Changing the Rules
(An ambitious new initiative seeks to move teens from group homes into foster families, but critics worry about moving too fast on an untested ideal.)

[This article originally appeared in the Winter, 2004 edition of Child Welfare Watch.]

By Nora McCarthy

Two years ago, Arelis Rosario, 18, lived in a group home. She had lost interest in school, been hospitalized several times and attempted suicide. Arelis says she felt like many of the teens living in the home: Nobody cares about me, nobody wants me, I’m alone in the world.

But Arelis knew of a foster home that felt like heaven. Her older sister lived with Mary Keane, a foster mom who takes only teens. The first time Arelis and her brother visited Keane’s three-story, five-bedroom home in Yonkers , “It was like a movie,” Arelis recalls. “My brother leaned over and said, ‘She lives in a mansion.’”

Keane, a consultant with an MBA who began fostering teens after working at a residential treatment center, is widely considered one of the system’s finest foster parents. The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is banking on finding hundreds more parents like her. The agency has decided to close 30 group homes, aiming to move 600 teens to foster families by the end of next year. This initiative will only continue to grow: Nearly half of all new children now admitted into ACS care are teenagers [see “Kids Coming into Care” on page 27]. Unlike in years past, the system has made teens’ success after foster care a top priority, and officials believe teens are more likely to live stable adult lives if they grow up with families either as foster children, or, ideally, adopted.

When Arelis visited, Keane gave her kisses and hugs, and on Christmas, presents under a tree covered with angels and icicles. Finally, Arelis got to move in. Years of abuse and distrust did not magically melt away. But one day Arelis got in an argument with one of the other five teens in the house and Keane came to her room. She told Arelis she was part of the family. “I’m not going to give up on you like everybody else did.” Then she said, “Arelis, I love you.”

Arelis began to cry. “For her to say that was unreal,” she recalls. “My own mother and father didn’t.” Arelis knew she had someone rooting for her.

There are lots of good reasons to move teenagers like Arelis into foster homes. The federal government’s Adoption and Safe Families Act requires foster care agencies to move all kids, including teens, into adoptive homes as quickly as possible. Nearly all of the 789 teens adopted in New York City last year were adopted by their foster parents.

Group homes are more than three times as expensive as foster homes, and at their worst, they can be anonymous, chaotic and dangerous. High staff turnover and rotating shifts make it unusual for teens to grow close to staff. A recent study by Children’s Rights and The Legal Aid Society documented unchecked violence in group homes, including intimidation and sexual abuse of residents by staff. Studies conducted in the 1980s found that teens who aged out of group care were less successful in school and more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system than those who grew up in foster homes.

Congregate care has been remarkably resistant to the changes taking place in the rest of the foster care system. As the number of kids in the care of ACS has fallen, the number housed in institutions has remained steady at around 4,000 children—almost one-fifth of all kids now in care. There are many reasons why this is so. It’s easier to simply stop sending children to a foster family than it is to shut down an institution, such as a group home or a residential treatment center. If an institutional facility is to be properly maintained, all of its beds have to be full and revenues have to be maximized.

But there is also a widely held belief throughout the child welfare field that teens in congregate care can’t handle living in foster homes. When ACS announced plans to move the first wave of teens out of their group homes in 2003, officials asked home staff where they thought each teen should go. The answer was typically another group home [see “ACS’s Families for Teens” on page 29].

“Too often [children] are placed in these group settings by default, because they are available. That’s how the system does it,” says ACS Commissioner John Mattingly, who served on the city’s Special Child Welfare Advisory Panel prior to joining ACS and was an important catalyst for the teens initiative.

“I think every child has the best chance to grow and to be a successful adult if they have a strong family,” he explains, and that’s not possible in an institution with rules and codes posted on the walls. “They don’t need organizations, bureaucracies, procedures and policies. They need someone who deeply cares about them and who will stick with them.... That’s what families do.”

This first wave of closures, when completed in late 2005, will cut the number of group home beds in the system by nearly half. Most or all of the nonprofit-run residential treatment centers, which provide more intensive counseling and supervision and serve children with more complicated problems than those in most group homes, are likely to remain open.

Critics warn that ACS is going too far, too fast. Agency directors say the initiative, called Families for Teens, will only work if ACS succeeds in recruiting exceptionally patient and thoughtful foster parents—and gives them and their new foster children training and support far beyond what the system now offers.

