Child Welfare News
July 24, 2023
In the area of child welfare litigation, there have been a number of developments in the past month as numerous cases around the country work their way through the courts. Most interesting are those cases challenging the lack of appropriate care and placement for children with significant behavioral health and autism needs. A suit challenging the use of hotel and office placements for these children and youth was recently filed in Maryland. A federal judge in Oregon has appointed a monitor to oversee the ongoing issue of children placed in “temporary lodging.” “Oregon has spent more than $25 million housing 462 kids in foster care in hotels since the state promised to largely end the practice as part of a legal settlement in 2018,” the AP reports. In a closely related issue, a federal judge in Florida has ordered the state to stop housing children with significant and complex medical conditions in nursing homes.
Folks are working to stop hoteling. A number of states have used Medicaid waiver programs and pooled resources to develop better systems of care to keep children and youth with significant BH needs out of the foster care and juvenile justice systems. Here’s a recent op-ed by Georgia healthcare executive Rick Jackson on the issue. As he notes, there are significant federal legal barriers to providing appropriate care for these children. As a case in point, here’s an article out of Colorado regarding a child with autism abandoned by his father at a hospital. It notes that there are very few residential treatment centers for children remaining in the state. In Florida, a state senator is pushing reforms that would amend federal law to make it easier to provide the intense treatment these children need.
NPR has been covering the nationwide shortage of foster homes. Scott Simon interviewed a Nevada source on Weekend Edition, and WBUR’s On Point covered the issue in a longer piece. The solutions don’t require rocket science. My colleague Debbie Ausburn alerted me to another NPR story out of Kansas, where the Child Advocate’s Office recently surveyed former foster parents to determine why they quit fostering. Training, communication, respect and support were the most common complaints they found. Despite the proliferation of foster parent bills of rights, too often we see foster parents treated like mushrooms (or worse).
Debbie also brought to my attention that in Massachusetts a court recently ruled that when the child protection agency “substantiates” a case of neglect or abuse against a parent or other individual, due process requires that the agency give the accused an opportunity to contest the matter and present evidence before a neutral party. There are a number of other states whose current policies suffer from the same lack of due process.
Child welfare attorneys and staff in New York City went on strike!
Read about the organizations bidding to provide foster care services in Kansas.
In Cook County, a circuit judge held DCFS in contempt multiple times for keeping children hospitalized in psychiatric facilities sometimes months after discharge. This happened to a client's child - child received just 1 hour of school per day and no visits from mom. Situation so bad in Cook County courts set up a special call just to deal with this issue.