Out of favor

Fall temperatures were just making their way to Florida’s Flagler County in 2019 when a desperate call came through an abuse hotline. The 14-year-old described physical and emotional abuse and squalid living conditions. She admitted thinking about suicide.

When sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home, they found five children living in rooms so littered with trash they couldn’t see the floor. Their boots stuck in the filth of animal feces. The refrigerator contained no edible food, and the home had no source of running water.

Sheriff Rick Staly immediately contacted Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranches, a nonprofit that serves at-risk children. Leaders assured him they had empty beds at a nearby 3,000-acre campus. But the Department of Children and Families had other plans for the siblings.

Maria Knapp wasn’t surprised. When she heard about that call, she knew the children wouldn’t end up at the facilities she helps operate for the Ranches. Instead, the state child protective agency chose to split the siblings among different foster homes, despite a Florida statute designed to keep sibling groups together.

“They told the sheriff he couldn’t place the children with us because we’re a residential group home,” Knapp said, even though her agency offered to take the siblings at no charge.

The Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch sits on acreage along the Suwannee River. Jon M. Fletcher/Genesis

But complimentary housing wouldn’t do, even when paired with the Ranches’ stellar 65-year track record of helping children in crisis. That’s because the landscape has changed significantly since Congress in 2018 passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, the most extensive overhaul of foster care in nearly four decades. The landmark child welfare legislation included a goal of keeping foster children out of congregate, or group, care. It’s a model that’s fallen out of favor with social engineers who say it’s not nurturing enough because it relies on professionals doing shift work, not family.

But five years on, states are struggling to secure enough foster homes for at-risk kids. This, even as many nationally renowned residential campuses shut their doors due to lack of use. Others, like Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranches, are fighting to keep their doors open.

It’s a midcareer battle Knapp never saw coming. Standing in a patch of sun outside her office in Live Oak, the Ranches’ executive vice president gets animated as she describes how her organization has helped some 173,000 children and families through the years, often hand-in-hand with state workers. Now, with federal pressure to eliminate group homes as a foster option, Knapp says her relationship with state-contracted placing agencies is strained. She’s pretty blunt about it: “They caved.”

Rancher Manny, 14, gets a horse harnessed and ready for work. Jon M. Fletcher/Genesis

THE MAIN INTENT of the Family First Prevention Services Act is easy to understand, if not implement: keep children with their families and out of the foster system. To increase that likelihood, the law provides at-risk families with greater access to prevention services—mental healthcare, substance abuse treatment, parenting courses. When children can’t safely remain with their families, Family First emphasizes using family foster homes rather than group homes. One type of group home still in favor is the “qualified residential treatment program,” which employs registered or licensed nursing and clinical staff and uses a trauma-informed treatment model. Trauma-informed care recognizes the effects of trauma and attempts healing without further re-traumatization. Sean Milner, who heads the Baptist Children’s Village of Mississippi, says it’s really nothing new: “For a long time, we’ve wanted our staff to be trained to recognize trauma. We’ve wanted them to respond to the needs of children and their families by creating a safe environment—not only physically safe, but also psychologically and emotionally safe. We didn’t know what to call it, but it’s a huge thing right now nationally.”

But designated qualified residential treatment programs are new, and the path toward accreditation can cost as much as $30,000. Maintaining the required software means another $20,000 a year.

It’s a fresh push that comes with financial incentives. Federal payments for placements that aren’t either foster homes, or one of four acceptable specialized group settings, are generally limited to two weeks. But not all child welfare workers understand the law. Many think all residential campuses are now off-limits, even though a large number—especially faith-based facilities—are donor based, with no ties to government money.

Milner’s organization is one of those. He says residential care providers don’t oppose the goals of Family First. “None of us believe in warehousing children. We want kids to have forever homes. What we fight is being lumped with poor-quality institutions. The law paints congregate care with a broad brush.”

