The Vermont Department of Children and Families consistently turns a deaf ear to calls about teenagers, organizations that work with older youths say.
Third-party social services organizations that serve teens call the Department for Children and Families when a teen needs services only DCF can provide.
DCF workers not only don’t respond, they sometimes tell the organizations, such as the HowardCenter and Spectrum Youth and Family Services, that those teens are not their problem.
“These kids are homeless and we get tremendous pushback from DCF, who are not taking responsibility for these 16- and 17-year-olds,” Mark Redmond, the director at Spectrum, told legislators last month.
Spectrum runs a homeless shelter in downtown Burlington and the law requires him to report cases of homeless youths to DCF and the teens’ parents.
When he does, DCF does nothing, leaving Spectrum in a bind because the organization by law can only keep teens in the shelter for 14 days, Redmond said.
Spectrum follows a national law that allows them to stay an extra week, but after that they have to leave.
“Do we send them out into the cold, the snow and the rain when they’re 16 and 17 years old or do we just blow through the federal law?” Redmond asked at a the hearing about the state’s child protection system. “These are not isolated incidents, this is a pattern that we see over and over.”
DCF says state law ties their hands in dealing with older teens.
DCF’s website explains that they will generally not get involved with youths age 16 to 17½ unless the child is at a high risk of seriously harming himself or others due to problems such as substance abuse, prostitution or homelessness. That policy stems from a 2002 law.
Instead, DCF tries to send those teens to community agencies. DCF is only supposed to get involved when the family has exhausted all other options, the policy says.
“I think folks think of DCF and that we can have the same response to a youth whether they’re six months or 17 (years old), and that’s not the case,” said Lindy Boudreau, who until a year ago was a supervisor in the Morrisville DCF office and has worked for DCF 21 years.
Often social workers would like to offer older youths more services, but are bound by the law, said Boudreau, who is now the DCF juvenile justice administrator.
“Depending on the resources in the local office and the information that we may have about the youth and the family situation, we can offer other pieces that don’t require us to open a case or have a court response,” she said.
They also cannot force teenagers to attend the services they recommend, making it an especially challenging age group to serve.
DCF does have to respond, Boudreau said, if a teen is already in DCF custody. Many are not in custody, however, but have come in contact with DCF in the past and have been referred to services at local organizations.
One of those organizations is the Vermont Coalition for Runaway and Homeless Youth. Director Calvin Smith has also noticed DCF’s lack of response to calls about older teens.
He has requested a meeting with DCF and is gathering information to show officials examples of cases where this has happened. DCF is receptive to working out a solution, he said.
“They’re coming from a place of wanting to do what’s best for a young person,” Smith said, but sometimes a situation is truly a child welfare issue and not something his program can handle.
Smith said most of the time he tries to find other services, but in general there aren’t a lot of good resources for teens. Housing is a huge problem, he said. Boudreau agreed that housing can be exceptionally difficult to find.
Of the 1,000 youths Smith’s agency serves each year, about 88 percent go home or to another safe placement, Smith said. About 100 or 150 youths leave for a place that isn’t safe and a subset of those are cases where DCF should be involved, he said.
Cyrus Patten, a social worker who worked at Spectrum and HowardCenter, said he has also noticed that DCF ignores older teens.
DCF often shuffles callers who inquire about teens between departments and agencies and their culture of “not our problem” has led people to stop calling DCF, Patten said.
At Spectrum workers would call DCF on behalf of homeless teens engaged in dangerous behavior, girls who were trading sex for drugs, or on behalf of teens whose parents dropped them off at the shelter.
“DCF wouldn’t even take reports on half of those kids,” said Patten, who is now the director of Campaign for Vermont, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Sometimes it wouldn’t make any difference if a child was in DCF custody, but other times there are services a child could receive that the Department of Mental Health would pay for, but DCF would not, Patten said.