Samantha Stewart always wanted a big family, so over the past few years, the door to her home has been rotating. She and her husband have fostered seven kids.
On a summer afternoon, two of those children play in the living room, doing somersaults and singing songs from “Frozen."
But Stewart said not every day is so carefree. One of her children faces challenges a lot of kids her age don’t.
“Our daughter with autism, she had gotten kicked out of a couple different daycares because of her behaviors that stem from her autism and neglect,” Stewart said.
Stewart is a nurse, so she’s had professional experience working with kids with autism and was eager to work with them personally as a foster parent.
“I knew that I would be able to give them the resources that they needed to succeed in life,” she said. “ With my nursing background, I knew what kind of therapies they would need.”
So, through a novel program in her area, the Northwest Treatment Foster Care Partnership, she learned about trauma-informed care and how to respond to tricky behaviors.
Now, she’s one of eight treatment foster homes in her area licensed to care for kids with high behavior needs.
Foster care needs in Ohio
A growing number of children are in need of care like this.
“There's a mental health crisis among children across the nation,” said Scott Britton, the assistant director of the Public Children Services Association of Ohio. “And Ohio isn't alone in seeing more kids coming into children's services custody because they have nowhere else to go.”
“They are staying in hospital emergency departments for a week. They're going to detention centers because of dangerous behavior. There simply isn't the mental health infrastructure right now to meet their growing needs,” he said.
Nearly a quarter of kids come into children’s services custody not primarily because of abuse or neglect, Scott said, but because of behavioral health, intellectual disabilities or juvenile justice involvement.
“That surprises a lot of people,” he said. “Perhaps the parents can't afford the treatment the child needs. Or maybe the parents don't know how to manage the behaviors of a child on the autism spectrum who's gotten older and and bigger. And so, at their wit's end, they often come to children's services.”
But children’s services sometimes struggle to meet these kids’ needs as well. The number of foster parents in Ohio is dropping, Britton said, and even fewer people are willing to take in kids with serious behavior challenges. So instead of being placed with families, many end up in congregate care.
The Sandusky County example
As the director of Sandusky County’s Job and Family Services, Melanie Allen knows this firsthand.
“We couldn't get a regular foster home to take a high acuity 10-year-old. So we were placing kids younger and younger in congregate care.”Melanie Allen, Sandusky County Department of Job and Family Services Director
“The problem we were having was, we couldn't get a regular foster home to take a high acuity 10-year-old,” she said. “So we were placing kids younger and younger in congregate care.”
That’s a problem for a few reasons. Although congregate care settings can be necessary to stabilize behaviors, they don’t always provide the best environment for young children to grow up in, Allen said.
“Living in a home where there's a parent, versus a staff member, I could not even quantify how important and valuable that is.”
Plus, group homes can be really expensive. Allen knows of one child in particular that stayed in a congregate care setting at a cost of nearly $500 a day. When she moved to a foster home, the cost dropped to just $50 a day.
On top of that, group homes can be located hours away from a child’s biological parents, making it hard for them to visit. But if a child can stay in a local treatment foster home, parents can not only visit, they can learn how to manage their child’s challenging behaviors by working alongside foster parents.
“We want them to be able to transfer skills,” Allen said. “We want them to be able to talk about, ‘This is how I've managed this behavior.’”
The Treatment Foster Care Pilot Program
But finding and training treatment foster parents isn’t an easy task.
Allen’s department lacked the resources to get a treatment foster care program going on its own. So, they partnered with neighboring northwest Ohio counties to hire a shared worker solely dedicated to the task.
So far, they’ve trained eight treatment foster homes across a four-county area. Another five families are in the process of getting licensed.
The model has been so successful the state is dedicating $2 million to replicate it with nine other regional partnerships. The clusters of Ohio counties will work together to recruit, train and support foster families, in hopes of finding more homes for the 1,800 Ohio foster children currently living in group settings.
“[These kids] are going through something that most people couldn't imagine,” Samantha Stewart said, eyes trained on the preschoolers she’s fostering. “Their whole lives are being changed.”
“So, if you think that you can give that kid the best life, it's worth it,” she said. “Whether they go back to another home with family or whatever, you made a difference in their lives, no matter how long you have them.”
And the kids are making a difference in her family’s life too.
“My husband always jokes, ‘If you would have told me however many years ago I was going to be a foster parent or have a daughter with autism, I would have thought you were crazy.’ And now, he has learned to understand her and they have their own secret language. And it's beautiful.”
