“Perfect Storm:” CT foster parents say they’re being left behind

Mike and Kate Burns of Woodbury have been foster parents to mostly teenage girls for the past 30 years, but now Kate, a retired social worker, says that they, and other similarly situated foster parents in Connecticut, are being undercut by the Department of Children and Families (DCF), which relies on foster families to house troubled and traumatized children and adolescents in wake of group home closures over the last ten years.

“They should be looking at all of us as doing a heroic job,” Kate said during an interview with Inside Investigator. “We’re doing their staff’s job and there’s no compensation for it at all. If you look at the economy of our country and our state, and the fact that foster parents have been compensated just with the economy in close to 20 years, that’s negligence on their part. They’re the last to be remembered, what a horrible thing to do.”

Mike and Kate are part of what is called Therapeutic Foster Care (TFC), in which foster parents take in children and adolescents who require a higher level of care due to mental, behavioral, and emotional issues. Therapeutic Foster Care requires more training for parents, regular meetings with therapists and social workers, and a lot of patience. For that extra work, they receive a higher stipend than a typical foster family – $55.55 per day per child – equating to roughly $1,666 per a typical 30-day month.

But that rate hadn’t increased substantially since 2013 until very recently, marking a decade of inflation without any adjustment to help foster parents meet the needs of children in DCF custody whom they are housing, feeding, clothing, and transporting. Accounting for inflation, that $55.55 per day stipend now equates to $41.96 per day, or $1,258.80 per month. Across three kids in their care, that marks a $1,223.10 per month loss, just from inflation alone.

But it’s not just that their stipend hasn’t kept up with the times. The Burns say other services previously provided by DCF and contracted therapeutic foster agencies have been reduced, including “wraparound” funding which provides extra money so that foster children can attend camps, have tutors, play sports, childcare or babysitting – foster parents still have to work regular jobs – and even Christmas presents.

“It’s not measured by how much did you lose, it’s how do you keep up with inflation, expenses, and all of that? That’s one loss, then the other loss is if you want to send the kids to camp you have to pay for it out of pocket. If you want to do anything for the kids that someone living in a family would want for their kids to normalize the teenagers you have to find your own budget to do that,” Mike said. “It’s not so much that they cut us, it’s that the economy is affecting us and then taking away going to camp, having a mentor, going bowling with other kids — all these things that kids like to do — all of that is out of our pocket. We like to think we’re generous, but there’s a point where that starts breaking the bank.”

In Hartford, Dave Thompson, another therapeutic foster parent, takes in troubled adolescent boys and did see a major reduction in the stipend he receives. Thompson took in boys with the highest-level medical and behavioral needs. That stipend was $82 per day, but that rate was dramatically cut under a new contract by DCF in which the highest rate for TFC is $55.55 per day.

“I’ve been in therapeutic foster care for twenty years. There is absolutely no more service for foster parents at all. When we call for a service to come in, they can’t find anyone, everything is left up to us,” Thompson said. “Not only that, the system is totally a mess, nobody wants to take accountability for nothing. The kids that I do have are therapeutic, if they break anything in the house, if they destroy anything, there’s no compensation, we just have to suck it up.”

“They didn’t even send a gift card for Christmas,” Thompson added, although it is not DCF that provides gift cards, but rather the foster agencies. “We have been successful in doing this, but we can’t with how the system is working and it seems like the system is set up for both of us to fail. We shouldn’t have to be fighting them because DCF took these kids from their parent and became their legal guardian and bring them here and we’re supposed to be taking care of them and this is almost abuse again.”

The parents and providers – both current and former – who spoke with Inside Investigator all pointed to a new contract for therapeutic foster agencies issued in 2022 as the primary cause for their speaking out. It was a Request for Proposals that caused several smaller foster agencies that specialized in therapeutic foster care to drop out of providing services, leaving fewer agencies available to recruit new parents or help current foster parents with therapeutic interventions and trainings.

According to the RFP issued by DCF in 2022 , DCF was seeking 14 agencies to administer therapeutic foster care. According to DCF, three agencies decided they couldn’t bid on the contract and ended their therapeutic foster care programs. DCF ended up with 9 agencies under the contract, with two other agencies subcontracted by the bid winners.

