, we were told by representatives of a national advocacy group that, “Youth are better off moving from shabby foster home to shabby foster home than in the very best congregate care.” In my own experience, instability begets instability and there’s little more soul-sucking than being rejected from family after family.

Setting aside the question of quality, foster care, whether treatment or not, has great challenges recruiting homes for youth with weapons charges, those with a history of drug dealing, or whose parents have refused to pick them up from the police after another runaway episode. “Cutters” and “swallowers” need 24/7 supervision to keep them safe and in general, kin have already tried to provide care long before the child’s entry into state custody. With the closure of group homes and residential treatment centers in Maryland and the prohibition on out-of-state placements, finding placements willing to accept youth with high-intensity needs became literally impossible. As a result, for years now children have been left in psychiatric hospitals (sometimes for months) after “ready” for discharge, and others are ‘boarding’ in emergency rooms for weeks or months.

A failure to recognize reality

Instead of recognizing the lack of capacity to serve those youth with nowhere to go after being hospitalized, hospital representatives, public officials, and legislators blamed caseworkers for not ‘picking children up’, as though they were simply lazy and incompetent. “Advocates” proposed legislation imposing more caseworker accountability as the solution, as though if caseworkers worked harder and filled out more forms, placements that didn’t exist would magically appear. Fortunately, none of the legislation passed, but being a lonely voice trying to explain the source of the problem wasn’t lazy caseworkers or enough forms was painful. Public officials, leaders and advocates also clamored for more “prevention” services, not recognizing the acute needs of older youth developed over many years and that new services authorized today are not going to keep them safely at home.

During my 20 years as the director for my county’s foster care and adoptions program, I can’t count the nail-biting times we came close to not finding a placement for a child – but we were always able to pull something together. The state made funding available for a 1:1 staff person (or sometimes 2:1) we could offer existing providers, allowing us to use that as a bargaining chip. Of course, increasing reimbursement rates and staff salaries would have been far less expensive than millions for extra staff to support ill-equipped placements, but that change in fiscal allocation has yet to happen.

Five years have now passed since I retired, and hotel placements have become not a rarity but a regular necessity. At the rate of $30,000 to $60,000 per child each month (not including damages to hotels) to warehouse children in hotel rooms supervised by an untrained aide – one can only imagine what that kind of money could be doing productively for children. Caseworkers are overseeing the most precarious and risky “placements,” and being ‘hotel reservation clerks’ isn’t the reason competent social workers choose to do the work. We’ve all heard the tales of youth stealing their 1:1’s car; or youth locking themselves in their rooms doing what we don’t know; a youth who overdosed on his medication; parties taking place with the acquiescence of the 1:1; youth harassing guests; and the youth who leaped over the reservation desk to try to steal cash.

Over the years there have been many, many meetings among high ranking state officials and others; ironically, these meetings didn’t include the experienced and knowledgeable child welfare staff responsible for the children. Lots of strategies, goals, and plans too – a personal favorite was the goal of instructing local department staff on hospital discharge planning, as if they weren’t already experts. Despite all the meetings and all the hand-wringing, progress meeting the needs of the children in our care, or soon to be in our care when parents abandon them at the hospital or elsewhere, has been negligible. Years that could have been spent on developing and promoting new model programs have been wasted. In the meantime, Congress saw fit based on testimony from well-heeled advocacy groups to pass the Family First Prevention Services Act, which limited congregate care even more by restricting funding to approvable options based on criteria seemingly pulled out of a hat.

Today, the deepening and pervasive placement crisis is affecting nearly every state and attracting media attention around the country. Given the financial resources dedicated to keeping children in hotels, finances clearly aren’t the issue. And it certainly isn’t about quality of care, since hotel rooms, overstays in hospitals, and boarding in emergency rooms rank far below a quality congregate care program as a suitable home for a child.

What is to be done?

In the short run, Maryland and other states need respite programs for young people awaiting placements in hospitals, emergency rooms, and hotels. In the long run, we must acknowledge child welfare’s responsibility not only for maltreated children, but also those with high-intensity needs for supervision and treatment once served by other child-serving organizations. We need to bring the finest minds together to reimagine how residential care is provided, and its role in the continuum of child welfare resources to meet the needs of older youth entering foster care because of needs related to behavioral health and/or developmental disabilities. That process should include some of the scholars who have been studying the use of congregate care in other countries where it is more highly valued as a treatment and a professional field. Exploring the development of real alternatives to congregate care is also a worthy investment. Finally, the unintended consequences of the Family First Prevention Services Act that disincentivized needed placements without a credible replacement must be remedied.

How many more years until we wake up? And how many children will have to be harmed? A colleague had a quote in her office that stays with me always, “when we are doing something with somebody else’s child we wouldn’t do with our own, we need to stop and ask ourselves why.” Who among us would consent to our own children boarding in emergency rooms, on overstay at hospitals, or ‘placed’ in hotel rooms? If that’s not okay for our own children, it shouldn’t be okay for the children in our state’s custody either.

The misuse of “lived experience” in child welfare

Vanessa Peoples: Gofundme, https://www.gofundme.com/f/nb2wut-help-vanessa-get-back-on-her-feet

“Those closest to the problem have the answers to solving it. Every child welfare policy and project should prioritize incorporating the expertise, perspectives and experiences of the people whose lives have been directly impacted by the system. We call this ‘centering lived experience.'” There is a lot of truth in these words from an organization called Think of Us and a lot of good in the current focus in child welfare and other fields on considering the actual experience of people affected by systems when developing new policies and practices for these systems. But the emphasis on lived experience has potential pitfalls. When experiences that support a particular perspective are highlighted and those that contradict it are not, and when evidence from data and research are ignored in favor of narratives that may be outliers, there is a risk of adopting policies and practices that hurt, rather than help, children and families.

As described in a brilliant article by Naomi Schaefer Riley and Sarah Font, it is “individuals and groups with a platform” like foundations, government agencies, and journalists, that “select the people with lived experience to serve on advisory boards, testify to Congress, give media interviews, or otherwise disseminate their story.” The “lived experiences” that are selected tend to support the views of what I call the “child welfare establishment,” which includes federal, and many state and local child welfare agency leaders; foundations and nonprofits; consulting firms; and influential commentators and writers. They tend to believe that foster care is harmful and rarely necessary, and that on the rare occasions when children are youth must be placed in foster care, they should almost never be placed in “congregate care” placements such as group homes or residential treatment centers.

Let us start with the idea that foster care is rarely necessary, and the child protective services (or the “family policing system” as author Dorothy Roberts and others put it) removes children from loving parents who just need a little bit of help, thus harming rather than helping children. The story of Vanessa Peoples illustrated this thesis so well that it was shared by numerous media outlets before being picked up by Dorothy Roberts to begin her book, Torn Apart, about how the child welfare system “destroys Black families.” Peoples was a mother of three small children who was apparently doing everything right; she was married, going to nursing school, about to rent a townhouse and was even a cancer patient. But Peoples attracted the attention of both the police and child welfare and ended up hogtied and carted off to jail by police, placed on the child abuse registry, and subjected to months of monitoring by CPS after she lost sight of her toddler at a family picnic in June 17 when a cousin was supposed to be watching him.

From the information provided by Roberts and others, it sounds like Peoples’ was the victim of a hyperactive agency and police department, but it is also possible that critical details were omitted from the narrative. Moreover, Roberts did not include any narratives from people with a very different experience, like this one from Kiana Deane writing in The Imprint: “For me, meth became the pernicious thief that stole my home, my sense of belonging and, at times, my well-being. Being placed in a foster home saved me. Though foster parenting is not for everyone, I couldn’t imagine a world without the protection of the foster care system.” The Kiana Deanes are not asked to testify before Congress, highlighted in books by trending authors, or interviewed by the mainstream media for stories on foster care. (But kudos to The Imprint, which has published many narratives from youths who are grateful that they were placed in foster care.)

Then there’s the issue of group homes versus foster family homes. We all “know” that group homes and residential treatment centers are houses of horror because that is the only thing we ever hear. In the two hearings it held on the Family First Act, the Senate Finance Committee heard from only one person with “lived experience” in a group home, and that was Lexie Gruber, who told Senators about the locked food cabinets, punitive disciplinary system, over-medication, and the lack of emotional support that characterized her group home experience in Connecticut. But Senators did not hear from anyone like Imani Young, who wrote in The Imprint: “Eventually, OCFS (the Office of Children and Family Services) brought me to a wonderful placement called St. Christopher’s. …While in the NY child welfare system, I wanted to feel safe, comfortable, respected and not neglected, and St. Christopher’s made me feel all of THOSE above. They taught me independent living skills, helped me manage my money, got the counseling I needed, and taught me that there’s more to life.”

Other than the selective presentation of lived experiences to be highlighted, another problem with using individual narratives to develop policy is that each person presents their own version of their story, which may leave out crucial details. It is rare for a journalist, author, or Congressional committee to check up on the accuracy of a story that supports the broader narrative they are seeking to portray. Vanessa Peoples’ wanted to portray herself as an innocent victim who did nothing to merit the intervention of CPS, and Roberts had no interest in finding inaccuracies in her story. Lexie Gruber, too, was intent on making the case against group care. She did not talk about the support that she must have gotten from the group home in order to get into college, or any other positive aspects of the care she received.