Executive Vice President Maria Knapp. Jon M. Fletcher/Genesis

In 2017, Milner learned Knapp and a coalition of other group home directors were busy staving off three attempts to pass Family First. Then, during a late-night session the next year, lawmakers succeeded in attaching it to the Bipartisan Budget Act. When news of its passage reached a stunned Milner the next morning, he immediately started dialing congressmen. It was too late.

Family First has a formidable champion in the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national institution committed to providing and preventing the need for foster care. UPS founder Jim Casey established the foundation in 1948 in honor of his mother, a widow who struggled to raise four children. While the challenge to institutionalized care has been building since the mid-1800s, the direct aim at ­congregate care is a this-century development influenced largely by Casey philanthropies. According to its financial summary, Casey Family Programs spent $111 million in pursuit of its vision the year Family First passed. Assets totaling $2.2 billion allow Casey to provide free consulting to states, including Florida, where Knapp says Casey pays for advocates to work with the Department of Children and Families to write the plan to cut out residential care. That kind of work is going on all over the country, she says.

Another influential though surprising presence on the platform to curb congregate care? Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton. In 2021, Hilton spoke to members of Congress about abuse she suffered at a Utah youth residential ­treatment program where she says she was strangled and slapped. But it was an immersive, deterrent type of program, nothing like the group homes Knapp and Milner operate.

Activities director Tony Dodd (center) greets ranchers Christian (left), 16, and Brian, 16, during their P.E. class. Jon M. Fletcher/Genesis

THE ADOPTION ASSISTANCE and Child Welfare Act of 1980 stressed that kids in the child welfare system should grow up in families—their own when possible, and in new permanent homes when it isn’t. A 2008 amendment clarified that out-of-home placements must be in the “least restrictive setting” possible—the setting most like a family. It’s no surprise that research shows children fare better emotionally, physically, and educationally when placed in home-based family settings. But many residential care providers contend that’s what their campuses provide, not the institutionalized “hard-knock life” depicted in Broadway’s Annie. Instead, their cottages have full-time houseparents, individual bedrooms, and dinner tables where kids linger after meals.

That’s what members of Seventh and Mueller Church of Christ in Paragould, Ark., envisioned when they founded Children’s Homes Inc. in 1955. Its slate of services grew to include family counseling, equine therapy, wilderness education, and an alternative school. Staff member Paul Schandevel is quick to point out another notable achievement—an 80 percent family reunification rate.

Schandevel has been in the business long enough to remember when group homes were the state’s best friend. When he started at Children’s Homes 30 years ago, nearly all its placements came through child services. Still, he says he wasn’t surprised when congregate care became the industry pariah. His supervisors perceived what was coming down the pike and gradually decreased the number of kids they took from the state. By the time Family First passed, 99 percent of the residents at Children’s Homes came directly from families in crisis, not state social workers. It was a wise move that enabled Children’s Homes to remain viable, even as Arkansas became the third state in the nation to win federal approval for its Family First implementation plan.

Children’s Homes houses six kids per cottage, the same cap many states set for family foster homes. Even so, it’s lumped into the congregate care category, a label Schandevel equates with a black eye. “And now the neediest kids in the state of Arkansas aren’t benefiting from us anymore,” he laments. While Children’s Homes does have a treatment component, Schandevel says it doesn’t drive their agency. “We were that middle ground on the continuum of care. We prevented kids from going into treatment centers, but now that this law has been passed, you have all these kids who end up in treatment centers.”

Rancher Caleb, 14, feeds the cows at the youth ranch. Students have jobs to earn extra money and learn trade skills. Jon M. Fletcher/Genesis

SIXTEEN YEARS as a Georgia juvenile court judge made Juanita Stedman a believer in cottage model foster care. “What I saw from the bench is some kids don’t fit into a typical foster home,” she says, describing her surprise when Family First singled out congregate care for avoidance. She contends the cottage model, with its homelike environment, is very similar to a single foster home. “In Georgia 1,600 out of 11,000 foster kids are in congregate care. That’s not a huge percentage, but where would you put those kids?”