The contract replaced the department’s therapeutic foster care model with a new model and made the rate of $55.55 per day the highest stipend level to care for youth experiencing medical, behavioral, and psychological issues. So, some foster parents caring for children with the highest levels of need who may have previously been placed in group or residential facilities saw their stipends greatly reduced when they took in new foster children to care for. Existing placements were grandfathered in to continue with the higher rate until the children left foster care.

June Mitchell, another long-time foster parent, says that the mental and emotional acuity of foster children in Connecticut has worsened in the years following the closure of many group homes.

Mitchell recounts that she was previously approached by DCF to foster a girl from a troubled Short-Term Assessment and Respite (STAR) Home in Harwinton, that has since been shut down due to ongoing issues . Mitchell decided she couldn’t take the girl because of her long history of behavioral issues.

“But that’s the kind of child that you’re now getting, those children and those behaviors are now what you get to pick from to help, those are the phone calls that you get,” Mitchell said. “There used to be a lot of group homes when you had a child who was not manageable in the community, they would go there for a few months, and it would help stabilize them with the routine and then they could either come back to you or they would be discharged and go to another home. But somebody decided that wasn’t cool and they shut them down, they shut them all down, so there’s no place anymore for anybody to go.”

Contracted foster care agencies in Connecticut are less willing to speak up. Those who would speak with Inside Investigator would only do so on background or anonymously but indicated that the lack of support for foster families is hurting the state’s ability to recruit more parents willing to take in children under DCF’s care. Essentially, much of their recruiting is through word of mouth, so disgruntled foster parents mean fewer recruits.

“I have heard the same concerns from foster parents who foster through private agencies, particularly for therapeutic level of services,” said Margaret Doherty, executive director of the Connecticut Alliance of Foster and Adoptive Families. “I can say that the number of licensed foster homes has decreased, and recruitment is crucial. Our best recruiters are foster parents themselves, so it is vital that we ensure foster parents receive the supports they need, including financial support.”

“I don’t know what [DCF] is doing or why they’re doing it,” Mitchell said. “They’re desperate for foster parents, they’re crying they don’t have any homes, they’re begging us to take these children and we have nothing anymore, we have no back up other than the emergency rooms.”

John is a former program director who worked for a therapeutic foster agency in the greater Hartford area for 25 years, and asked to remain anonymous to preserve his relationship with his former employer, which was forced to close its doors when they couldn’t meet the 2022 contract requirements. The agency crunched the numbers and determined they’d be losing about $300,000 per year, too big of a loss to continue.

“There were probably five or six other agencies that did not get bids. They may have put in bids, but they didn’t get them,” John said. “So, they basically reduced the number of agencies doing business – I guess in theory to make other agencies bigger which would help them get closer to financial solvency. Really, the numbers were very low.”

“I call it an austerity campaign that they went on years ago and they keep cutting out all the supports. The fact that they’re paying therapeutic foster parents less is a crime,” John said. “The idea that they weren’t looking to increase their rate and were looking to decrease it drove me crazy given that Connecticut was now touting the fact that we are running a budget surplus after all the years of deficit and belt-tightening and all that kind of stuff, that we were talking about a three to ten billion surplus and we’re still on an austerity campaign on behalf of children and the families that care for them. It makes no sense to me.”

The 2022 RFP by DCF represented a shift in how foster care would be handled in Connecticut, under a new model called Functional Family Therapy (FFT), an evidence-based program that focuses on children and teens with histories of mental health and behavioral issues by addressing the underlying family dynamic with the goal of reuniting the family.

Under the old model, therapeutic foster agencies would receive the funding to pay parents’ stipend and wraparound services, along with additional funding for therapy and clinical services the agency would conduct weekly.

John says that by the time his organization closed, they were receiving $134 per child per day. Fifty-five of that went to the families, while the rest was for wraparound services, case management costs, staffing, transportation, and administration costs. Under the new model, DCF now pays the families directly, including wraparound services. But the foster parents interviewed for this article say DCF has clamped down on those wraparound services, requiring them to go out of pocket.

Mike and Kate Burns said when they pushed for DCF to help fund the costs of driving their foster children out of their district area to attend their scheduled therapy sessions, the kids were instead put into online therapy sessions.

“Which is okay, but the point is they saw another opportunity for not having to cost anything,” Mike said. “They’re answer is no more out of district placements, and that would work fine if you didn’t already have kids placed out of district. But for the kids who largely were placed out of district because there weren’t available homes, they’re still in those homes and DCF doesn’t want to support the costs. Even family visits, to facilitate that, it took a while for them to find someone to come get the kids and take them there and supervise the visits.”