When the media, congressional committees or advocacy groups select only one set of lived experiences to highlight, real harm can result. Take the passage of the flawed Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) in 2018 after only two hearings with a “curated” group of invited speakers who were clearly chosen to support passage of the bill. Lexie Gruber was the only former foster youth who spoke at the hearing on group homes and other congregate care placements, which was titled No Place to Grow Up: How to Safely Reduce Reliance on Foster Care Group Homes. When it was finally passed in 2018, FFPSA contained drastic restrictions on federal reimbursements for group homes and other residential placements. I wrote in a recent post about how those restrictions have contributed to a placement crisis around the country, with the most troubled foster youth spending weeks or months in offices, hotels, jails, hospitals and other inappropriate and harmful settings. I don’t claim that hearing from Lexie Gruber caused Congress to impose drastic restrictions on group homes, but it was certainly used to support that action.

Don’t get me wrong. Every individual’s story has value. Such stories allow us to visualize the reality behind dry data and statistics. But, to make policy, we need to know whether a story we hear is an outlier or representative of the average experience. It’s not that outliers don’t matter; we need to have protections to ensure that the worst possible outcomes (like the killing of 16-year-old Cornelius Fredericks in a residential treatment center run by Sequel Youth and Family Services) don’t occur. But making policy assuming the outliers represent the majority can lead to disastrous outcomes, like the congregate care provisions of FFPSA.

In contrast to individual narratives, surveying a representative sample of people with lived experience in a particular setting or system can provide information that is useful for policy purposes. Such information is not guaranteed to be accurate; survey response rates are often suboptimal and those who do respond may differ systematically from those who don’t. Nevertheless, such surveys are a much more accurate way of assessing lived experience than relying on individual anecdotes.

And it happens that in child welfare, surveys of older foster care youth and alumni present a much more positive picture than what has been presented by the child welfare establishment and the media. In four studies of former foster care youth reviewed by Barth et al, majorities said that they were lucky to have been placed in care. Most recently, the CalYOUTH study followed a cohort of 727 youth who were in foster care at age 17, with personal interviews every other year until they were 23 years old. At 23, 68.4 percent of the 621 respondents said that they were lucky to have been placed in foster care. And 57.4 percent were “generally satisfied” with their experience in foster care.

There are few studies of youth perspectives on residential care, but a recently published study in a leading child welfare journal reports on the experience of 450 youths placed in 127 licensed residential care programs in Florida between 2018 and 2019. The youths responded to a validated quality assessment that asked them to rate their facilities on elements of service quality in seven domains based on evidence and current best practice standards. Overall, youth provided high ratings of their residential programs on all seven domains. The mean ratings indicated that youths felt their facilities were “mostly to completely” meeting the standards across all domains.¹

This does not mean that there are no children who could have stayed safely with their families and not been placed in foster care had the right help been provided. Nor does it mean that there are no terrible group homes. The current placement crisis (to which FFPSA has contributed) means that more youths will be placed in neglectful or even abusive homes or facilities than if this crisis did not exist. But when advocates of one point of view choose to share only those experiences that support their viewpoint, the use of lived experience to support particular policy proposals can lead to policy choices that are harmful to the people they are intended to help.

Note

But not all surveys are based on large, scientifically-chosen samples. For example, the nonprofit,Think of Us, which has the aim of “centering lived experience,” published a report called Away from Home: Youth Experiences of Institutional Placements in Foster Care. That report is based on the responses of 78 young people residing in what it called “institutional placements, which included group homes, homes for pregnant and parenting teens, and therapeutic residential treatment facilities around the country. Among the conclusions of the report were that institutional placements were prisonlike (“carceral”), punitive and traumatic for their residents and failed to meet child welfare mandates to provide safety and wellbeing. The methodology section, relegated to an Appendix, reveals that the 78 participants were recruited through an “open call for participation through youth advisory boards and community partners.” Assuming that these are advisory boards and community partners of Think of Us, and knowing that the nonprofit and its CEO are associated with the dominant viewpoint on group care, one has to wonder whether the recruitment process produced an unbiased sample.

Residential care in child welfare: An international perspective

In my last post, Family First at five: Not much to celebrate, I discussed how the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) made it more difficult to provide residential care (often pejoratively called “congregate care” by the Act’s supporters) for the most troubled foster youth while doing little to ensure the development of alternatives. The result has not been surprising–an exacerbated placement crisis, with foster youth around the nation sleeping in hotels, offices, jails and other inappropriate settings. An important new book provides an international perspective on residential care. It shows that the U.S. ranks very low in the percentage of foster youth that are in residential care, casting doubt on the advisability of trying to further reduce residential placements. The obvious conclusion is that we would do better to increase the quality of residential care by raising standards for staff.

The new book, Revitalizing Residential Care for Children and Youth, is a compilation of research on residential care in 16 high and middle-income countries, edited by James K. Whittaker, Lisa Holmes, Jorge F. Del Valle, and Sigrid James, who are professors at universities in the US, England, Spain, and Germany, respectively.¹ The editors define “residential care” as “any group setting where children spend the night,” encompassing settings that vary in size and function and that operate under the auspices of child welfare, juvenile corrections, or mental health. The 16 countries are viewed through a common template, making comparisons possible. However, there are problems with such comparisons. As explained in the second chapter, countries differ in the terms they use for different types of care and how they define these terms, among other things. The editors’ definition of “residential care” does not ensure that the same facilities are being counted across nations. A small group home with paid staff might be classed as “foster care” in some countries, and some facilities (like those for youth offenders) might be counted in the residential totals for some countries and not others.

Keeping in mind the impossibility of obtaining data that is totally comparable across countries, there appears to be a striking variation between nations in the utilization of residential care for youths who are in out-of-home placements. The editors defined the residential care utilization rate as the proportion of out-of-home care dedicated to residential care rather than family foster care or other types of out-of-home placements. This percentage ranged from seven percent in Ireland and Australia to 97 percent in Portugal, as shown in Figure 29.1, which is reproduced below. The United States had the third lowest residential care utilization rate, with ten percent of children in out-of-home placements being in residential settings. Moreover, the number of children in U.S. residential care fell by about 25 percent between 2015 and 2019. According to the editors, it appears that countries in the low-utilization category have made legislative changes (like FFPSA and California’s Continuum of Care Reform in the US) that have led to drastic reductions in residential care. But the countries with medium utilization rates (between 30 and 55 percent) seem to be focused on improving residential care by strengthening the elements believed to be associated with quality care rather than reducing the utilization of residential care.²

Source: James Whittaker et al, *Revitalizing Residential Care for Children and Youth*, page 430.

The authors also found great variability in the education and training requirements for residential care staff. These range from no minimum qualification in the United States, Canada and Australia, to high school level (Israel, Argentina and Portugal), to rigorous multiyear vocational training and/or university education in the other countries. A number of countries use both vocationally trained and university educated staff. For example, in Germany, about 70 percent of residential care staff hold a 3.5 to five-year vocational degree as educators (or in fewer cases two years as assistants) and 30 percent have Bachelors’ degrees in social work or “social pedagogy.”³

The editors found that it is countries with lower educational requirements for staff that have turned against residential care and have sought a drastic reduction of its use. Among those countries was, no surprise, the United States, along with Australia and England. In contrast, countries with a high qualification requirement have higher utilization of residential care. This correlation is not surprising. There is no doubt, say the volume’s editors, that “the quality of the services is directly related, in any field, to the qualifications, training and experience of the professionals who provide them.” In child welfare, they argue, “[I]t is difficult to carry out the work without a qualification based on the learning of very diverse theories related to child development, the clinical expressions of trauma, listening and helping techniques, the framework of family relationships, and ecological theories.” The editors suggest the existence of a vicious cycle, where low staff qualifications may led to poor quality and outcomes, which in turn lead to reduced funding, making it harder to recruit well-qualified staff.

Unfortunately, available data do not tell us what proportion of children and youth in residential care in each country are there for time-limited treatment for behavioral issues with a plan to “step down” to a family setting. Available data suggest that a majority or large minority of children and youth in residential care in the middle-utilization countries have a mental health diagnosis, which does necessarily mean that they are in a time-limited therapeutic setting. Most likely, the residential care population in the middle-utilization countries is a combination of youths with issues that require treatment in residential care and those who could be in family foster care if available As one of the editors notes in the introductory chapter, “residential care across the globe …does not seem to be limited to the narrow treatment-oriented and time-limited setting it is generally reduced to in several Anglo-American nations. In fact, in many countries,…., children and youth still spend years in residential care programs.”

The assumption that family foster care is always the better choice unless a child cannot function in such a setting may be unique to the English-speaking countries. Small, family style group homes, whether freestanding or part of a campus of such homes, may be difficult to distinguish from foster homes, especially if they use a house-parent model. In fact, the authors say, some countries classify “a small “family group” home, staffed by paid staff” as a foster home. I have argued in the past that high-quality family-like group homes may be better for children than mediocre or poor-quality foster homes and are especially appropriate for siblings. Indeed, as discussed in the book, France has 28 children’s villages, which are family-like units especially for siblings.

