Out of Options, California Ships Hundreds of Troubled Children Out of State
One 14-year-old boy’s search for care takes him to Utah as his home state struggles to safeguard its most challenging children.
Over more than a dozen turbulent years, he lived with a half-dozen foster families and in five different group homes. Now he is among the more than 900 children that California sends to out-of-state residential facilities, most of them in Utah, a ProPublica analysis shows.
Each of these children represents a surrender of sorts: a tacit acknowledgement that California — the nation’s biggest and, by some measures, richest state — somehow has no good answer for them.
In the late 1990s, after a 16-year-old boy died from abuse at an Arizona boot camp, California pledged not to export its troubled youth to out-of-state group homes and juvenile detention facilities that didn’t meet certain standards. The number of kids sent away plummeted.
Today, however, the state is grasping for options anew.
California has shuttered most of its secure facilities for youth and done away with almost all beds for children in psychiatric hospitals. It has moved to curtail the use of group homes, partly because, as ProPublica has reported, several have melted down into chaos in recent years. Most recently, the state has adopted reforms meant to keep children in need of acute care as close to home as possible, pumping money into county programs to create new centers and recruit foster families.
At the same time, California is sending more and more children to facilities out of state — some as far away as Florida. Indeed, the number of children sent from probation and child welfare agencies across the state has more than tripled since 2008.
“What’s happening in California is dishonest,” said Ken Berrick, the founder of Seneca Family of Agencies, a major child services agency based in Oakland. “We’re saying we don’t want locked facilities here and we don’t want group homes, so instead we’re sending kids to Utah where we can’t monitor them. What’s that about? It’s just wrong.”
There are signs that California has a limited ability to guarantee the health and welfare of the children it sends beyond its borders.
For one thing, state officials struggle even to keep track of how many children they’ve sent away. They couldn’t provide a total. Using several different sources of state data, ProPublica calculated that county probation departments in 2015 had some 235 children living out of state; child welfare agencies in 2015 had another 52 placed outside California; and local school districts had more than 600, including Deshaun Becton.
California’s Department of Social Services conducts occasional inspections of Out of Options, California Ships Hundreds of Troubled Children Out of State | Alternet:
