Former foster youth speak on their experience with a lack of placement stability while in Oregon's foster care system
In response to Oregon’s high number of moves and disruptions for young people in foster care, Street Roots, with funding and collaboration from the Solutions Journalism Network, is investigating unique solutions to problems associated with placement instability for youth in care. This is the first of a five-part series exploring innovative, data-driven solutions which can be replicated in other states or regions.
Young people in foster care will tell you a myriad of reasons why they were moved to a new foster care placement. One teenage girl said she was caught smoking, which was against her foster family’s rules. A young boy had to move because his foster parents couldn’t handle his mental health needs. A teenage boy was bounced out of a group home due to his run-ins with police.
The “foster care shuffle” is a reality for tens of thousands of young people who make up the more than 400,000 youths in our nation’s foster care system. Most child welfare workers agree, moving young people from home to home only adds another layer of trauma for youths who are already dealing with the devastating effects of abuse and neglect.
Child development experts say even children who enter foster care relatively unscathed by their past experiences, but then face multiple foster care placements, are prone to develop behavioral changes, attachment issues, struggles in school and reduced chances of reunifying with their biological families.
“I had to quickly learn there’s no one guaranteed to be in my life,” said Chy Nash, 21, who experienced 14 placements in 11 years while in foster care in Oregon and Arkansas. “I went into survival mode — fight or flight.”
Nash shuffled from foster homes to group homes to institutions; so many, at such a young age, she struggles to remember the order. Unfortunately, her story is not entirely unique.
In Oregon, 41% of children in foster care have experienced three or more placements during their time in care, including 15% with six or more placements, according to the latest quarterly results in the Oregon Child Welfare Data Set for June 2021.
When the data is broken down by race, a disproportionate 54% of Black and African American youths have had three or more placements, including 25% with six or more placements.
This comes after years of public outcry over Oregon’s foster care system. As Street Roots first reported in 2019, foster youth and their representatives filed a class action lawsuit demanding the governor and state leaders take responsibility for the gross negligence and failures within the state’s foster care system.
Information surfaced about the state placing foster children in juvenile detention centers, motels and out-of-state treatment facilities to deal with the shortage of local treatment centers and family foster homes.
Oregon’s most recent Child Welfare Data Book for Federal Fiscal Year 2020 shows the percentage of children with three or more placements has only grown the past three years.
It’s not the direction child welfare officials want to head, considering the longer children remain in foster care, the more likely they are to have multiple placements.
“If the system was just more aware about making sure placements were compatible with kids, rather than a temporary fit,” Nash said. “It would reduce the trauma and conflict within the home.”
Nash and two of her peers from FosterClub, a national network of current and former foster youth, agreed to sit down with Street Roots for a virtual roundtable discussion on placement instability and how it’s affected their lives.
All three have had different experiences in foster care; but all agreed, the “shuffling” to different caregivers was traumatic.
“There’s so much they could improve upon,” said Max Masse, 19, from Astoria, discussing hasty placement decisions made for youth in care. “They put every child into a box.”
Masse said he was removed from his home to live with his grandmother because his mother made up fictitious diseases and falsely led him to believe he was ill. Masse said he spent much of his childhood undergoing unnecessary medical procedures and taking strong medications.
In his case, Masse knew it wasn’t safe to remain at home, but he says that doesn’t make it any easier to walk out the door.
“It’s never going to be a smooth transition when you leave your family behind and go to a place you don’t know,” Masse said.
Jaquelyn Reyes Alonso, 22, who’s now a student at Warner Pacific University in Portland, agreed with Masse.
She didn’t speak English when she immigrated from Guatemala and entered foster care at 17.
“I came on my own,” she said. “I have family here, but they’re not close to me.”
As an immigrant, Reyes Alonso faced several temporary stops before landing in Oregon’s foster care system, where she experienced two placements.
“The constant moving,” she said. “Not having something stable and always being afraid I may only be here a couple weeks. I didn’t even understand how the system works.”
Placement disruptions and repeated moves like what Nash, Masse and Reyes Alonso experienced are happening in states across the nation.
National placement stability data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) shows 65.9% of Oregon youth have had two or fewer placements. Compare that rate to other states, and Oregon ranks right in the middle for placement stability.