“The wraparound funds, it is like pulling teeth, it’s heroic. It’s not a simple request. You have to plead to get paid,” Mike said.

Christina Ghio of the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) says they have not done any formal investigation into how foster parents are compensated but says that therapeutic foster care fits within the larger system of caring for children who are facing “a long history of abuse and neglect and pretty long list of mental health needs.” Ghio says that the switch from therapeutic foster care to FFT has caused some concerns among providers that have reached her office.

“I think it’s fair to say we heard concerns from a lot of providers with that transition,” Ghio said. “It was a difficult transition for a lot of reasons, and I think from our perspective, the model has a lot of value to it, but it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits all model.”

“What I can say is that it is our understanding that flexible funding – also called wrap funding, money to pay for things that families might need, the child wants to participate in an activity or there’s some urgent need to purchase something – our understanding is those funds are being administered differently,” Ghio said. “The providers used to be given a certain amount of money to work with and they could decide quickly what the foster families need and make those decisions. That has been shifted over to the department and I think there’s some concerns there from providers and foster families as to how quickly they can access and whether they can access the same level as before. I think that’s a piece of the puzzle.”

Ghio referred back to a 2023 report by the OCA looking into a sharp increase in the number of problems at a STAR Home in Harwinton, Connecticut the OCA presented before an informational hearing by the General Assembly’s Committee on Children.

In it, the OCA indicates that the closure of residential and group homes for children and adolescents with severe mental, emotional, and behavioral issues are resulting in logjams for child mental health care and are straining the existing support systems in Connecticut, including therapeutic foster care. The lack of foster homes pushed more and more of these troubled teens into STAR Homes, or the foster families were not able to handle the level of mental health and behavioral issues, resulting in multiple foster placements.

“While OCA agrees that FFT-TFC will be an important part of the continuum of care for children with specialized needs, given gaps and logjams in the rest of the continuum of care, including the dearth of community-based and wraparound services, children with significant support needs too often wind up in emergency departments, juvenile detention, and temporary shelters like STAR homes,” Sarah Eagan wrote.

“They made this change, and it wasn’t part of a full system redesign, it was just a piece, and I think that it has been a challenge and certainly we do hear a lot of concerns,” Ghio said. “But I do think when you go back to the STAR report and what we were recommending, a lot of what we were recommending there is the same thing that we would recommend here in terms of the foster care system because we have to have those services available to provide what the kids need wherever they’re placed.”

John says his former agency saw fewer foster recruits toward the end of his career and says some of it has to do with lessening support for those foster parents, combined with higher mental and emotional acuity of the kids in the therapeutic foster system.

“You just weren’t getting foster parents who felt they would subject anyone else to this but in 2010 they began a mission to close residentials. Where are those kids going to go?” John said. “The highest end kids with the biggest behavioral demands, where were they going to go if they closed residentials? They were going to go into therapeutic foster care.”

Mike and Kate Burns say that kids in therapeutic foster care present a real challenge for foster parents and those parents need training and support to be able to handle the rigors of troubled adolescents who come from difficult backgrounds.

“There’s a lot of folks that are just intolerant,” Kate said. “I think what they do is they think they’re opening up their homes, they should be grateful, and kids are not, they’re angry and you need to do a lot of specialized training for foster parents to prepare them for that emotional pain for teenagers and to be able to tolerate it and be able to adjust your own life and emotional challenges that affect your own family over time. It’s a high demand.”

“We did a good job, we achieved all kinds of outcome measures that were desired, we majored in adoptions and reunifications, all the things they wanted, but there’s no reward for doing a good job. The reward for doing a good job is they put you out of work,” John said. “If you spoke out, they would make your life harder. A year and a half ago I couldn’t have this conversation.”

Michael Williams, deputy commissioner of operations for DCF, says the concerns raised by foster parents are not new, but rather “historic” to the foster care system both in Connecticut and across the United States.

“I’ll be the first person to tell you the cost of raising children far exceeds anything we can give a caregiver,” Williams said in an interview. “If they want to have a conversation about the cost there, there’s not even a debate that we just can’t pay them enough for what they really need, we can only give them what we can afford right now within our budgets.”

