Reforms on the way for group homes

Move follows claims of abuse and neglect at youth facility

Connecticut will implement broad changes at a set of group homes meant to be temporary respite for children, including adding staff and offering kids more intensive therapeutic placements, state officials said.

Department of Children and Families officials, along with leaders from the legislative Committee on Children and Gov. Ned Lamont gathered in Hartford to make the announcement, which comes on the heels of highly publicized reports of alleged physical and sexual abuse, a lack of supervision of kids and insufficient therapeutic care for children with histories of severe trauma at one of the homes in Harwinton.

The Bridge Family Center in Harwinton has since closed.

The Harwinton group home was one of the state’s Short-term Assessment and Respite homes, also known as STAR homes. They were intended to be shorter stays — 30 to 90 days — before another placement for kids in foster care and don’t offer high levels of therapeutic care.

The Department of Children and Families announced Thursday that the homes will now be known as Specialized, Trauma-informed, Treatment, Assessment and Reunification homes, or STTAR.

“We acknowledge that STAR homes have experienced significant challenges in trying to meet the needs of youth in their care,” said DCF Commissioner-designee Jodi Hill Lilly. “In many instances, those complex needs, particularly post pandemic, exceed what STAR programs were originally intended and equipped to address.

“As Connecticut’s lead agency on children’s behavioral health, it’s imperative that we collectively evolve as the complex needs of our children evolve,” she said.

The shifts include adding staff and reducing the number of kids at the group homes. The state also plans to establish two new intensive transitional treatment centers and prioritize children from the group homes for certain residential care.

The announcement marks one of the first significant shifts in DCF operations since Hill-lilly began leading the agency. She’s touted the importance of community-based care and keeping kids with families whenever possible.

Hearing

State lawmakers held a hearing in the fall to learn more about what happened at the Harwinton facility, and the Office of the Child Advocate issued a report about the homes and found that kids were staying there for much longer than intended and that their levels of trauma and behavioral health issues often required more care than the STAR homes provide.

“At that time, we concluded that the STAR model is no longer adequately serving children in crisis,” said Children’s Committee Co-chair Rep. Liz Linehan, D-cheshire. “And we knew for the safety of our kids that we needed to act, and we needed to act fast.”

The problems at the facility were first reported by Connecticut Inside Investigator, which revealed allegations of children being sex trafficked at the facility, sexual abuse of children by staff members and children leaving the facility for extended periods of time without supervision.

Two lawsuits have been filed claiming that children were harmed at the Harwinton facility.

There are typically between 30 and 40 youths, most of them teenagers, across the group homes. They’ve often been bounced between different foster placements for years and experienced severe trauma.

The OCA report found that most of them are children of color.

Child Advocate Sarah Eagan said that while she sees the policy changes as progress, more needs to be done. Connecticut’s mental health care system for children is strained, Eagan said. People have to wait for in-home services, and higher numbers of children are experiencing more acute mental health issues.

“We can’t make the STAR homes work when we have a children’s behavioral health system that’s crumbling on our watch,” Eagan said in an interview.

DCF plans to have STTAR providers add a supervisory position to ensure better monitoring of staff and kids at the home, especially during late-night hours. Staff will also get more trauma-informed training and resources.

The state will cut down on the number of kids in each home so that the staff ratio is better. DCF’S census in the homes is six, but as youth leave the homes, they’ll winnow down to five. The programs will also have more recreational activities to “channel their energy into positive activities, creating a sense of normalcy,” Hilllilly said.

The state will establish two intensive transitional treatment centers that can each house eight children. Youth with more therapeutic needs than the group homes are equipped to handle will go to these centers. If children stabilize in the centers but can’t go home or into foster care, they’ll be moved to a therapeutic group home.

Officials are still deciding on locations for the centers.

DCF also plans to offer youth in the STTAR homes priority access to three of the beds at Solnit South and Solnit North, two of the state-run psychiatric residential treatment facilities.

The STTAR homes are operated by Dcf-contracted providers. The project will cost about $6.2 million, DCF officials said. The money will come from within the department’s budget for congregate care. Use of congregate care has declined since 2019, which allows the agency to use the money for the new services.

“This plan provides an injection of resources for STAR homes to meet that need, but does so in recognition of the fact that these homes exist in a vital but singular part of a larger continuum,” Hill-lilly said.

Lamont spoke about the challenges kids have had since the pandemic. He said it’s been evident in the number of children who are chronically absent from school.

“Over the last year, we’ve got the mental health crisis centers, so you don’t go running into an emergency room, if you’ve got a need, we can get you more specialized care that maybe better addresses exactly what you need to do,” Lamont said.

The group homes are meant to offer youth a place to stabilize their mental health before they can go back home or to another placement. Hill-lilly said part of the plan is to help them reunify with their families where possible.

“We know out-of-home services need to be intensive and temporary, with the ultimate goal of helping our youth successfully return to their families and their communities,” Hill-lilly said. “Because after all, we remain convinced that children need to be with family in order to be successful.”

The Committee on Children recently passed House Bill 5260, which would require DCF to conduct an assessment of the group homes and create a report by Jan. 1. The bill would still need to go to the House and Senate.

Linehan said lawmakers are happy with DCF’S new plan and want to avoid passing legislation if the problem can be fixed without it. But, she said, the bill is there as a vehicle if they find before the end of session that they need a legislative change.

She said the committee doesn’t have requirements for DCF to make a report about the homes and whether the changes are working, but that they have a good working relationship. She’s confident DCF will share data and outcomes for the homes.

Eagan said she would like to see more specificity around reporting out information, and that the State Advisory Council could play a role in getting information.

DCF spokesman Peter Yazbak said that while Eagan has been in conversation with Hill-lilly, and the plan relied in part on OCA’S report on the Harwinton home, Eagan wasn’t directly a part of conversations crafting the plan.

Eagan said the state should also look at in-home services as well as issues such as low Medicaid reimbursement rates.

Lawmakers praised the plan during a press conference .

“Perhaps the most important part of this announcement is that these substantive changes we’ve been working on will be put into place almost immediately, bypassing a long legislative process where children can start to receive this necessary care as soon as possible,” Linehan said.

“I’m excited to have this happen,” said Children’s Committee co-chair Sen. Ceci Maher, D-wilton. “I’m excited to know that children are going to get additional therapeutic care, that the census is going to be reduced, and that there’s going to be additional support for our therapists within the homes so that they can do the work they need to do.”

Committee ranking members Sen. Lisa Seminara, R-avon, and Rep. Anne Dauphinais, R-killingly, also released a statement saying that the policy changes “reflect the seriousness of the STAR home problems.”

“While we’re hopeful that staffing and programmatic shifts will produce safer environments and better outcomes for the at-risk children who need these beds, we, as legislators, must monitor implementation of these changes and continue the conversation about what level of oversight and accountability is needed as we analyze whether this path is working,” the statement said. “We owe that to the children and the communities where these homes are located.”

Hill-lilly said that since she came into her role earlier this year, children’s mental health has been “top of mind.”

Eagan said that the challenge in the children’s behavioral health system is bigger than just DCF.

“This is a very important step forward,” Eagan said. “But it’s a piece of a much larger challenge that we have.”