“It’s very nice to have a policy that says ‘All children should have a family.’ But there are some children who cannot function in a family situation. And I hate to say this, but there are a lot of dysfunctional foster parents,” says Lelar Floyd, executive director of Concord Family Services. She echoed other agency directors’ concerns that hundreds of teens’ lives are being disrupted by an untested process.

“I see the potential for a lot of danger,” adds Giselle John, training coordinator for Voices of Youth, a support program for youth in care, and a former foster teen herself. “If those foster homes don’t work out, what’s Plan B?“

Group homes have served an important function in the system. Teens often end up there because they were repeatedly kicked out of foster homes. Group homes can even be stabilizing; a recent paper from the Chapin Hall Center at the University of Chicago analyzed a group of children that entered foster care in New York City in the late 1990s, and while the majority never changed placements, teens in group care were even less likely to move than those in foster homes.

Some teens find the emotional intensity of family life overwhelming, and many foster families are not equipped to handle teens expressing pain or anger in the ways teens do: fighting, running away, talking back. There has long been a shortage of families willing to take in teenagers.

But recent research suggests that foster teens who live with supportive foster families do better. A 2003 study conducted by Seattle-based Casey Family Programs surveyed more than 1,000 former foster youth who came to the organization after they had been in care for several years and were not expected to return to their parents. They had suffered high rates of physical and sexual abuse and, in care, had lived with an unusually high number of foster families. But with Casey’s considerable supports, they found stable foster homes and left care with more education than the average foster youth. About three-quarters of the Casey program teens earned a high school degree before aging out, compared to studies showing that roughly half of other foster youth earn degrees before emancipating. Further, those who reported good relationships with their last or longest foster parents were more likely to graduate from high school, a known predictor of later success. In fact, young women who aged out of Casey Family Programs had a higher than average employment rate.

ACS officials point to the study as proof that foster homes can work, even for tough kids, though they admit that Casey achieved its results by spending generously. The program recruited highly educated caseworkers, gave them low caseloads and experienced little turnover. Casey also provided teens and foster families with a wide range of mental health counseling.

With the budget restraints of the last few years, New York City cannot afford to offer caseworkers, foster parents or teens the same level of support. Nonetheless, ACS has been changing its recruitment methods to provide prospective foster parents a more realistic picture of life with teenagers. Posters plastered around the city show teens, not just adorable toddlers, who need homes. Prospective foster parents now hear from panels of their peers who’ve taken in teens, or from teens themselves about what they’re seeking in a family.

The city is also expanding its therapeutic foster boarding home program, which provides some additional training and financial support to families. These homes are meant for foster children and teens who need psychotherapy or behavior modification, and the parents are paid more than in normal foster care. They also receive 15 hours of additional training each year, their caseworkers have smaller caseloads and they are expected to speak with the worker at least once each week. Still, just 470 teens are in these therapeutic homes.

Parents with new teens in their families warn the adjustment isn’t easy. In November 2003, Mary Chancie adopted a 17-year-old, Timothy, who had lived in 14 different foster homes. Chancie found that with Timothy, small inconsistencies or broken promises hurt him much more than she expected. Chancie might say casually, “We’ll go get you a pair of sneakers on Friday.” If she felt tired that day after work and said, “Not today,” her adopted son would be crushed.

Chancie quickly learned to make only promises she could keep. “If I say something, I make sure that it’s going to go through, for his sake, until he realizes that he can trust me. That’ll take some time.”

Chancie found her son through a teens-only adoption and foster care agency called You Gotta Believe!. She is now working as a “shadow worker,” giving new families guidance.

Unlike some other agencies, You Gotta Believe! gives prospective foster parents intensive training and support. Staffers also attempt to send an unequivocal message: once they’ve taken in a teen, parents must stick with them no matter what. Pat O’Brien, the agency’s director, draws a stark contrast between his program and “the bizarre world of foster care,” as he puts it. “We’re not training them in the foster care mentality, which is, ‘Try it and we’ll see if it works out,’” O’Brien says. “We’re training people to be parents.”

To train new foster parents, O’Brien brings in parents who’ve taken in teens and asks them to speak honestly about the challenges they’ve faced. Then parents are trained in the basics of teen development, grief and loss issues, and the effects of rejection and abandonment. Matches are made slowly, with lots of visits.

