Child welfare in Connecticut: Here come the new shelters, just like the old shelters

Every state has them.  Short-term dumping grounds for children supposedly so difficult that no place else can handle them. 

The premise is false. The dumping grounds, like all institutional care, are a failed model. The homes that, with the right kind of help, can handle the children that supposedly can’t be handled are filled with children who never needed to be taken in the first place, and states are so busy pouring so much money into things like short-term dumping grounds, that they can’t invest in the Wraparound services that would make such placements work. 

In Connecticut, these dumping grounds are called Specialized Trauma-Informed Treatment, Assessment and Reunification Homes, or as a press release from Connecticut’s family police agency, the Department of Children and Families calls them, STAR homes. Or is it STTAR homes? Or STARR homes? DCF is so clueless it can’t even get the acronyms straight – the press release uses all three. 

As usual, in child welfare, the name is Orwellian. If anything, they are trauma-inducing, and they do nothing to help with reunification. They may even be one of the reasons Connecticut has one of the worst rates of reunifying children from foster care in the country. It also may help explain why Connecticut spends on “child welfare” at the third highest rate in the country, triple the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in, even as it backslides from progress it made during the last decade. (The problem isn’t the amount, it’s that so much of it goes to causing harm instead of helping.) 

As with so many of their counterparts across the country, really bad things can happen in Connecticut’s  STAR/STTAR/STARR homes. Here’s a small sample of what happened at one of them, according to a memo from a state trooper reported by Connecticut Inside Investigator. 

● The arrest of a 42-year-old male staff member for sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old female resident of the STAR home. 

● The arrest of a 39-year-old male staff member for physically assaulting a 17-year-old female resident after “kneeling and using bodyweight to hold her to the ground after slamming her to the ground several times.” 

● The arrest of an 18-year-old biological male who was transitioning to female for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old female in the home. 

● A melee involving four girls barricading themselves in the home, locking out staff, and requiring seven state troopers and multiple ambulances to be called to the scene, resulting in assaults on the state troopers and the arrest of the four juveniles. 

● The sexual assault of four female residents between the ages of 14 and 17 by a 25-year-old female staff member. An arrest warrant was being drafted for the staff member at the time of the memorandum. 

But don’t worry, DCF has a solution: Give the homes more money – and build more of them! (What? You were expecting a real solution?)

So now, in addition to the STAR/STTAR/STARR homes, Connecticut will have ITTC homes! That’s Intensive Transitional Treatment Centers. What’s the difference between an ITTC and a STAR/STTAR/STAR home? Well, says a DCF bureaucrat, “the budget is bigger, so it provides the opportunity for additional resources …” 

But would you trust any young person, let alone one who is troubled, in the hands of an agency that stuffs into its own press release a paragraph like this?: 

Youth who stabilize in these ITTC programs who cannot be provided a home setting in a timely manner will be referred to Therapeutic Group Home (TGH) level of care. Youth who continue to be acute and/or whose needs exceed the ability of what the ITTC can provide will be referred to psychiatric residential treatment facility (PRTF) level of care.

Got that? If the STTAR doesn’t work, ship ‘em to the ITTC, and then to the TGH or the PRTF. 

But perhaps most striking, and most indicative of the DCF mindset, is the fact that the new plan also will give each STAR/STTAR/STARR program $125,000 for “therapeutic recreational activities” which as CT Mirror explained, translates into things to do so the kids don’t get bored while they’re institutionalized. 

Young people really do need that, of course. But let’s contrast the acronym-laden, bureaucratic DCF approach with how the late Karl Dennis, the “father of Wraparound” dealt with the same problem.  

I have often embedded the video below, in which Dennis explains how he returned safely to his own mother a teenager so difficult the local jail couldn’t handle him. His mother was hesitant, so Dennis kept asking her what she would need to be able to take care of her son. This time, I’ve cued this link to the video to what Dennis did when faced with the same issue as Connecticut DCF. (Or watch the embed below, starting at exactly 10:00 in).

If only there were an acronym for that.