The Department for Children and Families has a plan to help care for foster kids in crisis at home and avoid sending them to more expensive out-of-state residential care.
The strategy? Offer higher pay and more training to families that would offer short-term care for kids in crisis.
Now, 123 Vermont kids in state custody are in residential care homes, half of them outside Vermont.
“We have too many kids in residential placements,” said DCF Commissioner Sean Brown, calling it “really disruptive” for children. “If we can serve more of them in-state, it’s better for the youth. That’s our primary driver.”
Putting kids in residential care is also costly, to the tune of $26 million in 2020, according to Brown.
The state aims to set up at least a dozen “high-end stabilization foster homes” as a way to help divert kids who need mental health care from going to emergency rooms and hospitals. Many of the kids who have been showing up in high numbers at emergency rooms, unable to get mental health treatment, are in state custody, Brown said.
Advocates, parents and nonprofit leaders said they are optimistic about the plan — if the state can pull it off.
“I applaud any and all efforts” to reduce reliance on out-of-state homes, said Chuck Myers, executive director of Northeastern Family Institute, VT, an organization that provides care to kids with emotional, behavioral and mental health challenges.
Keeping kids close to home and in their communities allows them to stay engaged in school, sports or other activities, and to develop close relationships with adults, which can be a key factor in overall well-being, Myers said.
But doing that successfully requires a significant investment in training and support for foster parents, said Jim Hudziak, chief of child psychiatry at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine and founder of the Vermont Family Based Approach, which helps equip parents to provide healthier environments for kids.
“These aren’t psychologists,” he said of foster parents. “They know how to get the support they need when they need it.” Right now, he said, that’s likely not an option, given the lengthy waitlists for many mental health organizations and counselors.
“Parents should be vetted, rewarded, and they should be trained,” Hudziak said.
DCF now has about 1,100 children in foster care and about 460 kids in conditional custody — meaning they are in the custody of their parents, though the state retains oversight. The total number of foster kids has dropped during the pandemic, which Brown attributed to a decline in calls reporting abuse or neglect from schools and day cares while kids stayed home.
Families who foster receive a stipend that ranges from $18.70 to $29.72 a day — between $560 and $890 a month — depending on the age and need of the child.
Under the new program, foster families would be paid more, though Brown said DCF was still deciding what that rate would be. The family would receive services from local agencies or nonprofits, depending on where they were located and the availability or supports nearby.
The placements could last from a few days to several weeks, until the child was safe to return to their permanent home. Eighteen foster families have expressed interest in the program, Brown said.
Brown said he didn’t know when the program would start, or how much money it would save the state, but “it’s definitely more cost-effective.”
‘A successful model?’
It’s not the first program to take the approach — Northeastern Family Institute runs therapeutic foster homes, and Washington County Mental Health has its own version, called micro residences, to provide care to high-needs kids in state custody.
The state embraced the model of providing services to kids and their families in their homes in the mid-1990s, according to Myers. His organization offers those services to 60 children and their families, including foster kids.
Myers warned the state may have its work cut out as it seeks to recruit more families. Foster parents are difficult to recruit in the best of times, and even more so during the pandemic, he said. Covid-19 safety precautions made parents hesitant to take in children, and financial strains of the pandemic didn’t help.
Brown said DCF would draw from its existing pool of roughly 1,500 licensed foster families.
The plan hasn’t been universally embraced. Robyn Freedner-Maguire of Burlington said she worried that the effort could come at the expense of other, more important work to help kids and families. She describes herself as a career issue-based campaign strategist on issues concerning mental health.
She urged the state to “focus like a laser beam on workforce development and creating community-based services,” she said in an email to VTDigger. “We shouldn’t rely on tenuous plans staffed by average Vermonters who get a little training because ultimately, the issues that children in foster care experience are generally complex and warrant expertise of highly trained, highly skilled individuals.”
Brown offered assurance that foster parents would be equipped. “We have some pretty amazing foster parents who can step and fill this role,” he said. “With additional training, this could be a very successful model.”
Correction: This article originally mischaracterized conditional custody.
