San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
State’s foster system failing kids
“All of us are one tragedy away from horrible, horrible consequences.”
That was one of the first things Anna Gleason told me when I recently visited her office in Placerville, a forested city about 45 minutes east of Sacramento. Gleason is the CEO of Summitview Child & Family Services, which operates five residential treatment facilities and two nonpublic school classrooms for youth with serious behavioral health conditions.
It’s a message that the dwindling number of providers serving California’s highestneeds foster youth have been conveying with increasing urgency. I didn’t fully grasp it until I visited Summitview.
The night before my visit, Gleason had been up until 2 a.m. due to a “very highneeds” youth wielding a large stick in a threatening way and refusing to let it go. A staff member was “pretty injured” and several kids were traumatized. A few days before that, Gleason said, a drug dealer had come to one of the facilities — whose addresses are supposed to be confidential — after being contacted by a foster youth who had been commercially sexually exploited and was trying to exchange drugs for sex.
Such incidents are routine. Gleason isn’t sure how much longer she can keep handling them.
That’s because recent wellintentioned but poorly implemented reforms to California’s child welfare system have put facilities like Summitview under increasingly unsustainable pressure. In 2017, the state embarked on an ambitious overhaul of its foster care system, designed to place fewer kids in group settings and more in family homes. Remaining group homes were reserved for youth with severe behavioral health needs and were required to offer more robust services.
Yet new foster families failed to materialize at the anticipated rate, and many group homes couldn’t meet the stricter licensing and staffing requirements necessary to become “short-term therapeutic
residential treatment programs.”
Consequently, the state lost thousands of licensed beds, according to estimates from the California Alliance of Child and Family Services. Federal funding restrictions that went into effect in January have only made things worse. In the past month alone, California lost 81 beds, state data shows.
Gleason has already closed three youth homes and is contemplating whether to privatize her remaining facilities, meaning she would no longer accept youth from the publicly funded foster care or county probation systems.
It’s an idea that Gleason herself recoils from. She’s devoted to working with California’s most troubled kids, and remained in the field even after almost losing her life 26 years ago, when, she said, a
youth picked her up and threw her down a flight of stairs, resulting in broken bones, significant nerve damage and brain contusions.
But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make the work pencil out.
Last year, the state paid short-term therapeutic residential treatment providers about $15,300 per kid per month, a rate that was set to increase to about $16,300 as of July 1, said Tyler Rinde, deputy director of child welfare policy for the California Alliance of Child and Family Services.
That sounds like a lot of money — though it’s far cheaper than hospitalization for acute psychiatric care — and some critics contend it could be better spent. But providers say that it falls far short of what the state promised for the higher levels of care required under its reforms,
and doesn’t come close to covering the soaring costs of labor, insurance and rent.
Concentrating kids with such acute needs in one place isn’t just expensive — it’s explosive.
Jordyn, 16, who in mid-June returned to her adoptive family after a seven-month stay at Summitview, told me during my visit that it could be difficult to live in such an “unpredictable” place.
“The staff don’t completely understand how hard it is,” she said, noting that the youth who had threatened others with the large stick was her roommate at the time. “It’s been very difficult not to act out. But I’ve been using my skills.”
Further complicating matters, state law limits what facilities like Summitview can do to prevent kids from engaging in dangerous behaviors.
For example, staff can’t physically prevent kids from leaving a facility and can only intervene in cases of imminent danger, Gleason said — which is often too late. In 2020, a 12-year-old girl left the Children’s Receiving Home in Sacramento County and ran into the freeway, where she was fatally struck by a car. And in February, Gleason said, a youth ran out of the main Summitview building and jumped off a roof. He survived, but sustained serious injuries.
“We were cited for it because we weren’t able to stop him getting on the roof,” Gleason said. “But, because of regulation, we couldn’t stop him.”
The state also recently cited Summitview for inadequately supervising two youth who left the facility and broke into and vandalized a neighbor’s home — though it’s unclear what staff could have done to prevent them from leaving.
Nor can staff restrict foster kids’ cell phone use without a court order, a well-intentioned rule that can be problematic if youth are using their phones to connect with traffickers or to obtain drugs, Gleason said.
The California Department of Social Services did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.
Clearly, facilities like Summitview are “not for the faint of heart,” as Gleason put it. But the chaos is partly a function of California’s reluctance to acknowledge the crucial role that group homes play in housing and caring for the state’s highest-needs youth. It isn’t enough for California to say that every kid deserves a loving family home. In the absence of this utopia, the state needs to adequately fund — and sensibly regulate — facilities like Summitview that take in kids with nowhere else to go.
Anything less is a failure to uphold the implicit promise it makes to each foster youth: “I can care for you better than your family can.”