Even with all the extra preparation, You Gotta Believe!’s success rate has not been great. In 2001, the agency arranged only five teen adoptions. The second year it placed eight teens, but by the end of that year, half of those kids were no longer living in those homes—two had been hospitalized, and two had run away. O’Brien was deeply disappointed. He was critical of the other nonprofit agencies responsible for supervising the foster homes where his young people were placed, because they provided almost no oversight or support to the families or teens.

So O’Brien raised money to hire the “shadow workers” like Chancie who use their experiences to help new foster parents understand the sometimes extreme reactions of teens in their care. Chancie works with four adoptive families, making the time to talk with each at least once a week, either on the phone or over coffee. She is constantly reminding parents that even tiny misunderstandings can provoke intense feelings.

Friction over curfew, for instance, seems to carry unusual freight. Getting strict doesn’t work with teens who’ve been in care, Chancie says. “They’ve been on their own a lot. It’s hard to get them to see you as a parent looking out for their safety.” Parents need to be flexible at first, acknowledging the autonomy a teen may have become used to, and crafting a set of rules cooperatively, Chancie says. It’s unusual that any parent can, under attack, look at an enraged child and see the despair underneath. But that’s precisely what teens in care desperately need.

Shadow workers have had an impact: Of the 18 teens placed last year, “almost all“ are still in their homes, O’Brien says.

O’Brien worries that, because many families taking teens straight from group homes are not getting intense training or support, they will buckle under the strain—and that kids will find not “forever families,” but further rejection. “You have got to be careful that you’re not just throwing them in people’s houses,” O’Brien says. “If that’s all you’re doing, I’d say they are better off in group homes.”

For aquellah mahdi and her twin, Taheerah, moving into a foster home only confirmed their belief that they are too troubled to be loved. After only one short visit, the twins moved in with a relatively new foster mom on the day their group home closed. Although the foster mom had gotten additional training and was visited often by a caseworker, Aquellah’s attitude and anger quickly overwhelmed them both.

Aquellah had bounced through five foster homes during her first year in care, and found stability in the group home, where she lived for three years. Even so, she wanted a family. Listening to friends complain about fights with their parents, or seeing parents show up at school events, “It hurt not to have anyone looking out for me,” Aquellah says. But in the foster home, every move the foster mother made reminded Aquellah either of her mom, who was violent, depressed and addicted to crack, or her father, also a drug abuser, who sexually abused the twins.

The foster mom bought the wrong kind of cereal, or cooked a dinner the twins didn’t want. Aquellah saw it as manipulative. The foster mom sucked her teeth when Aquellah yelled at her. That was evidence, to Aquellah, of a “dark side“ and she began to expect that, like their mom, this woman too would emotionally abuse the twins. The foster mom wanted to do Aquellah’s laundry for her. If Aquellah allowed that, she’d feel as she did at home: like a doll in someone else’s playhouse, being used for everything that person desires.

In the group home, Aquellah was independent and felt safe and in control. Stepping into the foster home, all of the feelings she’d tried to suppress came out. It was scary for both of them. “I fear myself sometimes,” Aquellah says. “I hope she understood all of my troubles with foster homes, my past and my feelings toward myself.”

ACS acknowledges how painful it can be for teens to move in with new families. “It’s not like you or I picking up and moving from one home to another,” says Susan Grundberg, acting deputy commissioner of foster care and preventive services. “Every time a child needs to be re-placed, there can be a re-visiting of the initial trauma.”

But Aquellah didn’t stay in that home for long enough to find out that she actually was safe. Instead, she found out she’s easy to reject. Despite her training, the foster mom quickly decided to kick the twins out. Three weeks after they moved in, they were gone.

To charges that teens will end up ricocheting through foster homes, ACS Special Counsel Alexandra Lowe has one answer: Things are different now. These teens are getting to choose their own families. Lowe, an adoptive parent herself, offers a pocketful of “small miracles” stories: The teen who felt she had no one, until a group home staff member she called “mom” agreed to take her in. The boy who asked his internship supervisor to adopt him—and did get adopted. She ticks off half a dozen such stories in quick succession. “You can’t call them miracles anymore, because it keeps happening,” she says.

ACS has, in fact, radically changed how agencies find homes for teens. In the past, caseworkers placed teens by looking in a computer database. The kids would move into the home without so much as meeting the foster parent beforehand. This year, ACS’ placement team visited each closing group home, asking teens: “Who are you connected to? Where do you want to live?” Some mentioned teachers, friends’ families or group home staff. The team then contacted each “connection” to see if that person would consider fostering the teen.

