Why kids in foster care end up sleeping in offices

It has been several weeks since US District Judge Janis Graham Jack announced that she would try Texas child welfare officials again for failing to protect children in the care system.

“I’m really stunned by the state’s non-compliance,” she said before threatening Texas with a fine of several thousand dollars a day. “But I am stunned every time we have one of these hearings.”

But neither Judge Jack nor anyone else familiar with the forces driving child protection decisions in this country should be stunned. Over the summer, a Washington judge ordered the state to stop placing children in offices as well. But just like Texas, Washington can’t put them anywhere else. An article on NBC’s local website said, “It’s not clear where? [the state] will place foster children without accommodation once they stop using hotels and government offices as options. “

In recent years, community facilities on the left and right have been closed, driven by a shift in federal funding away from residential groups and towards preventive services for families. At the same time, states have failed to recruit high quality foster families, both because they want to completely limit foster use and because they treat foster families so badly that they evict those willing to do the work.

The hundreds of children now sleeping in offices across the state, not to mention those in Oregon, Florida, and various other states are mostly older children, some with behavioral issues and others with mental health problems. They are not children who can be easily placed in family settings because most foster families are unable to cope with the type of trauma they have experienced and the resulting disruptive behavior. Often they need either short or long-term stays in a community facility in order to adapt to the family situation.

But such facilities have been closed for years and in 2018 Congress put another nail in the coffin with the passage of the Family First Prevention Services Act, which significantly restricts the use of care allowances for group homes. Family First came about in part because child protection experts believed that abuse was widespread in some of these homes and that many simply weren’t staffed with trained or caring professionals. Instead of calling for the offended facilities to be closed, Congress dumped the baby with the bath.

Family First has therefore determined that after a child’s first two weeks in such an environment, only a Qualified Residential Treatment Program (QRTP) may be eligible for federal compensation. QRTPs must have a “trauma-informed treatment model tailored to the needs, including clinical needs, of children with severe emotional or behavioral disorders or disorders” and “registered or licensed nursing staff” available at all times.

The law therefore implied that only children with the most severe mental disorders should be placed in homes; everyone else should be with one family. Even programs that have a small group of children living with two full-time house parents and aiming to reunite children with their families or to make them “adoptable” within a year or two have been made over allegations against one small number pushed out of business by others.

And now there is a funding crisis for facilities that provide psychiatric care around the clock. Because the federal government designates psychiatric institutions as Institutes for Mental Disease, they are not eligible for Medicaid dollars. (As part of the deinstitutionalization effort in the 1970s, Washington decided to be far more stingy in supporting long-term psychiatric care.) But states often use Medicaid dollars to meet the health needs of foster children. Such facilities are now shrinking their capacities or planning a complete closure.

And some proponents plan to take the crisis even further to make their agenda a reality. In a recent testimony to a subcommittee of the House of Representatives, William C. Bell, executive director of Casey Family Programs, urged members “to stand firm against any proposed changes to the mental illness rule or delays in the implementation of qualified inpatient care standards stay”. He noted that “investing in proven prevention strategies makes much more sense than allowing these facilities to be used continuously as accommodation facilities”.

Tell the kids who don’t have beds right now.

Finally, as if those facilities weren’t cramped enough, an operator in California told me that its group homes have lost significant numbers of staff to state-licensed facilities that house unaccompanied minors who have come across the southern border. Washington is willing to pay the staff a lot more than these group houses can afford.

But what about finding families for these children at risk? Many of the children who sleep in offices have shuffled through several, if not dozen, foster families. And with each new placement, the children become more traumatized and less equipped to live within the normal confines of a family.

Almost every state in the country reports a shortage of foster families, and about half of the volunteers actually quit within the first year. There are several reasons for this problem, but the way they are treated by child care staff is an important one.

Foster parents are sometimes not informed about the health of children they are staying with or about previous incidents of inappropriate sexual behavior that could prevent them from being safe around other children. Foster parents are kept in the dark about legal proceedings in which the children in their care are involved, and when they attend hearings, judges are not interested in what they have to say. When foster parents complain about the treatment they are receiving or the way that the cases of children in their care are mishandled, it is not uncommon for case workers to take revenge by moving the children to different homes.

Because child welfare institutions in recent years have focused so much of their energy on preserving the family, maintaining relatives and completely reducing caring roles, they have failed to adequately recruit, train and support foster parents. Often times, the only people who put up with this treatment are those desperate for the government’s small payments and non-middle-class families willing and able to open their homes.

There will always be children whose parents do not want to or cannot look after them. And they will always need caring adults to take them in. Sometimes these are relatives. Sometimes they will be strangers. And sometimes it is professionals who can meet more complex requirements.

Rather than wishing the problem away, states should offer as many options as possible for these children. That we shouldn’t all numb each other.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives” October 12th. She wrote this column for the Dallas Morning News.

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