The evidence shared by Whittaker et al. has important implications for the United States. Given our low position on the scale of residential care utilization, one might logically conclude that further lowering the number of children in residential care would be unrealistic. In the two countries with lower residential utilization rates than the United States, Ireland and Australia, news accounts document an urgent need for more foster parents, with young people being separated from siblings, moving from one emergency placement to another for lack of a suitable home, and spending nights at hotels. Instead of trying to bring the residential share of foster care even lower, the U.S. might be better advised to follow the example of countries like Germany and Finland, which are focusing on improving residential care programs rather than eliminating them.

Cross-national comparisons are valuable in many policy areas, and the absence of such comparisons in child welfare debates is particularly unfortunate. Reading this book brings home the lack of international comparisons informing Congress when it passed the FFPSA. As far as I know, the supporters of FFPSA’s drastic restrictions on residential care never referred to other countries’ use of residential options; that’s not surprising as such comparisons may have led to uncomfortable questions about the premise that too many foster children and youth were in residential care.

Some members of Congress who supported the residential restrictions in FFPSA may have been more concerned about budgets than ideological objections to residential care. Improving residential care costs money, while cutting it may appear to help balance budgets. FFPSA was designed to be budget-neutral, so that restrictions for funding of residential care were required in order to offset the increase in spending for services to families. And it apparently did not matter to Congress if those costs were by necessity picked up by states that had no other options: the federal government would see the savings.

Perhaps the federal coffers have benefited from the restrictions on federal funding for residential care, especially because federal spending for the “prevention services” side of Family First has been negligible. But it is hard to believe that states have gained financially from the new law. Spending as much as $2,000 a night for a hotel room complete with staffing and security for foster youth, as Washington State is reportedly doing, cannot possibly be a better use of funds than improving and expanding residential care. And the effects on children and youth are disastrous. One can only hope that state leaders will be brave and smart enough to take the first steps in the direction of revitalizing residential care to be a nurturing and therapeutic environment for children and youth and a field that is a source of pride for its practitioners.

Revitalizing Residential Care for Children and Youth should be required reading for anyone involved in making policy or drafting legislation regarding foster care. But it is probably too much to hope that the anti-residential crusaders will choose to read this important book. They find it more comfortable to continue believing that cutting funds for these programs without providing an alternative will save money and help children at the same time.

Notes

The countries studied include Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotlad, Spain, and the United States.
Portugal, with 97 percent of its out-of-home youth in residential care, is in violation of its own law establishing residential care as the last option for out-of-home care. It appears that the country has not developed the supply of foster parents needed to shift the system toward home-based care. Argentina, with 86 percent of children separated from their families living in residential care, is only in the early stages of developing family-based foster care. In Israel, a system of residential facilities or “youth villages” developed as a means of social integration of immigrant groups, starting with survivors of the Holocaust. This system of residential care operates under the MInistry of Education. A separate child welfare system developed later under the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Social Services, to serve the needs of maltreated children, and 63 percent of the children in this system are also in youth villages.
According to the editors, “[s]ocial pedagogy is grounded in a holistic understanding of the person and espouses participation, democratic processes, self-determination, and social and moral education within the context of everyday life as guiding values and principles for practice. Individualization (n contrast to standardization) and professional decision-making are further hallmarks of this approach.”

No Way to Treat a Child: a needed corrective to the dominant narrative

No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives

These days, It is a bit difficult to be a left-leaning liberal while also being an advocate for abused and neglected children. I would never have expected that a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Naomi Schaefer Riley, would be one of my closest allies in child advocacy. Or that my proudest achievement since starting this blog would be my service on a child welfare innovation working group that she organized out of AEI, or that, with a few quibbles over details, I would agree with the main points of her new book. But that is the case in these strange times, in which many of my fellow liberals appear effectively indifferent to the fate of children whose parents they view as victims of a racist “family policing system.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a journalist, a former editor for the Wall Street Journal, and the author of five previous books. In her new book, No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives, uses examples, data and quotes from experts to show in heartbreaking detail how policymakers from the left and the right have converged in creating a child welfare system that puts adults first. Much of this occurs because in deciding how to treat abused or neglected children, the people who create and carry out child welfare law and policy “consider factors that are completely unrelated to and often at odds with a child’s best interests,” as Riley puts it.

Take family preservation and reunification, for example. Instead of placing the safety of the child as the highest priority, Riley illustrates that child welfare agencies leave many children in dangerous homes long past the time they should have been removed, with sometimes fatal results. They give parents more and more chances to get their children back, long after the law says that parental rights should be terminated. The book is full of stories of children ripped away from loving foster parents (often the only parents they have ever known) only to be returned to biological parents without evidence of meaningful changes in the behaviors that led to the children being removed.

Not only do today’s advocates of “family first” wrest children away from loving families to return home, but Riley describes how they send other hapless children to join distant relatives that they never knew, on the grounds that family is always best even if the relative does not appear until as much as two years after an infant has been placed in foster care. The fact that a relative may display the same dysfunction that the parent showed may be ignored. I would add, based on personal experience, that in my foster care work I often met grandmothers who seemed to have gained wisdom (and finally, for example, gave up drugs) with age, as well as aunts and uncles who avoided the family dysfunction and went on to lead productive lives, making their homes available to the children of their less well-adjusted siblings. But Riley is right to say we should consider not just blood, but also fitness and bonding before removing a child from a good pre-adoptive home to live with a relative.

As Riley describes, one of the primary factors that is now taking precedence over a child’s best interest is that of race or ethnicity. Riley explains how data on the overrepresentation of Black and Native American children in foster care in relation to their size is being attributed to racism in child protective services, as I have explained elsewhere, ignoring the evidence that the underlying disparities in abuse and neglect are largely responsible for these differences in foster care placement. And they don’t seem to have a problem with holding Black parents to a lower standard of parenting than White children to equalize the ratios. Moreover, many of these “racial activists” are recommending eliminating child welfare systems entirely along with abolishing the police. As Riley states, Native children are the canaries in the coal mine, “for what happens when you hold some parents to a lower standard, as we have done with the Indian Child Welfare Act with devastating effects for Native children.

Another way we subordinate the interests of children is by minimizing their parents’ responsibility for their treatment by saying it is simply due to poverty. Riley addresses the common trope that “neglect,” the reason that 63 percent of children children were removed from their families in 2019, is “just a code word for poverty,” a myth that I have addressed as well. I’d venture that anyone who has worked with families in child welfare knows there is often much more going on in these families than poverty alone, including substance abuse, mental illness, and domestic violence. Riley puts her finger on an important issue when she suggests that part of the problem may be that we use a general category called “neglect” as the reason behind many removals. However, I don’t agree with her recommendation to discard neglect as a reason for removal. As I explain in a recent post, we need to distinguish between the over-arching categories of “abuse” and “neglect” and the specific subcategories of neglect such as lack of supervision, educational neglect, and medical neglect. Contrary to Riley’s suggestion that they are types of neglect, substance abuse and mental illness are factors that contribute to it. This important information should be included in the record but should not be confounded with types of neglect.

Another way that policymakers disregard the best interests of the child is by deciding that foster homes are better than institutions for almost all children instead of recognizing that some children need a more intensive level of care for a limited time, or that others can thrive in group homes that simulate a family setting but provide more intensive attention than a typical foster home can provide. The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which went into effect for all states on October 1, does allow for children to be placed temporarily in therapeutic institutions, although it sets some unreasonable limits on these institutions and on placement of children in them. But it does not provide any funding for placement in highly-regarded family-like group settings such as the Florida Sheriff’s Youth Ranches. (I’m not sure why Riley says in later in the book that FFPSA “is looking like another piece of federal legislation that will be largely ignored by states, many of which have already been granted waivers from it.” Those waivers were temporary and there is no way states can ignore the restrictions on congregate care).

In her chapter entitled “Searching for Justice in Family Court, Riley describes the catastrophic state of our family courts, which she attributes to a shortage of judges, their lack of training in child development and child welfare, and their leniency with attorneys and parents who do not show up in court. As a model for reform, Riley cites a family drug court in Ohio that meets weekly, hears from service providers working with parents, and imposes real consequences (like jail time) on parents who don’t follow orders. But this type of intensive court experience is much more expensive. These programs are small, and expanding this service to everyone would require a vast infusion of resources.

I appreciated Riley’s chapter on why CPS investigators are underqualified and undertrained.” Having graduated from a Master in Social Work (MSW) program as a midcareer student in 2009, I could not agree with her more when she states that the “capture of schools of social work and child welfare generally by a social-justice ideology has produced the kind of thinking that guides social welfare policy.” I’d add that some students are ill-prepared for their studies and may not get what they need while in school to exercise the best judgment, critical thinking, effective data analysis, and other important hard and soft skills. Riley suggests that the function of a CPS worker is really more akin to the police function than to the type of traditional social work function performed by other social workers in child welfare–those who manage in-home and foster care cases. As a matter of fact, Riley quotes my post suggesting that CPS Investigation should be either a separate specialty in MSW programs or could be folded into the growing field of Forensic Social Work.

