Troubled foster care office must shut down
Sacramento intake center’s kids a target of traffickers
SACRAMENTO — State officials have ordered Sacramento County to shut down its foster care intake office by the end of next month, calling for an end to an illegal operation where abused and neglected children are poorly supervised, sleep on the floor, and are often preyed upon by human traffickers.
The county’s child welfare agency, which has faced pressure from youth advocates, has until Sept. 30 to stop housing foster children at its Centralized Placement Support Unit, located on a highcrime strip of Auburn Boulevard.
Attorneys for foster youth say the unauthorized situation is unique in California, with no other county allowing such egregious conditions to persist.
“We’re glad that finally the state is starting to take some action to keep the most vulner-
able kids from being victimized in a place that’s located literally right across the street from where sex traffickers recruit kids,” said attorney Brenda Dabney, director of the Children’s Law Center of Sacramento.
County officials said they intend to comply with the Sept. 30 deadline, but offered few details about alternative plans for managing the 100 children on average who pass through the office each month, citing contract negotiations.
“The state has given us until the 30th of September and it’s certainly the intent of the county to comply with that,” said county Supervisor Don Nottoli. “They’re minors, they’re at risk, they’ve had terrible things happen to them, and we don’t want to put them at greater risk.
“Obviously, we’re going to have to move quickly.”
The Auburn Boulevard intake office and a pair of adjacent rooms with televisions, magazines and video games are designed as a brief, first stopover for children removed from their homes to protect them from abuse or neglect — a place to go for a snack and a rest while social workers call relatives and arrange foster home placements.
But over the years, the office has also become an illequipped crash pad for older teens already in the system who are between foster care placements and have nowhere else to go. That has created a dangerous mix of children who have just been separated from their parents for the first time, and others who have spent years surviving alone on the streets.
The office area is not licensed to house children overnight, but the county has long flouted state health and safety laws by rolling out air mattresses, mats and cots for children it has been unable to place, some sleeping there for weeks and even months.
In February 2016, state licensing officials issued Sacramento County a citation for operating a residential facility without a license, ordering that children living in the unit be moved to more appropriate settings within two weeks. Since then, only superficial remedies have been sought.
The state’s new demand of Sacramento’s top child welfare official, issued July 27, follows a Chronicle exposé of the troubling situation published three weeks prior.
“Sacramento County should immediately begin reducing the number of youth in CPSU and shall ensure no youth are housed at CPSU after Sept. 30, 2017,” wrote Gregory Rose, a deputy director with the California Department of Social Services.
Rose also detailed an array of stepped-up service plans the county is expected to complete, including enhancing the capacity of the local children’s shelter, which is charged with housing kids awaiting foster care placements. The shelter, located on the same campus as the county’s central intake unit, has mostly declined to admit the children who have been sleeping on the lobby floor.
Directors of the county-contracted shelter, run by the nonprofit Children’s Receiving Home of Sacramento, have maintained that they lack the space and resources to care for large sibling groups, youths with aggressive or self-harming behaviors, and those who are being sexually exploited. Plans in the works would allow for children with intensive needs to be admitted to the shelter, with one-on-one staff supervision.
But until recently, there has been little urgency to solve the problem at the CPSU. Late last month, the statewide director of the Children’s Law Center, Leslie Heimov, pushed county supervisors to act. In recent weeks, she testified at a public meeting, an 8-year-old boy spent more than a month housed at the illegal intake unit, shuttled back and forth from school. Social workers had found the boy’s siblings homes, but he was left behind.
Far from a home-like environment, the office lobby where some youth sleep when nearby “comfort rooms” are unavailable resembles a doctor’s office waiting room, lined with a bank of plastic chairs.
“The staff that are assigned to oversee these children are on the other side of a glass window. They don’t interact with them except to let them know when they need to go to the restrooms and perhaps bring them a meal,” Heimov said. “They roll out mats or cots at night for them to sleep on, and what ends up happening — not surprisingly — is these kids who are already anxious, agitated and have a lot of needs become more anxious and more agitated.”
The resulting fights and emotional outbursts can often lead to arrest, hospitalization and increased victimization. Heimov described the problem as “a constant state of crisis” for almost two years.
Both the intake center and the shelter are located in a Sacramento neighborhood well known by authorities for commercial sexual exploitation, and county staff and advocates say a good number of teens passing through the facilities are being sent to recruit other young people into the abusive trade.
Given the dire circumstances in the intake unit, “the children are easily enticed away,” Heimov said, adding: “One girl got beat up because she refused to go.”
The problems in Sacramento came to light during a Chronicle investigation published in May that found foster youth in California children’s shelters have been subjected to hundreds of questionable arrests for minor misbehavior. In 2015 and 2016, 44 foster youths were booked at the local juvenile hall after arrests on the Sacramento shelter campus. One boy no older than 8 years old was arrested in January on suspicion of felony assault and misdemeanor vandalism in the county intake unit.
One former Sacramento County foster youth, now 27 and living out of state, said she is skeptical that the intake unit will actually be shut down, given its lengthy history.
She said when she was a young teen in the system between 2003 and 2005, she was moved in and out of the children’s shelter and the placement unit, where she slept on a blue beanbag.
The young mother, who did not want her name used to protect the confidentiality of her children, said that memory of the intake unit will never leave her.
“If it is shutting down, I think that’s absolutely wonderful,” she said. “Children going through these systems should be treated like children, like humans — not like worthless pieces of trash.” With no right to even a bed, she added: “I felt like nothing, and I was pretty much reminded of that, that I was nothing, that I was just passing by.” Karen de Sá is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kdesa@sfchronicle.com