Street Roots compared states by using the youths’ “time in care” of 12 months to under 24 months since most states have relatively stable placement percentages for children who are in and out of care in less than a year. The percentage of moves begin to slide after the one-year mark.
New Mexico (48.4%), Massachusetts (48.8%), Tennessee (50.2%) and Wisconsin (51%) came in with the lowest placement stability percentages, or two or fewer placements, meaning roughly half of the children in the states’ foster care systems for 12 months to 24 months moved at least three times.
Maine (77.3%), Rhode Island (76.6%), West Virginia (74.5%) and Iowa (74.3%) had the best placement stability in that particular “time in care” category.
Charles Zeanah, psychiatrist and professor from Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, is an internationally acclaimed child development expert in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. He spends much of his time training others in the “art” of creating nurturing, child-centered transitions in foster care.
“It’s about trying to think about this experience from the child’s perspective — what it’s like for the child to be completely uprooted from their setting and relationships and taken somewhere else,” Zeanah said.
Zeanah said the most important question is whether the transition is truly necessary and not just a knee-jerk reaction. He said a growing body of evidence supports the conclusion that disrupted placements are harmful to children and their well-being.
“For a young child, it’s like their whole world has been turned upside down,” he said.
Children, particularly under the age of five, need attachment figures who are consistently available to them, so the foster parent typically becomes the primary attachment figure. Zeanah said most infants and toddlers removed from their homes don’t have sufficient time with their biological parents to be able to maintain those attachments.
Then, if their foster care placement is also changed, those children once again lose the “most important person in their life.”
“As a group, children who come into foster care are at the extreme end of the risk continuum for all sorts of problems,” Zeanah said. “They should be getting extra special attention in care, rather than just perfunctory care or ‘sorry we can’t do better.’”
With placement disruptions often caused by policy failures, foster family issues, biological parent issues or child-related problems, a 2012 survey of child welfare leaders and professionals from 44 states and counties compiled a list of approaches for improving placement stability.
The survey resulted in a number of suggestions: collaborative support for caregivers; more involvement of biological parents; placing more children with relatives; better placement matching; improving mental health services for children in care; caseworker retention and training.
With those suggestions in mind, Street Roots analyzed placement stability statistics from all 50 states in search of positive deviance in placement stability and an explanation for why some states fared so much better than others.
From a “no eject/no reject” policy preventing kids from being shuffled to group homes hundreds of miles away from their families and schools, to encouraging judges to support more placements with relatives, Street Roots found several responses showing evidence of success. One state is shaking up the system by requiring a “pause” before any placement changes. There’s an evidence-based program created in Oregon producing results around the world for treating children with high-level behavioral and mental health needs in the comfort of a well-supported foster home.
The solutions were designed to be shared and implemented nationwide, as child welfare workers scramble to meet the demands of 2018’s Family First Prevention Services Act — one of the most sweeping overhauls of the federal child welfare system in decades.
The Family First Prevention Services Act redirects federal funds to support programs to keep children at home and out of foster care, or when foster care is needed, programs supporting “family-like” placements with relatives or people the children know.
It requires timely assessments and reviews of all children placed in group homes and other residential care settings.
The legislation provides additional support for relative caregivers by providing federal funds for evidence-based “kinship navigator” programs.
It also provides competitive grants for the recruitment of high-quality foster families.
Child welfare departments are tasked with implementing those changes by developing or improving upon evidence-based programs which meet the demands specified in the legislation.
Zeanah acknowledged placement stability is a great place to start, but it’s important to remember to look at the bigger picture.
“As a society, we don’t take foster care nearly seriously enough,” Zeanah said. “It’s a major intervention, and like all interventions, it can have good or poor outcomes. When we really invest in how to make this intervention as helpful to the child as it can possibly be, it looks very different than if we just go through the motions and think of kids like FedEx packages going from one place to another.”
The roundtable participants echoed his thoughts.
“Foster care traumatizes people since there aren’t enough resources in place,” Nash said. “Being able to be flexible and tailored to each child is better than pushing children into this box of expectations.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the year listed for Street Roots reporting on foster youth and their representatives class action lawsuit in Oregon. We regret this error.
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