Riley’s chapter on the promise of using predictive analytics in child welfare shows how concerns that using algorithms in child welfare would exacerbate current discrimination are not borne out by history or real-world results. Use of an algorithm to inform hotline screening decisions in Allegheny County Pennsylvania actually reduced the disparities in the opening of cases between Black and White children. As Riley states, this should not surprise anyone because data has often served to reduce the impact of bias by those who are making decisions. As she puts it, “if you are concerned about the presence of bias among child-welfare workers and the system at large, you should be more interested in using data, not less.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, it is Riley’s two chapters on the role of faith-based organizations in child welfare that made me uncomfortable. Riley describes the growing role of these groups, especially large evangelical organizations, in recruiting, training, and supporting foster and adoptive parents.” Like it or not,” she states, “most foster families in this country take in needy children at least in part because their religious beliefs demand such an action.” But the Christian Alliance for Orphans, an organization often quoted by Riley, was one of the groups behind the “orphan fever” that took hold among mainstream evangelical churches in the first decade of this century. Many families were not prepared for the behaviors of their new children and some turned to a book by a fundamentalist homeschooling guru named Michael Pearl that advocated physical discipline starting when children are less than a year old. Many of the adoptions were failures, some children were illegally sent back to their own countries, some children were abused, and at least two died of the abuse. But Riley’s narrative suggests that many evangelical churches working with foster youth are using a trauma-focused parenting model (Trust-Based Relational Intervention) that is diametrically opposed to the Pearl approach. Nevertheless, the association of evangelical Christianity with a “spare the rod” parenting philosophy as well as the possibility that saving souls is part of the motivation for fostering or adoption, make me a bit queasy about over-reliance on evangelical families as foster parents, and I would have liked to see Riley address this issue.

In her esteem for religious communities and their role in child welfare, Riley is worried that some jurisdictions will bar all organizations with whom they work from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, driving religions institutions out of business. Since the book was written, however, the Supreme Court has ruled that the City of Philadelphia violated the First Amendment when it stopped referring children to Catholic Social Services for foster care and adoption because the agency would not certify same-sex foster parents. So this threat may be dwindling for the time being. In general, unlike many liberals, I agree with Riley that, as long as there is an agency to work with any potential foster parent, we should “let a thousand flowers bloom” rather than insisting that every agency accept every potential parent.

Riley ends the book with a list of recommendations for making the system more responsive to the needs of children rather than adults. She agrees with liberals that we need an influx of financial resources as well as “better stewardship of the money we already spend.” We need both a massive reform of our child welfare agencies and a family court overhaul, she argues. She wants recruitment of more qualified candidates for child welfare agencies and better training for them. She urges the child welfare system to move away from “bloodlines and skin color” and allow a child to form new family bonds when the family of origin cannot love and protect that child. I certainly hope that policymakers on both sides of the aisle read and learn from this important book.

When Ideology Outweighs what’s Best for Kids: the case of San Pasqual Academy

In 1998, something extraordinary happened in San Diego County. Galvanized by the heartbreaking stories of local foster youth who were disgorged at the age of 18 from a system that never gave them the tools to thrive, the community came together to create a place where foster youth could prepare for happy and productive futures. In 2001, the San Pasqual Academy (SPA) opened as a result of this unique moment of community solidarity and altruism. Twenty years and over 400 graduates later, SPA is on the chopping block because of federal and state legislation that eliminates any funding for placements that are not standard foster homes, unless they are providing temporary intensive treatment for severe mental health conditions.

The story of SPA began in 1998 when James R. Millikan, the presiding judge of the San Diego Juvenile Court, arranged for a group of foster youths to speak to the County Board of Supervisors, as described in a moving video. It was a transformational moment for many of the listeners, who were essentially unaware of the plight of older foster youth. Supervisors were riveted by young foster care alumni, who described surviving as many 30 placements and being discharged to the streets at the age of 18, with no supports or tools for success. This magic moment resulted in the creation of SPA.

In a rare moment of collaboration by multiple agencies and community leaders, SPA was developed with the support of Judge Milliken, the County Board of Supervisors, the Child Welfare Director, the Office of Education, as well as attorneys, social workers, healthcare providers, educators, law enforcement, foster youth, and other community members. They found a disused boarding school for sale on 238 acres, refurbished it, and opened it in September 2001. The goal was to “provide a safe, stable and caring environment” where youth [could] work toward their high school diplomas, prepare for college and/or a vocation, and develop independent living skills.” The Academy was “designed to be a place its students can call home, providing stable relationships needed for development of social skills and future relationships during their student experience at the Academy and beyond.”

SPA services can be classified into four categories: residential, education, work readiness and child welfare.

Residential: The residential component is run by New Alternatives, Inc., a private nonprofit. Youths live in family-style homes with house parents for up to eight children per cottage. “Foster grandparents,” who live on campus for reduced rent, mentor, tutor and engage students in hobbies and activities. An on-campus health and wellness center provides comprehensive health care, including mental health. Housing and supportive services are also available to Academy alumni for up to 24 months. (Twelve alumni are living on campus right now, taking advantage of this crucial safety net in the midst of a pandemic.)
Education: The onsite high school program is operated by the County Office of Education. After-school activities include student government, athletics, yearbook, and dances.
Work Readiness: Provided by the San Diego Workforce Partnership, services include tutoring, career counseling, job training, internships, employment, vocational electives, and assistance in creating resumes and portfolios.
Child Welfare: Social workers from the County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) onsite provide case management, services and advocacy.

The resources provided to SPA students are enhanced by the support of Friends of San Pasqual Academy, a dedicated group of community members who provide additional financial support and volunteer work. Friends’ support pays for special events, school supplies, and personal items, all designed to give students a “normal high school experience.” The Friends raise money for maintenance and upgrades to the cottages, the pool and other parts of the facility. They have leveraged outside resources to help SPA. The San Diego Chargers helped build the football field and the Padres built the softball field for SPA.

SPA truly embodies the definition of wraparound services, and the research shows that it works. To assess the effectiveness of the SPA model, New Directions commissioned a ten-year research study that followed 478 SPA alumni, including all youth who attended the academy between February 2001 and June 2011 and left the program between July 2002 and July 2012. The results were summarized in an article titled “Comprehensive residential education: a promising model for emerging adults in foster care,” which was published in Children and Youth Services Review. The findings were impressive. As the authors put it, “Foster youth who participated in the Academy until they were 18 years old or older attained high school diplomas or GEDs at rates far above state and national standards for foster youth. Of the youth who were at least 18 years old when discharged from the Academy, 92% of them graduated with a high school diploma or GED, which greatly exceeds Californias high school graduation/GED rates for foster youth of 45% and for the general population of California youth of 79%….In fact, we are not aware of any other program serving foster youth in the United States…with such high rates of high school diploma/GED completion.”

The evaluators concluded that “the Academy provided its alumni with safety, significant relationships with adults, and well-being that exceed state and national standards for foster youth. Those youth who attended the Academy for longer periods of time through their 18th birthday and participated in extracurricular activities had the most positive outcomes, including safe housing, employment, access to healthcare, attainment of a high school diploma or GED, and attendance at institutions of higher education. The Academy appears to provide a stable, comprehensive residential education program that helps foster youth successfully emerge into adulthood.” A preliminary draft of a follow-up study focusing on current students and alumni is equally glowing.

In addition to the spectacular evaluation mentioned above, SPA has been the subject of several other flattering reports. Five San Diego County “grand juries” (groups appointed by Superior Court judges to investigate, evaluate, and report on the actions of local government) and four county Juvenile Justice Commissions have issued glowing reports on SPA. The most recent report, by the group meeting from 2016-2017, lamented the fact that SPA was operating at only 50 percent of its capacity of 184 students. The Grand Jury recommended that SPA be fully utilized to make full use of its life-saving potential. San Diego’s Juvenile Justice Commission has also issued multiple flattering reports on SPA. In its most recent report, issued in 2018, the commission stated that “SPA continues to be a model facility delivering essentially full service, wrap around services in a residential setting to foster youth.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence of SPA’s life-changing impact, the number of children at SPA declined from 139 in April 2011 to 69 as of February 1, 2021. The most important reason for declining referrals appears to have been the decline in support by child welfare leaders for what is often called “congregate care,” usually meaning any type of setting other than a foster home. This change in mindset was created in large part through influence of two wealthy organizations started by the same family, Casey Family Programs and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, that have used their financial resources to produce reports like Every Kid Needs a Family, lobby legislators, and provide free consultation with states. With the help of the “Casey Alliance,” a new narrative has been created that that all “congregate care” settings are prison-like institutions and any family home is better than a group setting for almost every child.

The change in mindset eventually resulted in legislative changes. California’s Continuum of Care Act, passed in 2015. ended the placement of foster youth in group settings except to provide short term therapeutic care. Thanks to SPA’s known track record and strong support, pilot program was authorized to allow SPA to operate through December 2021. But passage by the U.S. Congress of the the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) sealed SPA’s fate. Like Continuum of Care, FFPSA essentially eliminated federal funding for placement in settings other than foster homes except for short-term placements for youth who assessed to have a diagnosis that requires a level of care that a family cannot provide. With the implementation of FFPSA scheduled for October, the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) decided to advance the date of SPA’s closure to avoid having to use state funds to maintain it until December. In an undated letter, CDAA informed San Diego County DHHS that SPA must close by October.

Both Continuum of Care and FFPSA were based on the belief that children almost always do better in families than in other, more institutional settings. But as we have written, supporters often misuse data and research to support this belief. Research generally shows children in group care having poorer outcomes than those in foster care. But these studies do not account for the fact that children placed in group care generally have much more severe issues, which is why they were placed in group care in the first place. Moreover, supporters of “a family for every child” fail to define the concept of a family. The cottages at SPA and many other residential facilities offer a family setting, with house parents who play the parental role, as one house parent eloquently described in the video cited above. SPA homes are much more like families than many foster homes, where the foster parent has little interaction with the youth and provides little besides room and board. In fact, the residential component of SPA could be called “enhanced foster care” more accurately than congregate care.