Not every teen ends up in a foster family. Among a sample of 50 teens moved in June, only 20 went to foster families. Ten kids went home to their own families, and the rest went to other group homes or residential treatment centers. In some cases, teens managed to convince ACS that they would rather stay in a group home. A few of the teens who ended up in group homes were boys who asked for families, but the city has not yet come up with families willing to take them.

Hattie Rice, 15, fears she’ll end up like those boys. One afternoon last July, Hattie’s placement team crowded into her group home bedroom. Hattie addressed the friendliest person, telling her she wanted two parents, no kids, a suburban house, a yard and a car. Hattie explained that she’s quiet and needs her space, that she values school and wants help getting into college.

Hattie was thrilled her group home would close. In her two years in care, she had become certain she would never return to her mentally ill and drug-addicted parents. She dreamed of living like the kids on the Cosby Show or the Brady Bunch—in a stable haven far from the poverty and disorder in which she grew up. Still, she had few connections of her own and could not think of a single person who might take her.

The placement team left her room, promising to do their best, but Hattie couldn’t help being alarmed: her group home was slated to close in one month.

Successfully matching teens to new families is a long, painstaking process. The Harlem Dowling-Westside Center for Children and Family Services has all of its teens living with foster families, but found it difficult to match them to families that might one day adopt them. With special foundation funding, the agency hired an “adolescent permanency specialist” who met with 80 of the agency’s 115 teens, asking, “Would you be willing to meet a family that might adopt you?”

Over several months, 20 of those teens either identified families they knew who might take them, or met with strangers recruited through ACS programs. “They visit, then they have longer visits, then weekend visits, and if all goes well, they get placed. Nothing is rushed,” says Barry Chaffkin, director of foster care and adoption. Despite the hard work, Harlem Dowling matched just a half-dozen teens to potential adoptive families, and celebrated only one teen adoption this year.

Chaffkin and other agency directors believe families and teens need additional support for this effort to succeed. He thinks the teenagers need additional counseling with specialized adoption counselors to deal with their feelings of guilt and anger. He also suggests expanding programs ACS already offers, like requiring new foster parents to attend support groups, or ensuring that all teens receive the kind of increased supervision by caseworkers that only licensed therapeutic foster homes now get.

Jerry Levanthal, vice president of Graham Windham, a Manhattan-based foster care agency, and a foster parent himself, says ACS’ challenge is to reinvest the money it’s saving by closing group homes into supporting fledgling foster parents. “Give a case what it needs to succeed. Sometimes that’s 25 hours a week on one case,” says Levanthal. “If that’s done right, the city will be proven right. If not, it will hurt kids a little more.”

For hattie, it felt like her whole life rested on a fantasy. Her group home’s closure date was moved back two months, then got pushed forward, then back again. Hattie soothed her anxiety with daydreams of the saviors she desperately hoped to find, even though the two homes she visited looked nothing like the families she envisioned.

One older woman living alone in Brooklyn told her she’d have a 7 p.m. curfew. One of the few questions she had asked Hattie was, “Can I discipline you?” Hattie left feeling angry and disappointed. Even her caseworker said, “I could’ve told them this place wouldn’t work out.”

Then, in early fall, two girls in Hattie’s group home went to visit a family in Queens . They came back describing a mother who took business trips to California , a home with rooms for each of them, and a BMW in the driveway. That was just the sort of professional, two-parent family Hattie had long dreamed she would join. She feigned bitter humor. “Nobody wants me! I’m going to be homeless,” she pretended to wail, puffing out her bottom lip so she looked truly despairing.

But three days before her group home closed, Hattie finally found a home that fulfilled much of what she hoped for. It isn’t in the suburbs, but in a nice part of Manhattan —Murray Hill—and in a doorman building. The foster mom is a professional working woman with one daughter, who’s in college, and Hattie has all the quiet she needs. She even has her own spacious room filled with antique furniture.

To Hattie, the place feels like a palace. “It’s too quiet,” she jokingly complains, rolling her eyes. “And why does the security guard—I mean doorman—say, ‘Have a nice day’ instead of, ‘What’s good, Mama?’”

In truth, moving in has been scary, and oddly intimate, but exciting. “At the laundromat there are people who wash our clothes! And the elevators actually work.” Hattie’s confident she will get used to this new lifestyle. As for adjusting to a new family, she’s not so sure, just yet.

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Nora McCarthy is the editor of Represent: The Voice of Youth in Care.