* Last month, the Illinois Answers Project reported on a lawsuit against Illinois for holding foster children in detention due to lack of housing…

The Cook County public guardian is suing Illinois child welfare officials for allowing foster children to remain locked up in juvenile detention even after they’ve been ordered released — a problem that has only gotten worse, an Illinois Answers Project investigation found last year.

At issue is the inability of the state’s Department of Children and Family Services’ to find appropriate placements for children with behavioral health and emotional problems that often stem from their histories of serious abuse and neglect.

The federal lawsuit, which is seeking class-action status, alleges that “children incarcerated in juvenile jail are confined to their cells for the majority of the day, have limited opportunities to exercise and are exposed to unnecessary violence and dangers. Moreover, DCFS is unable to provide them the clinically appropriate mental health treatment and educational services that they need — critical resources for children who have suffered trauma and instability.” […]

The Illinois Answers investigation showed a steady increase in the number of Illinois foster children held for weeks or months after a judge ordered their release from detention centers. A total of 73 foster children were locked up for weeks or months in the Cook County juvenile temporary detention center without pending charges during 2021, according to an analysis of court and DCFS records.

* Illinois is hardly the only state lacking resources to house foster children. Let’s start in North Carolina. Youth Today…

Late last year, the Disability Rights North Carolina and the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP filed a class action suit against North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kody Kinsley, seeking to end discrimination regarding children with disabilities who are placed in foster care (as wards of the state), and who are then unnecessarily segregated from their home communities.

As a result, they are often isolated in heavily restrictive and clinically inappropriate institutional placements called psychiatric residential treatment facilities (PRTFs). This is not the first such class action. Ad litem attorneys (and others standing as “next friends”) to children with disabilities relegated to PTRFs all over the country are seeking similar relief. As noted in the North Carolina complaint:

“PRTFs are designed to provide intensive, short-term, residential psychiatric treatment for temporary stabilization. They are generally unsuitable as a long-term ‘place to live,’ but that does not stop DHHS from allowing children to languish there for extended periods of time. Unsurprisingly, research shows that children with disabilities confined to PRTFs suffer much worse outcomes than non-institutionalized children. These outcomes include spending longer periods of time in child welfare custody without a permanent home; losing critical family connections with parents, siblings, and extended family due to their confinement; and experiencing higher rates of maltreatment while in child welfare custody.”

* More from North Carolina…

The State Department of Social Services is admitting it’s in an emergency situation when it comes to housing children in the foster care system, especially those with mental health challenges.

FOX8 has confirmed dozens of children are living in hospital emergency rooms because there isn’t a family to care for them.

Cone Health has eight kids living in their ER. officials tell us this is common, and the kids stay for a while. […]

“It’s gotten so bad that at one point a few weeks ago, there was not even space in our local hospitals,” said North Carolina Senator Michael Garret.

* Texas has a huge budget surplus, but these problems also exist in the Lone Star State…

When U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack declared in 2015 that Texas foster kids were leaving state care more damaged than when they entered, it forced the state to confront decades of missteps.

After a yearlong trial for the lawsuit, which was filed in 2011, the Corpus Christi judge found Texas was violating the constitutional rights of foster children by exposing them to an “unreasonable risk of harm.” Caseworkers were carrying more than double the standard for caseload limits, children were being placed far from their home counties, and the state was not enforcing residential facilities’ compliance with licensing standards. […]

Much of her ire over the years has been focused on how DFPS has tried to handle a capacity crisis. There is a high number of children with severe mental health and behavioral needs, but not enough licensed facilities or foster families trained to properly care for them.

“I’m sure you have multiple excuses, but I guess I don’t want to hear them right now,” Jack said at a 2021 hearing, berating state officials about children sleeping in offices and motels.

* Texas’ family and child welfare commissioner plans to outsource case management. Texas Tribune…

Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Stephanie Muth, who began her tenure about a month ago, told lawmakers writing a new two-year state budget that the agency will have different needs as it moves into the new system of outsourcing case management services to nonprofits.

Implementation of the new approach, called community-based care, began about six years ago but is still not fully in place. It was adopted in 2017 and is meant to keep foster children closer to home while they’re in state care. It is currently used only in parts of three of the agency’s 11 regional service areas, and there are plans to introduce it to more areas during the next two-year state budget cycle, according to a map shared during Friday’s meeting. […]

The change will likely require fewer in-house case workers. It will also require a different agency mindset, Muth said at Friday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing.

“We’re in two worlds,” Muth said. “We have the legacy world, we have the CBC world. We know how to operate the legacy world — that’s our comfort zone. But as you look at moving to community-based care, it’s very different skillsets that we need as an agency.”

Muth said that means thinking more about managing contracts with third parties and less about staffers managing cases.

* Georgia…

The state of Georgia shelled out $28 million last year to the Department of Children and Family Services to put foster children up in hotels, sometimes for months at a time, Channel 2 Action News has learned. […]

Julie and Jeff Selander said that a 12-year-old boy they were attempting to foster was kept in a series of hotels from Canton to Waycross for months.

“So a 12-year-old can move from hotel to hotel with no education,” Julie Selander said. “He’s not received any education. Two days later, I get a text message saying that they’re just going to keep him at the hotel.” […]

Lincoln found that at $1,500 a night, it costs more money to place a foster child in a hotel than it does for the average person to book a night at the Four Seasons.

The state has spent roughly $250,000 in taxpayer funds to house the 12-year-old alone.

* Kansas…

A young Kansas girl suffered a severe head injury after being placed in a foster home by KVC Behavioral Healthcare Inc., according to a lawsuit filed last year in Shawnee County.

The lawsuit alleges that the child suffered severe head trauma after KVC, a state contracted foster care provider, placed the child in a “dangerously overcrowded” foster home and failed to ensure safety planning services were provided to the foster parents. […]

The lawsuit says the number of foster children living in the home “exceeded capacity”, though it is unclear in court documents how many children were in the home. They were also “inappropriate age-mates” to the incoming baby girl, the lawsuit said.

Some of the foster children were suspected of being “mentally unstable and aggressive” according to the lawsuit. But a KVC employee allegedly failed to give the foster parents safety planning services and ensure they understood the behavioral and psychological problems of the other foster children.

* Tennessee via the AP…

The Tennessee agency that has faced heightened scrutiny for failures in oversight of the state’s most vulnerable children is requesting a quick influx of $26.6 million, aimed at keeping youth from having to sleep in administrative state offices or in transitional housing, among other pressing problems.

Tennessee Department of Children’s Services Commissioner Margie Quin unveiled the request to a state House panel Monday.

It includes $20.4 million allocated to increase the rates for care providers, which is expected to add 118 beds for kids. There’s also a request for $4.1 million to add 48 clinical assessment beds that help identify the next placement for a child, while providing medical and mental health treatment; and $2.1 million to incentivize more foster care placements for teenagers and groups of siblings.

The request for funding follows a sweeping audit that identified a host of problems at the agency. It underscored reports of high employee turnover over the past two years and challenges to find proper temporary housing. It also stressed that the state’s failure to investigate abuse and neglect allegations contributed to putting children’s health, safety and wellbeing at risk. Democratic lawmakers have long deemed the agency’s woes as a crisis that demands immediate changes to protect vulnerable youth.