And that raises the related concept of quality, which the reformers ignored. Quality matters much more than the type of setting. It is likely that most parents whose child had to leave home, would prefer a high-quality group setting (even if not family-style) for their children than a low-quality family setting. Anyone who has worked in foster care will know the difficulty of obtaining high-quality settings for older foster youth. Due to the scarcity of foster families, especially those willing to accept older youth, few jurisdictions can afford to be choosy enough about whom they accept and retain. What they do get more often than not are foster homes that provide little beyond room and board (and often those are barely adequate), foster parents who never set foot in the child’s school, refuse to take them to the doctor and the therapist, and quickly return difficult youths to the agency–resulting in multiple placements for each foster youth. Moreover, in my experience as a foster care social worker in the District of Columbia, few of my high school age clients participated in extracurricular activities because foster parents were unwilling to pick them up late from school or take them to weekend games, performances or other activities. Yet, engagement in after-school activities is linked with higher academic performance and college attendance, better health, and fewer problem behaviors.

Opponents of group care also ignore the problem of sibling separation. Many children placed in traditional foster homes are separated from one or more siblings because foster families do not have room for sibling groups. As I argued in Sibling Separation: An Unintended Consequence of the Family First Act, family-style group homes like those provided by SPA have been an important vehicle for keeping siblings together. In addition to providing a home for sibling groups of high school age, SPA accepts siblings of current students who are of middle-school age, allowing them to live at SPA and attend school in the community. The importance of siblings to foster children is such that even some congregate care opponents admit that it is better to place siblings together in congregate care than to separate them into different foster homes.

It is important to note that the restrictions on group care in FFPSA had another purpose aside from the alleged benefits to foster care. Restricting group care, which is more expensive than foster care, was necessary to free up federal funds to pay for the expansion of funding for services to prevent the placement of children in foster care. In other words, to find the money to preserve families, Congress took it away from services to the children who will have to be removed when family preservation fails. As long-time Congressional staffer and child welfare consultant Sean Hughes wrote in the Imprint, the focus among child welfare advocates seems to have shifted almost exclusively toward preventing entry into foster care, with little advocacy being devoted to actually improving the continuum of care for children in out-of-home care.

Current students, alumni and supporters of SPA were stunned by the CDSS letter. A petition on Change.org has obtained almost 11,000 signatures so far. Supporters of SPA have created a Facebook page and deluged public officials with letters and telephone calls. Reverend Shane Harris, the President and founder of the People’s Association of Justice Advocates, says SPA changed his life and gave him a safe place to grow up and is fighting to keep it open. One alumna is quoted on the Save San Pasqual Facebook page as follows: “I really loved living at SPA. I got to create relationships, a family and a strong support system. I also became stable by living here. I was able to attend school and catch up from how behind I was. I succeeded in sports and found outlets to deal with emotions. I couldn’t live in foster homes because the families wouldn’t treat me like their own.” Simone Hibbs-Monroe, valedictorian of the class of 2009 told KUSI News that “SPA has been a community safe haven and the only solution for many foster youth and a dedicated home for many alumni of foster care… “It’s an opportunity for children to feel normal. We are able to play sports, get jobs, have pep rallies, have our first proms, get our drivers’ licenses …..these are all the things that the caring community of San Pasqual offers its youth and its alumni….Often people [say] it takes a village to raise a child. That is San Pasqual Academy.”

Current and former staff have joined the call to save SPA. SPA’s Clinical Director, Rex Sheridan, wrote as follows in an eloquent letter to the County Supervisors and San Diego’s DHHS leadership team. “During my career in mental health and youth services, two decades of which has been in San Diego County, I have had contact with and worked in many different settings dedicated to meet the needs of our most vulnerable youth populations; yet none could even remotely be compared to what is offered at SPA. That is why I have now spent a third of my life committed to and working to develop this program because of first-hand experience witnessing lives transformed, hearts opened back up after years of disconnection, wounds healed after lifetimes of abuse and trauma, siblings reunited after separation, goals reimagined out of hopelessness, skills and knowledge crafted and nurtured out of feelings of incompetence, and new identities and possibilities replacing desperation and fragmentation. And if you think that those experiences sound overstated or dramatic, then you haven’t had the privilege of attending games where youth are cheered for the first time in their lives, one of our talent shows where they perform an original song, or a college road trip where they get to visit universities all over the state and envision a new possibility that was never previously imagined.”

What can be done to save SPA? The state and the county must adopt a stop-gap solution to keep SPA running as they work to permanently amend state law to create a category of residential schools that is eligible for reimbursement. On the federal level, advocates are already working on legislation to amend FFPSA to add residential campuses with family style homes as a placement option. We will share more information as it becomes available.

The proposed closure of SPA is a victory of ideology and greed over humanity and common sense. We need more, not fewer San Pasqual Academies. Rather than shutting it down, the state and county should be ensuring that it is at capacity and boasting that within their borders lies the most effective foster care program in the country.

Washington Post on foster care: old tropes and false narratives

The Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center in Julian, W.Va., where Geard Mitchell, now 17, spent part of his childhood. A lawsuit says 10 states’ agencies tasked with caring for children failed, “jeopardizing their most basic needs.” (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) — Image: *Washington Post*

Foster care has finally made it to the front page of the Washington Post, and a sad story it is. The story highlights the growing crisis in many states due to the increase in drug addiction bringing in its wake a cascade of child removals into foster care, outstripping the supply of foster homes and other placement. The problems outlined in the article are real and urgent, but the analysis and prescriptions offered in the article and subsequent editorial reveal the authors’ lack of understanding of the issues, which results in the repetition of false narratives and common misleading tropes.

The Post‘s front-page article focused on a growing crisis caused by increased drug addiction among parents, especially the opioid crisis. The author, Emily Wax Thibodeaux, zeroed in on West Virginia, one of the epicenters of the crisis. She introduced us to Arther Yoho, a young man who spent more than two years in a detention center because there was no foster parent available to take him in. Locked up with 27 juveniles with criminal convictions, Arther was failed by the system that was supposed to protect him.

Thibodeaux reports that other desperate states are using emergency shelters, hotels and out-of-state institutions to house youth for whom there is no foster family home available. This is tragic and true, and I wrote about it in a recent post, although the placement of foster youth in detention centers along with criminally charged youth may be unique to West Virginia with its cataclysmic foster care crisis. Thibodeaux reports Oregon’s use of refurbished detention centers to house foster youth, which is certainly not ideal but is quite different from housing them with juvenile offenders. In any case, Thibodeaux is right to point out that many young people in foster care are being placed in inappropriate (and often harmful) placements because appropriate ones are not available.

However, Thibodeaux takes an unwarranted conceptual leap by linking the placement of children in inappropriate facilities to states’ use of congregate care, a term used to connote placements that are not families. These include what are generally known as group homes, as well as residential treatment centers, which are part of the accepted continuum of care for foster youth. While detention centers are never appropriate for foster youth who have not been charged with a crime, group homes and residential treatment centers may be the appropriate placement, often for a limited time, for some youths in foster care. These are the young people who cannot be maintained in a regular foster home because of their defiant, violent, or self-destructive behavior. Many of these children might be able to “step down” to foster care after spending time at a therapeutic residential facility. It is possible that some of these young people could be helped in a professional therapeutic foster home staffed by salaried and trained foster parents, an approach that is gaining increasing interest, but programs so far are few and small and not likely to meet the need for therapeutic placements.

Thibodeaux cites the common trope that “Compared with foster children living with families, those housed in congregate care settings are more likely to drop out of high school, commit crimes and develop mental health problems.” That is very true. But it is a matter of correlation, not causation. It is the younger and less damaged children who end up in foster homes in the first place. Not surprisingly, they are likely to have better outcomes. Concluding that congregate care causes the negative outcomes may well be akin to concluding that fire trucks cause fire damage since buildings that have been visited by fire trucks are far more likely than typical buildings to have sustained fire damage. We don’t have a body of research on what happens to children with similar risk factors who spend time in foster homes compared to those who spend the same amount of time in group homes.

Thibodeaux appears to be unaware that some of the states with the lowest proportions of children in congregate care are those that are struggling the most with inappropriate placements. Washington and Oregon are among the states with the highest proportions of foster children placed in families as opposed to congregate care facilities, according to federal data cited in a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Both states have been the subject of disturbing media reports that foster youth are staying in hotels, offices and substandard and abusive out-of-state facilities. That’s not surprising, since appropriate options are not available. In Washington, ten years of group home closures led to the current crisis. The director of Washington’s child welfare agency has requested funding to expand the capacity of therapeutic group home beds to accommodate the children who are now staying in hotels and offices. The director of Oregon’s agency has cited a reduced number of treatment beds as a cause of children being sent to substandard and abusive out-of-state facilities.

By implying that all congregate care placements are inappropriate, Thibodeaux lays the groundwork for false conclusions about policy. Rather than saying that states need to beef up their therapeutic options, whether they are professionally-trained therapeutic foster parents or therapeutic group homes or residential treatment centers, Thibodeaux suggests that the new Family First Prevention Services Act, which makes it more difficult to obtain federal reimbursement for congregate care stays, may solve the problem.