Stedman now leads Together Georgia, an influential network of child welfare advocates. She says Georgia has been slow to implement Family First objectives, probably because her state uses Temporary Assistance for Needy Families dollars to fund congregate care. But Stedman is preparing for the push: “I’m on this mission to say, ‘Look at who your congregate care folks are. They’re doing a good, strong job, and they’re taking these kids that are ­difficult to take.’”

That’s the point she made to a group of child welfare leaders during a recent legislative discussion. Looking around the table, she asked if any of them could relate to her assignment to secure placement for a 16-year-old, 300-pound autistic, nonverbal child who wears a diaper. “I had spent a day doing that, and I was able to tell them that the child is now in congregate care. He’s being picked up by school bus, and he’s in the special ed program at school.”

At-risk children arrive in the system with a host of complex issues: physical, emotional, educational, relational, psychological. Stedman says meeting those needs takes a special kind of caregiver. That’s why Stedman counseled her daughter and son-in-law, busy with careers and young children, against fostering when they expressed interest. “You almost have to have at least one stay-at-home parent because of all the appointments.”

Group care advocates believe the Family First narrative ignores something important—that qualified foster parents are in short supply. That’s why news outlets from Oregon to Maine and Virginia to Georgia have reported children awaiting placement sleeping in hotel rooms and government offices. In fact, hoteling is a new term among child welfare workers, who last year managed the nation’s nearly 400,000 children in need of foster care. It’s a stressful role. Texas has seen an exodus of more than 2,300 Family and Protective Services employees, many burned out by extra “child-without-placement” responsibilities. But Don Forrester of the Coalition of Residential Excellence thinks the kids sleeping on office sofas may fare better than the ones feeling the brunt of a new push to keep kids with their parents and kin, even when it’s dangerous. He calls that the “unseen crisis.”

“An effective childcare program needs to have prevention services,” Forrester admits. “I fully support that aspect of Family First, but it also has to have protective services. The problem with the 21st-century child welfare model is it focuses only on prevention.” In 2017—even as lawmakers crafted Family First—an estimated 1,720 children died from abuse and neglect in the United States. Child welfare officials had interactions with more than a quarter of their families before these homicides made the news.

Meanwhile, Forrester says half of the residential agencies in his coalition are operating at diminished capacity. The rest have closed. And in Texas, you won’t find a single qualified residential treatment program.

Rancher Braxton, 14, relaxes in his room before dinner at the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch. Jon M. Fletcher/Genesis

BUT SOME GROUP HOMES have embraced the residential treatment model. Kevin Hewitt is president of Christian Children’s Home of Ohio. He recently spoke at a church two hours west of its campus in Wooster.

“This little lady came up in a wheelchair and told me how grateful she was for what we were doing for kids. She wanted me to know that she had been praying for the ­children’s home for a quarter of a century.” Hewitt smiles at the memory, going on to explain the woman grabbed his hand and put a $5 bill in it. “Those kinds of encounters remind me of the weight of the decisions we make. Over 200 churches send us monthly donations.”

Hewitt’s praying friend probably remembers when residents of the Children’s Home enjoyed greater freedoms, like hunting on its expansive property. She’d be surprised to know that in recent years, employees filed some 50 workers’ comp complaints because children attacked them. These days, kids come to the campus to work on their severe trauma, then get placed in less restrictive ­environments. That move toward the treatment model status makes the Children’s Home Family First–friendly, but Hewitt admits there’s a trade-off. “At times, I feel looked down upon because we take government money, but if these kids didn’t have us, where would they go? What better place to be than in a Christian home where the kids get to hear the gospel, see the gospel?”

But their homes are different from other cottage models. Cottage supervisors, rather than houseparents, direct each residence. Clinicians live in the cottages. “For the first 40 years of our existence, the houseparent model was ­fantastic,” Hewitt explains. “But as the needs of the kids continued to deepen, and the trauma became more severe, we were burning out houseparents like crazy.”

