A new report offers insight into why the Oregon Department of Human Services failed to stop placing kids in foster care in hotels and temporary lodging despite a pledge to stop the practice.
Oregon has spent more than $25 million housing hundreds of kids in foster care in hotels after promising in a 2018 legal settlement to curb the practice.
A federal judge appointed Marty Beyer in July as a special master to dig into the issue and come up with recommendations on how to find better placements for vulnerable children. Beyer’s report, obtained through a public record’s request from OPB, is still in draft form.
The report includes recommendations on how to improve the system, but also notes that temporary lodging is not the problem the agency should be trying to solve.
“Everyone agrees that temporary lodging must end because it is not good for children and youth,” Beyer writes.
But the reasons why the state’s most vulnerable youth end up in inappropriate placements starts long before they become “unplaceable” and end up in a hotel, Beyer notes.
Beyer’s biggest takeaway: For the state to end temporary lodging — and ensure every kid has an appropriate and stable placement — will require “whole child care” and necessitate changes within DHS and other state agencies, from the Oregon Health Authority to the juvenile justice system to local school districts.
Officials with the state Department of Human Services declined to comment, noting they were involved with active litigation on the matter.
‘Unconscionable’ lack of treatments to address foster kids’ trauma
The 2018 legal settlement prompted the department to try and stop the practice. The settlement also set certain metrics. The result, Beyer wrote, was that child welfare staff became increasingly “metric focused” — they missed the big picture and narrowly focused on keeping kids out of a hotel unsuccessfully, which resulted in extremely costly approaches and exhausted staff. It also got in the way of “effective solutions,” Beyer wrote.
To get at the root of the problem, Beyer continued, it will take a more holistic approach to caring for the state’s most vulnerable.
“The thousands of children blocked from receiving the therapeutic and educational services to meet their needs for years while in foster care are further harmed by agency divisions driving reactive interventions that push children into placements and schools that cannot meet their needs,” Beyer said.
Beyer pointed out how traumatic placement changes (a new home, new school and new community) can be for any kid. Yet, it’s common for children placed in care to bounce from one placement to the next, and they usually don’t usually have enough adults around them equipped with the skill set to help the vulnerable youth navigate their situation.
“Caring adults often misunderstand the child’s verbal and physical outbursts and react as if they were directed at them personally; the adult may become less receptive and soothing as a result, unintentionally adding to the child’s feeling rejected,” she wrote.
Integral to ending temporary lodging is to ensure that children have placement stability early in their time foster care, Beyer wrote.
Beyer, who is a child welfare and juvenile justice consultant, didn’t mince words when writing about the type of treatments to address the trauma kids in foster care receive, calling the lack of such treatment “unconscionable.”
“Children in foster care wait four months or more to be seen by a therapist, and usually the therapist is a trainee unable to see them for more than a few months,” she wrote.
Judge could order the state to follow report’s recommendations
Finding appropriate housing for kids in foster care has been a longstanding problem in Oregon. Kids started sleeping in child welfare offices in 2012. Later, that evolved into hotels. In 2016, the Youth, Rights & Justice, a law firm focused on advocating for kids, filed a lawsuit to stop the use of hotels. In 2018, the parties agreed to a legal settlement to limit the practice.
The state argued they had to place kids in temporary lodging due to “increased aggression, suicidal ideation, sexual harming, and children refusing placement” along with “decreased resource homes and residential beds due to a combination of providers … being unable to recruit and retain staff and the restrictions on the use of physical intervention with out-of-control children/youth in foster care.”
Oregon Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis, who chairs the Senate Committee on Human Services and has read the draft report, said she appreciated the report and it made her feel optimistic things could improve for kids in care.
“The first thing that stood out to me was (Beyer’s) ability to really focus on the kids, so often in these conversations the kids are blamed … When you frame them as human, as kids, as people who have endured trauma and are trying to survive, it leads to different expectations and outcomes, and I hope we can talk and think about these kids in that way,” Gelser Blouin said.
Beyer has a one-year contract with the state and spent the first three months gathering information for the report. U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane appointed Beyer. He could order the state to follow Beyer’s recommendations.
Some of Beyer’s recommendations include:
- Guarantee placement stability; create an alarm-like system when a child is about to enter a third different placement that triggers a response where all the adults in the child’s life (teacher, therapist, nurse, parent, caregiver) and the youth work together. “There is a surprising lack of what some call ‘clinical’ thinking in child-and-youth serving agencies. Identifying the needs behind a child/youth’s behavior requires observing and listening to the child/youth. What are the child’s fearful responses? Before the child gets angry or self-harming, what small clues to what makes them feel unable to control their environment can be seen?” Beyer wrote.
- Increase the rates for foster parents and those whose who are watching a relative in care; offer more training to these caregivers, more in-home support, more respite care; think about the child more holistically and include support for them to be successful in school; make sure they have a therapist and create more resources for BIPOC and LGBTIA+ kids in care; also create more therapeutic foster homes where in-home services are provided.
- Create small staffed homes where one or two children could be cared for by staff trained to meet trauma-related and delayed development needs of children.
- Ensure that children are receiving trauma treatment that meets their needs; remove barriers so kids in care can access mental health services through coordinated care organizations. In general, Beyer urges taking a more big-picture look at all the kids in care and ensuring all state barriers are removed that prohibit some kids from accessing mental health services.
- Often when kids are placed in a different setting, their team of caregivers change. Beyer notes that there should be a continuity of services, so when a child transitions out of residential care and goes into another placement, the youth’s caregivers are able to continue as they transition to a new home.
Copyright 2023 Oregon Public Broadcasting. To see more, visit Oregon Public Broadcasting.