Actually, the Family First Act may well make things worse. By making it harder to license therapeutic group homes, there is reason to fear that Family First will exacerbate the placement crisis. This has already happened when group homes closed in in jurisdictions like Oregon, Washington, New York City, and Baltimore. In California, the closure of group homes due to their Continuum of Care “reform” (a predecessor of the Family First Act) has resulted in, according to one veteran service provider, “fewer kids in group homes, but only because there are fewer group homes and counties have inappropriately been pushing challenging, difficult-to-manage youth into lower levels of care.”

The Washington Post followed Thibodeaux’ article with an editorial, “The Crisis in Foster Care,” which repeated and further distorted some of Thibodeaux’s questionable statements. Where Thibodeaux reported that 71% of foster children aged 12 to 17 are in congregate care placements in West Virginia (a high number to be sure), the editorial page erroneously stated that seven in ten of all foster children are in such foster care placements. That is a huge difference as older children are much more likely to be in such placements.

The opinion writers go on to repeat Thibodeaux’ misleading statement from the Casey Foundation about children in group homes doing worse than those in foster homes. However, they also cite discouraging outcome data about children growing up with foster parents. Because both options seem bad, the opinion writers suggest that “the least-bad option for many children” may be staying or reuniting with their parents, “unless there is abuse in the home. “They go on to cite one of the most persistent tropes of all that child protective services workers “often remove minors from neglectful parents who, while a far cry from being good caregivers, may still be better than group homes.”

The trope that child neglect is “less than ideal parenting” is belied by some of the stories that have come out of West Virginia and other states in the throes of the opioid crisis. We’ve all heard the stories: infants born addicted to drugs to mothers unable to care for them, children who lost their parents and even their extended families due to opioid overdoses, children abandoned at home without food while parents seek drugs, children strapped in cars while their parents get high, babies and toddlers who ingest heroin, alcohol or meth; children whose parents are incarcerated due to substance abuse or dealing; and more. This is not “imperfect parenting” but something much worse. Living with an addicted parent is has a host of negative consequences that may be lifelong and is in itself considered an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE).

One article from the Seattle Times documents the impact of the drastic increase in infants born addicted to drugs when they reach school age. “[The lives of children who grow up with drug-abusing parents are marked frequently by the presence of police, the constant fear of a mother or father’s incarceration and the likelihood of sudden death by overdose — all traumas shown to impede brain development and learning.”

To add insult to injury, the Post did not even seek to find out what is happening in its own back yard. Only two weeks before Thibodeaux’s article, a hearing was held in the 30-year-old LaShawn class action case to discuss the current placement crisis in the District of Columbia. The Judge referred to a letter from the court monitor that 31 children, including seven children between eight and ten years old, experienced a total of 60 overnight stays at the Child and Family Services Agency between April and November of 2019. All of these children had challenging behaviors that excluded them from existing placements. The agency director acknowledged that the District needs more therapeutic placements (either in family or group settings) for these children. The District is in the process of developing a new group home and “a couple of” professional foster parents. The District is a small jurisdiction and its crisis is dwarfed by that of West Virginia, but its 60 office stays deserved a mention in our hometown paper.

The Washington Post‘s treatment of foster care illustrates the consequences of letting reporting and editorial staff without subject matter expertise tackle a complex subject like foster care. Repeating false narratives and tropes from alleged authorities is easy and saves time. But it does not help readers to understand what is wrong and what is needed and on the contrary leads them to look for “solutions” that may make things worse.

Family First Act: a False Narrative, a Lack of Review, a Bad Law

Family First Act The passage of the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) was greeted with joy and celebration when it passed as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. “The Family First Prevention Services Act will change the lives of children in foster care,” crowed the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The new law “will change foster care as we know it,” raved the Pew Charitable Trusts. But the Act took effect on October 1 to little fanfare. Based on contacts with all the states, the Chronicle of Social Change expects only 14 states and the District of Columbia to implement the Act and 36 to delay implementation for up to two years as allowed by the law. But as of two weeks before implementation, only four states had submitted the plan required in order to implement the Act.

An Act with Many Flaws

FFPSA has been revealed (as some knew all along) as a messy and poorly written piece of legislation. It starts with a misnomer. What the Act calls “prevention services” (“in-home parent skill-based,” mental health, and drug treatment programs for parents who have already been found to have abused or neglected their children) are aimed at prevention of foster care, not of child abuse and neglect before they occur. To most experts, these would be considered to be “intervention” and not “prevention” services. But beyond this misnomer, the legislation has multiple flaws which means it may create more problems than it solves. Among these issues, covered in detail in a recent webinar from California’s Alliance for Children’s Rights and an article in Governing, are the following:

Lack of new funding: FFPSA was designed to be budget neutral, redirecting funds toward foster care prevention services from congregate care and a delay of an expansion in adoption assistance. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that FFPSA will actually result in a $66 million reduction in federal spending over a ten-year-period. This comes on the heels of 20 years of federal disinvestment in foster care, leaving jurisdictions struggling to maintain reasonable caseloads and services. Some states are anticipating crippling losses of of funds due to the loss of their Title IV-E waiver programs, which expire at the end of the year and were far more generous and less restrictive than FFPSA. For example, California anticipates the loss of $320 million in federal funding when the waiver ends, forcing service reductions in some of its largest counties. New York will lose support for a program that hired more social workers and supervisors and has been credited with allowing youth to leave foster care earlier.
Requirement that 50% of funding be spent on “well-supported” programs. FFPSA requires that 50% of funding be spent on programs that meet a rigorous set of criteria to be defined as “well-supported.” But so far, the clearinghouse created for the purpose of this provision has designated only six programs as “well-supported”: three mental health programs, three home visiting programs, and no drug treatment programs. Some states may prefer to adopt or expand in other similar programs that are not on the list. Therefore there has been a chorus of proposals that this provision be eliminated or delayed.
Interaction with Medicaid: Each state’s Medicaid program covers a different set of services, but many of the services meeting FFPSA criteria, especially mental health and substance abuse treatment, are already funded by Medicaid in most cases. Allowing Title IV-E to supplement Medicaid funds might have helped improve the quantity and quality of services available. But in its guidance on implementing the legislation, the Children’s Bureau specified Title IV-E as the payer of last resort for these services. That means that Medicaid must pay first before Title IV-E can be billed. Thus, in states with more generous Medicaid programs, the law will not greatly expand the services available to families. Moreover, it appears, based on the federal government’s answer to one state’s question, that programs paid for by Medicaid may not count toward the 50% of programs that must be “well-supported,” leaving states that use Medicaid to fund these programs in a difficult situation.
Restrictions on congregate care: One of the two main purposes of FFPSA was to restrict congregate care, which is basically any placement that is not a foster home. To do so, FFPSA cuts off funding after two weeks for any placement that is not a foster home, with four exceptions. Three of these are programs for special populations and the fourth is a new category called a Quality Residential Treatment Programs (QRTP)–a new category created by FFPSA. QRTP’s must meet numerous requirements, such as accreditation, 24-hour nurse coverage, and a “trauma-informed” approach. Moreover, a child must be assessed by a “qualified individual” as needing placement in a QRTP and that decision must be approved by the family court. Furthermore, a youth may not remain in a QRTP for more than 12 consecutive months without written approval from the head of the agency. As Child Welfare Monitor has discussed elsewhere, there is concern that some group homes will have trouble meeting the FFPSA criteria. Group homes are closing around the country due to insufficient funding and state-level policy changes. Many states have desperate shortages of foster homes, and closing group homes at the same time will worsen their placement crises. Furthermore many young people, especially those with more issues, may need more than 12 months in a group home and may lose all their gains if transferred prematurely to a foster home. There is also a problem with Medicaid and QRTP’s, as it appears they will fall into a category of “Institutions for Mental Diseases” that are not payable by Medicaid.
Kinship Diversion: FFPSA creates an avenue for prevention of foster care by placing a child with relatives (often called kinship diversion) while the parents receive prevention services for up to 12 months. If reunification with the parents never happens, there is no requirement that the children be placed formally with the relatives, or that the relatives receive any assistance either financially or with services. They would be forced to rely on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is much less generous than foster care payments, and to make do with any services they can find in the community. There is concern that FFPSA may encourage states and counties to use kinship diversion rather than licensing relatives as foster parents, thus entitling them to more services and assistance and ensuring that the agency does not lose track of the children.

How a bad bill was born

The passage of FFPSA was the outcome of many years of advocacy, under the mantra of “child welfare finance reform.” So how did such a flawed bill pass after so many years of proposals and discussions? The answer includes a truncated legislative process, an insistence on budget neutrality, and a false narrative promoted by a wealthy group of organizations.

False Narrative

This call for finance reform was based on the idea that, as expressed by one of its primary proponents, Casey Family Programs, in a “White Paper” published in 2010:

…the major federal funding source for foster care, Title IV-E, primarily pays for maintaining eligible children in licensed foster care, rather than providing services for families before and after contact with the child welfare system. The fact that no IV-E funding can be used for prevention or post-reunification services has created a significant challenge to achieving better safety and permanency outcomes for children.