Hewitt is aware of the anti–congregate care climate. The anti-Christian climate, too. “But I’ve yet to find anybody who argues against trying to instill the fruit of the Spirit, whether that’s kindness, goodness. I mean, how can you argue that?” He says the Children’s Home wants residents to understand their worth in Christ. “Too often they’re defined by what’s happened to them, but they’re so much more. And that’s what we want the world to see.”

Still, the concessions of congregate care providers may not be enough to satisfy the new foster care engineers. In Minnesota, advocates have proclaimed racial disparities in their child welfare system as the top priority to be addressed. In New Jersey, the upEND campaign’s goal is to end children’s removal from families entirely. And yet, Family First has been difficult to implement. Lawmakers approved a transition act, coupled with more money, to grease the wheels. Family First architect Becky Shipp, in a surprising turn, became a lobbyist helping “fix” the law.

Cottage mom Kris May serves up generous portions of dinner in the cottage she supervises with her husband Randy. Jon M. Fletcher/Genesis

BACK IN FLORIDA, Maria Knapp is stretched out on her couch. It’s been a long day. A long week. But at 10 p.m., an email comes through, and the sound of Knapp’s excitement gets the attention of her husband all the way in another room. Staffers for U.S. Rep. Neal Dunn, R-Fla., sent a draft of proposed legislation called Creating Accountable, Respectful Environments for Children. It’s the brainchild of Knapp and her colleagues at the Coalition of Residential Excellence, a group seeking to rebrand their services as “cottage family homes,” a middle option on the continuum of care between traditional and therapeutic fostering. Marketing their campuses as family settings enriched with wraparound services—24/7 ­houseparents, alarm systems, individual bedrooms and bathrooms, sports, therapy, tutoring, music lessons, travel—makes sense. But will it make the House calendar?

Knapp knows a lot is at stake, especially for two young girls living at the Ranches. She remembers when they first arrived. “They’d been living like feral animals. They barked and meowed to communicate. But now they’re thriving. They’re active at church. They play sports.” Florida, however, is dead set on placing the girls with ­relatives Knapp says have never tried to gain custody of them. “It’s an injustice for children. I don’t see how anybody could visit our campus, our homes, and not feel like we’re a great place for kids.”

So Dunn’s email has come at a good time, and his aide’s “Yippee!” interjection in the first line is a nice touch, too. The sight of it has Knapp smiling, reenergized. “Just the fact that they believe in what you’re trying to do, it buoys your soul.”

Caring for children in crisis

The fight over group homes is just the latest round in America’s nearly 250-year debate over how best to care for children in crisis. And it all started with Charles Loring Brace.

A Congregationalist minister, Brace left the luxury of his New England childhood to live among the poor in the squalor of New York’s tenements. Every day he watched the children around “Misery Row,” who were known as “street rats,” scurry from one odd job to the next, picking pockets and sleeping in corners. Some of them had parents who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—care for them. Others had no parents.

Charles Loring Brace Public Domain

With help from like-minded reformers, Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society in 1853 to improve the children’s lives. But he could only do so much in the city. He wanted the children to have new homes and families, and to do that, he needed to get them out of New York. So he put them on trains and sent them to the Midwest, where hundreds of thousands of children forged new lives.

Some people took issue with Brace’s solution, calling it reckless to send children away with limited long-term follow-­­up. Still, Brace is considered the father of the modern foster care movement, one of many Christians working to carry out the Biblical command to care for orphans in their distress.

By the mid-20th century, the government took the lead role in that work, but Christian groups continue to support children in crisis. From adoption to ­foster care to assisting families at risk of having their children taken away, Christians still lead the way in providing help that really helps.

Starting April 18, WORLD Radio began highlighting the work of these ministries in Season 4 of the Effective Compassion podcast. Find it at wng.org/podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. —Leigh Jones