Sonoma County works to move foster care to family homes

In less than five months the state will launch an ambitious initiative aimed at overhauling its foster care system, phasing out the controversial era of foster group homes and placing as many foster kids as possible in permanent family homes.

It’s a lofty goal Sonoma County officials and local foster care agencies have been pursuing for years. But some officials fear the state’s reform policies and mandates won’t be properly funded, creating a vacuum of resources to deal with the most troubled youth.

Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane, a longtime proponent of beefing up foster care services, warned that failing to provide foster families with the proper training and resources to care for the most traumatized children could backfire.

“I don’t have any qualms about moving kids toward families,” said Zane. “But I don’t think anyone should be putting a kid in a family situation only to have them removed because the family is not equipped to deal with the child’s level of need.”

Doing so, Zane said, could lead to a chain of repeated foster family placements that could “re-traumatize” the youth.

Known as the Continuum of Care Reform, the move began four years ago when state officials and county welfare directors began working on a statutory and policy framework to comprehensively reform placement and treatment options for foster youth.

The effort led to state legislation, AB 403, that was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in October. The state will begin phasing in the legislation’s massive changes at the beginning of 2017.

The proposal calls for moving thousands of foster youth from group homes to family-based services, retooling group homes as short-term residential treatment programs, establishing new levels of provider accountability, and bolstering supportive services for youth placed with relatives.

The state has designated $127.3 million from the general fund in 2016-17 for implementation. Michael Weston, a spokesman for the state Department of Social Services, said that the reform essentially makes group home-type services available to foster children in a family home setting.

“The Continuum of Care Reform expands on services and supports provided to the child or youth and his or her family to meet their treatment needs regardless of the placement setting,” Weston said in an email.

“This includes behavioral and mental health services. The cost for providing these services does not go away.”

But critics warn that the state does not appear to be increasing the amount of funding to agencies and families who are expected to take in those in group homes.

“There are some kids that need intensive treatment,” Zane said.

Michael Kennedy, Sonoma County’s mental health director, also raised concerns about the time frame laid out for implementation. In some cases, counties are still waiting for state guidelines, such as those for certifying therapeutic foster homes.

“In reality, we have to wait until they give us the guidelines,” he said. “We can’t move until the state figures some of these things out.”

Nick Honey, director of Sonoma County’s Family, Youth and Children’s Services, said the county has for years been trying to steer foster youth away from group homes and into permanent family homes.

In April 2009, 110, or 23 percent, of the county’s 478 foster kids were in group homes. By April of this year, only 30, or 7 percent of the county’s 428 foster kids were in a group home setting.

“It’s a change in mindset,” Honey said. “We want to find a family for every child and, I think, in the past we accepted that children could or needed to be in group care for a long time, and our values have changed around that.”

But the key, Honey said, is whether enough families can be trained and recruited to provide homes for foster kids, and whether there will be enough funding to do that.

“There was more funding in this year’s state budget, but we think we’ll need more,” he said.

Jim Galsterer, executive director of TLC Child and Family Services in Sebastopol, said his organization, which operates three 10-bed group homes in the county, is ready for the state’s new foster care initiative and has been gearing its services toward permanent placement homes for some time.

“Group homes just aren’t places for kids to grow up. We’ve felt that way for a long time,” he said, adding that the average length of stay for youth in TLC group homes is about 10 to 12 months.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.