This statement was literally true. Before implementation of FFPSA, Title IV-E funds were not available for services provided to families to help them avoid placement of their children in foster care. But plenty of other funds were available to cover these services. We’ve already mentioned that Medicaid currently pays for many or most of the services that will be provided under FFPSA, with the specifics depending on the state. Other funding sources included Title IV-B, TANF, Social Services Block Grant, and CAPTA funds.

Moreover, Title IV-E does not cover all foster care costs. The federal government reimburses states for 50 to 75% of the cost of foster care payments, depending on the state. But only 38% of foster children were eligible for federal reimbursement under Title IV-E in 2016, down from an estimated 54% in 1999. The reason for this decline is an antiquated provision (often called the “Title IV-E lookback”) that links Title IV-E eligibility to eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a welfare program that ended in 1996. Anything calling itself finance reform should have addressed this senseless linkage, but the framers did not.

So, between the availability of other funds and the fact that states had to pay a large share of foster care costs themselves, it is hard to accept the narrative that states had an incentive to place children in care rather than provide services to their families to keep them at home. And indeed states have for years been providing in-home services to help families avoid foster care. According to federal data, 1,332,254 children received in-home or family preservation services in FY 2017 compared to only 201,680 children who received foster care services. So the argument for “finance reform” is simply a red herring.

The idea that a foster home is almost always better than a group home or residential placement is behind the other major part of FFPSA, the strict restrictions on funding for congregate care. But this narrative ignores the fact that there are not enough foster parents, especially those who are willing, loving and gifted enough to care for older and more troubled young people. Perhaps some supporters think that these foster parents will suddenly appear once group homes disappear. But this kind of wishful thinking failed when the mental hospitals closed in the 1960’s and the promised community mental health services did not appear, and there is no reason to think it will be more accurate this time around.

So how did a false narrative gain such a large following and become accepted as the truth? This idea has been supported by a powerful coalition of organizations led by Casey Family Programs, author of the white paper quoted above. Casey’s assets totaled $2.2 billion at the end of 2018 and it spent $111 million that year in pursuit of its goals, which include “safely reducing the need for foster care by 50 percent by the year 2020.” Casey has relentlessly promoted this narrative through publications, testimony, and assistance to jurisdictions that agree to implement its agenda.

Budget Neutrality

As mentioned above, FFPSA does not add resources to the system but instead redirects them from congregate care and adoption assistance to services designed to keep families together. Much of the savings will come from states taking on the full cost of group home placements that they cannot avoid. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 70% of the children residing in group home placements (other than residential treatment programs) would become ineligible for Title IV-E funding in 2020. So the cost of funding this placements will be shifted to states and counties that are often already struggling to fund these necessary placements. Moreover, the continuation of the TItle IV-E “lookback” means that the federal share of foster care funding will continue to decrease.

Much of the blame for the Act’s budget neutrality goes to Casey and its fellow advocates, who have been uninterested in increasing resources for foster care. As longtime Hill staffer Sean Hughes points out, “…Congressional staffers will tell you that child welfare advocates are perhaps the only group of federal advocates that consistently decline to even ask for new resources.” According to Hughes, these advocates have been unwilling to increase resources for foster care because of their bias toward family preservation. (Remember Casey’s goal of reducing foster care by 50% by 2020). They apparently hope that “starving the foster care beast” might result in fewer foster care placements, whether or not children might be left in unsafe situations. The framers wanted a budget neutral bill, and the advocates were happy to accept it in order to reallocate resources away from foster care (through the continuation of the “lookback” and the restrictions on group homes) toward family preservation.

Lack of review

Aside from a pair of hearings that were orchestrated by the bill’s sponsors to support their vision for the legislation, there were no hearings or floor debate on the Family First Act after it was introduced in 2016. In 2017, it passed the House by voice vote, and its Senate sponsors failed to get it passed. In 2018, after failing twice to attach it to larger bills without hearings of debate, the sponsors succeeded at the eleventh hour in getting it attached to the budget act. Young people whose lives were saved by group homes were never able to tell their stories. The technical problems with Medicaid eligibility were never discussed and may not have even been noticed until long after passage.

A bill called the Family First Transition Act has been introduced to ease the transition to the new legislation. It would delay for two years the implementation of the 50% “well-supported” requirement for services reimbursement, provide a small amount of transition funding to help states implement the Act, and provide temporary grants to jurisdictions with expiring waivers to make up for a portion of their loss under FFFPSA. However, none of these temporary fixes would cure this fundamentally flawed bill, the inevitable result of a false narrative, inadequate funding, and a truncated legislative process.

This post was updated on November 7, 2019, to specify that the Children’s Bureau made the determination that Title IV-E would be the payer of last resort for prevention services to foster care candidates. This designation of Title IV-E as payer of last resort was not made in the Act itself.

Reducing Congregate Care Placements: not so easy, not always good for kids

Most child welfare experts and policymakers at all levels seem to agree that our nation needs to reduce the use of group homes and other non-family placements (often called “congregate care”) for foster youth. Yet signs from around the country suggest that the drive to move foster youth quickly out of congregate care is facing some obstacles–and may be resulting in more damage to foster youth.

The child welfare establishment–including the federal Administration for Children and Families, agency leaders at the state and local level, prominent think-tanks, scholars, and foundations–is in agreement that “every kid needs a family.” These leaders acknowledge that some foster youth need a group placement to address behavioral issues that may prevent success in foster care, but such youth should be moved out of the group setting as soon as these issues are addressed.

In 2015, the California Legislature took the lead in implementing this new focus by enacting the Continuum Care Reform (CCR), which required all foster youth to be placed in families except those requiring intensive supervision and treatment for a temporary period. Such youth must be placed in Short-Term Residential Treatment Programs (SRTP’s), which must be accredited and meet rigorous standards.

Congress followed in 2018 by adopting the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA, (Title VII of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018), which imposed similar changes on the federal level, with a temporary congregate therapeutic option called Quality Residential Treatment Programs (QRTP’s) instead of SRTP’s. To receive reimbursement for a QRTP placement, a “qualified professional” must determines within 30 days of the placement that the child needs to be placed in such a setting rather than a relative or foster family home. The decision must be approved by a court within 60 days and reviewed at subsequent hearings (usually every three to six months). Moreover, a child cannot remain in a QRTP for more than 12 consecutive months (or 6 months for a child under 13) without written approval from the head of the agency.

California, where CCR took effect in 2017, has been widely viewed as a harbinger of what might happen after FFPSA takes effect next October. But Golden State policymakers have been “shocked shocked” to learn that children have not been moving out of congregate care settings as fast as anticipated. The reform was expected to pay for itself due to savings from moving children from pricier congregate care settings to cheaper family homes. However, this has not happened. The Office of the Legislative Analyst has found higher than projected state spending for one main reason: instead of moving from group homes into family foster homes, children are moving into “STRTPS,” the new congregate option offered by CCR.

Although the Legislative Analyst did not speculate about reasons for the slow transition, one does not have to look far for clues. A report from San Joaquin County indicates that the county is unable to find homes for the teens with the greatest needs, who remain in group homes. Efforts to recruit foster parents willing to take on these challenging youths have so far failed.

Another jurisdiction that started eliminating group homes long before the Family First Act was New York City. The city’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is reeling from an alarming report about the intake center where children are taken after being removed from their families. Workers described an atmosphere of chaos, violence, weapons in plain sight, feces-smeared walls, overcrowding and “a dangerous mix of babies and young children with special needs living alongside troubled teens and even adults straight out of jail.” This intake center was was meant as a place for children to wait for a few hours until a placement could be arranged. But staff report young people with behavioral problems or medical needs living in the shelter for months because foster families cannot be found for them. One disabled teenager lived there for a year. The president of the union representing ACF workers blamed these long stays on management decisions made years ago to close group homes, based on the belief that family homes were better for children. Unfortunately, the agency has not been able to find families to take in many children with behavioral problems, mental disabilities, and histories of trauma and abuse.

In Georgia, there are more children in foster care than ever before and not enough homes for them. Wanting to address this problem, long-time foster and adoptive parents John and Kelly DeGarmo started the Never Too Late (NTL) foster home for boys. But when they applied for a license to accept youth from the foster care system, they found it was too late. Due to the Family First Act, Georgia was not going to license any new residential group homes. State administrators instead asked NTL to serve as a Transitional Living Program, (TLP), for youth ages 16-21 as the boys transition from foster care to independent living. These programs are also needed, but one can’t help but wonder about Georgia’s plan for meeting the needs of the many children who cannot find foster homes and could have thrived in atmosphere of loving care at Never Too Late.

In my own jurisdiction, the District of Columbia, the Child and Family Services Agency is proud of the low percentage of foster youth that are in group homes, attributing it to “the agency’s success in supporting children and youth with higher needs in traditional foster homes.” Yet, advocates are declaring a foster care placement crisis. There is a lack of appropriate foster homes for many children, particularly older teens and those with behavioral problems. As a result, according to the Children’s Law Center, foster youth experience multiple placement disruptions, with devastating consequences to their mental health. CLC also blames the placement crisis for delayed removals of children from unsafe homes, youths remaining in poorly matched placement, and youths leaving their official placements for unofficial community settings. Yet, there is no voice advocating for more therapeutic group homes, the most appropriate setting for many such youths.

The state of Washington has about 100 youths in out-of-state facilities due to a lack of in-state beds. A scathing report recently described abusive restraint practices and other problems at an Iowa facility where Washington was sending some of its foster youth. In a letter to the legislature, Ross Hunter, director of the Department of Children Youth and Families, acknowledged that the agency has an insufficient array of therapeutic group homes and residential facilities for children with severe behavioral problems that make it impossible to maintain them in foster homes. Among the consequences of this shortage, Hunter cites the following: (1) children being repeatedly placed in homes that can’t handle them, resulting in damage to the children and loss of foster parents to the system; (2) over 2000 office and hotel stays for children last year; and (3) use of expensive one-night placements “at extraordinary cost and detriment to the child,” in addition to the out-of-state placements. Hunter proposes to bring all of Washington’s children home and eliminate office and hotel stays by expanding the number of therapeutic group home beds, as well as increasing the quality of existing congregate placements.

Oregon is also reeling from reports of abusive out-of-state placements. After being sued for housing foster kids in hotels, it stopped that practice but sent more high-needs children out of state. Reports of a nine-year-old being injected with Benadryl to control her behavior have led to a public outcry that over 80 Oregon foster kids are in out-of-state facilities, many of them troubled for-profits, because the state lacks residential programs to provide the treatment they need.

Washington and Oregon are among the states with the highest proportions of foster children placed in families, according to federal data cited in a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation that drew extensive press coverage. The report provided state-by-state numbers, generating media coverage (but not in Washington and Oregon) that praised those jurisdictions with lower group home percentages and chastising those with higher rates. But nowhere did the authors mention the fact that eliminating too many congregate placements may lead to foster youth staying in offices, hotels, emergency placements, and abusive out-of-state facilities.

We are not taking this opportunity to argue that many group homes (especially those using the house parent model) are more family-like than many foster homes–which we have argued elsewhere. Even if we accept the premise that no young person should be in a group home one minute longer than necessary once ready to function well in a foster home, there are several problems with implementing this premise in the real world.

We don’t have a diagnostic instrument capable of determining in advance who “needs” a congregate placement and who does not. As of now, it is a subjective determination, making it difficult to project a specific decline in congregate care placement. There is concern that the FFA may make it too difficult for children to gain access to the therapeutic placements they need.
Whether a child is “ready” for family life depends upon the families available. Some very gifted, well trained and dedicated foster parents can nurture high-needs youth who would not thrive in the average foster home. But when such a parent is not available, a child might be better off in a high-quality therapeutic group placement.
Often a family simply cannot be found that is willing to accept a teen with troubling behaviors or a history of residential treatment or delinquency. The most ridiculous sentence in FFPSA is this one: “A shortage or lack of foster family homes shall not be an acceptable reason for determining that the needs of the child cannot be met in a foster family home. ” What should be done then with a child that has no place to go?
A year (or six months for a preteen) may not be enough time for a troubled child to become “family-ready.”. Many children and teens in foster care have suffered years of trauma in their homes, and perhaps multiple placements in foster care. The time required is more likely measured in years than in months.
It may be difficult for smaller, high quality group homes to meet the criteria for QRTP’s.

There is no doubt that many congregate care facilities are of poor quality–witness the horrors suffered by Washington and Oregon youths who were shipped out of state. The framers of FFPSA were right in wanting to ensure that these facilities entrusted with our most fragile youth are up to the task, although they adopted a blunt instrument for doing this. Let’s hope that other states follow Washington’s plan and respond to FFPSA by ensuring that therapeutic group homes are adequate in quality and quantity rather than eliminating them.

Therapeutic Group Homes: Needed Programs in Danger from Family First Act

It is a fact universally acknowledged that some children cannot thrive in foster care. This includes children whose behaviors are so challenging that most foster parents will be unable to cope. These children often go through many foster homes before they are finally placed in a more appropriate placement, usually a therapeutic group home or residential treatment program.

One of the goals of the Family First and Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), passed last year as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018), was to reduce the use of placements other than relative homes and traditional foster care. However, FFPSA recognized that some children and youth cannot thrive in foster care and allowed for placements to meet their needs. Unfortunately, the many restrictions imposed by the Act mean that many of these young people may not able to access these facilities or will be prematurely removed from them.

Many youth who are placed in foster care have serious emotional and behavioral issues. Many have endured years of trauma, including physical and sexual abuse, severe neglect, and living in dangerous and chaotic conditions. Some have cognitive or neurological issues caused by drug exposure in utero or severe neglect. Some have violent outbursts, many are verbally aggressive, and many have difficulty in making attachments. As a result of these problems, many of these hard-to-place young people have been placed in ten or more foster homes.

High-quality therapeutic group homes are more able than foster families to work with challenging youth for a number of reasons described in an excellent video from the Sonoma County Juvenile Justice Commission. Their staff are trained in working with behaviorally challenging youth and often operate from a trauma-informed perspective. These facilities often have therapists and psychiatrists and other mental health personnel on staff. Good therapeutic group homes create a homelike environment, with young people living in cottages with a total of six or eight youths. Staff are dedicated and passionate about what they do. Unlike foster parents, these staff usually work shifts and thereby avoid burnout. Residents also draw strength from peers with similar issues, especially older peers who have improved and can serve as role models.

Some hard-to-place youth could thrive in the right kind of foster homes, those with training, time, and willingness to work with young people whose behavior is challenging. But many foster parents refuse to take teens or any or children with behavioral or mental health problems. Some states are trying to increase the availability of therapeutic foster homes, but funding and supply constraints mean that such efforts will be far too small to replace therapeutic group homes.

Unfortunately, the restrictions imposed by FFPSA may make it difficult to for many needed therapeutic group homes to continue operating. FFPSA allows the federal government to share the costs of treatment-based congregate care only at facilities that qualify as Qualified Residential Treatment Programs (QRTP). These programs must meet several criteria, including accreditation, a trauma-informed model, medical staff on call, and an aftercare program, among others. Accreditation especially is a long and arduous process that generally takes 12 to 18 months and some homes may not be able to accomplish it by the time the Act takes effect on October 1, 2019 (unless the state chooses to delay implementation for two years). Accreditation is a difficult and costly requirement for a smaller facility. It is important to ensure that only high-quality group homes retain state contracts, but accreditation may not be the best way to ensure quality for smaller programs.

Even more concerning are the limits on which children can be placed at these facilities and for how long. A child’s initial placement in a QRTP will not be reimbursed unless a “qualified professional” determines within 30 days of placement that the child needs to be placed in such a setting rather than a relative or foster family home. This assessment must use an approved tool and be conducted by “a trained professional or licensed clinician who is not an employee of the State agency and who is not connected to, or affiliated with, any placement setting in which children are placed by the State.” The decision must be approved by a court within 60 days and must be reviewed at subsequent status hearings. Moreover, a child cannot remain in a QRTP for more than 12 consecutive months (or 6 months for a child under 13) without written approval from the head of the agency.

There are several problems with these restrictions. It is not clear that agencies can find enough qualified professionals who are not employed by the agency or connected to any placement setting used by the state. More concerning are the time limits. Many therapeutic group home professionals believe that most children with emotional and behavioral problems cannot be in and out of therapeutic residential settings in six months. Many will need to stay a year or even longer.

Without needed therapeutic group homes, many children will experience a string of failed foster home placements, with each one leading to further damage to the child, who may end up on the streets or in jail. As a director of a facility that closed in North Dakota put it, new policies mean that “You are only going to refer kids to (residential child care facility) levels of care after you have exhausted all the other less restrictive options of care. That means putting them with their families, in foster care and repeating failed foster care placements several times before a referral to this level of care would be entertained.”

Group homes have already been closing around the country as states have adopted policies against congregate care (and also due to failure to provide adequate funding) and some states are already seen bad consequences from these closures. In Baltimore, the number of children sleeping in offices shot up from less than five per six month period in 2015 to 130 in the first half of 2018 due to a shortage of foster homes and a dramatic reduction in group home capacity. In Hillsborough County, Florida, hard-to-place foster youths have been spending the night in cars for lack of appropriate placements. In the state of Washington, group homes have been shutting down for years due the state’s failure to keep up with the increasing costs of care. This has contributed to a crisis in care for older, harder-to-serve youth, who are being put up in hotels, offices and $600-per night emergency foster homes and being sent out of state for care. In Illinois, hundreds of foster youths were being kept unnecessarily in psychiatric hospitals as of last August because of a decline in licensed residential facilities.

The attempt to close congregate care facilities without providing an alternative is eerily reminiscent of the closure of institutions for the mentally ill in the 1960s. These hospitals were supposed to be replaced with community health services that were never funded. We are still reaping the consequences with the abundance of mentally ill people sleeping on the streets of America’s cities.

As I mentioned in last week’s post, FFPSA’s group home restrictions were not based on ideology alone. The cost savings from reducing federal reimbursement for group homes were necessary to offset the increased cost of funding services to prevent children’s placement in foster care. But penny-wise is often pound-foolish and the future costs of eliminating therapeutic residential options for foster youth may be much greater than the present savings.

It is not too late for Congress to amend the Family First Act to reduce restrictions on therapeutic group care. Until we have an abundance of qualified therapeutic foster parents willing and able to take the hardest to place youth, cutting down on therapeutic group homes is irresponsible, short-sighted, and a recipe for possible disaster.