The stipend rate has increased, slightly, between 2013 and 2024, according to information supplied by DCF, but moreover, the classifications of types of foster care have also been adjusted. In 2013, there were five different rates depending on the age of the child and whether they had medical needs, ranging from $25.99 per day for a foster child aged 0-5, to the highest level of Foster Care, Minor Parent and Child, which was $54.51 per day.

That changed in 2018, when the department added several more foster classifications and included kinship care, in which a family relative cares for the child, under the stipend. Under that restructuring, DCF added several more stipend rates depending on the medical needs of the child. Those rates ranged from $30 per day for class 1 medically complex children to those with the highest needs in class 4 of $82 per day. During the pandemic, foster parents were also given a bump when Gov. Ned Lamont allocated $1 million of federal CARES Act money to foster parents.

DCF officials recognized that the 2018 change was a bit more of a “cost of living adjustment,” according to Director of Foster Services Natalia Liriano, but that Connecticut is one of the highest paying states in the country when it comes to foster care.

“We are proud to say in Connecticut that we’re on the highest end of daily stipends and monthly stipends for foster parents,” Williams said. “We’re one of the top paying states in the country for that, I mean we’re envied around the country.”

Williams also says that funding for DCF foster care under the latest budget isn’t an issue. According to the Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA), the number of children in foster care has decreased and so has the budget for board and care of foster children. Between 2019 and 2022, the caseload of children in foster care decreased by 1,102, and expenditures decreased by nearly $30 million.

“We can meet the needs of our children in all care and custody within the budget that we have for foster care board and care well that’s all our allocated budget amount is not a chat it’s not an issue for us,” Williams said. “Comparatively, when we look around us, around the country, a lot of DCFs are really challenged to where they are now having kids sleeping in their offices, some of them have turned their offices into makeshift bedrooms.” That’s not happening in Connecticut, according to Williams, through a combination of foster care and kinship care.

However, the shift to the Functional Family Therapy model as part of the 2022 contract did cause a few hiccups along the way and DCF officials acknowledge that the transition has caused some confusion and consternation among therapeutic foster parents who are now operating under a new paradigm.

Aside from several providers not being able to meet the demands of the new contract, DCF taking over the stipend payments did result in some late or missed payments to foster parents during the first two months of transition due to data entry errors – errors that have since been corrected, with no missing or late payments since, according to DCF.

The elimination of the highest $82 stipend was due to high administrative costs and inconsistent outcomes for the children, although the department indicates it will still provide a “special rate” for children who are determined to need an even higher level of care and support.

Liriano says the wraparound funding for foster kids, now under the control of DCF, is still provided to foster parents, but they must go through DCF’s system, which can typically take one to three business days.

“If it has to do with the child, if it’s in the best interest of the child we cover those costs,” Liriana said. “I would say that the turnaround time may be slightly different.”

The department also took over wraparound funding due to a 2021 audit that found “significant discrepancies,” in how contracted agencies were handling the funds, according to Nicole McKelvey, head of therapeutic foster care for DCF. Some agencies would expend all their wraparound funding appropriately, while others would hold onto the money, “not spending it as intended.”

McKelvey believes DCF retaining the wraparound funds may have led to some agencies not being able to make ends meet or compete for the contract.

That contract for FFT, McKelvey says, was the largest procurement in 30 years, done through Connecticut’s typical competitive bidding process, and was a stark readjustment of how therapeutic foster care is treated. Namely, it became more about family therapy and less about case management.

“What we were seeing is that children who were in therapeutic foster care, the department was spending a significant amount of money resources, and the outcomes for the children were really not that great. We were seeing with the kids, where their behavioral health was compromised, more hospitalizations, longer stays in psychiatric residential treatment facilities,” McKelvey said. “It was more of a case management model.”

That led to DCF taking a “pause” to reassess its therapeutic foster care model, selecting FFT as the most evidence based therapeutic model that has been used in other states, with the ultimate goal of reuniting the children with their parents, or, at least, a relative through the department’s push to keep more families together.

Williams says that some of the concerns of foster parents regarding the severity of mental and behavioral acuity of the children in their care is because, previously, the children they were caring for were not foster children truly in need of therapeutic interventions, but rather “kids who just needed a place to live.”

“Connecticut had relied so heavily on group care,” Williams said. “We had almost 32 percent of our kids who were in foster care living in group placements. Those kids were there because they didn’t have access to therapeutic placements. What we discovered was that the reason they didn’t have access to therapeutic foster homes was because in the therapeutic foster homes weren’t kids who had a therapeutic need, it was just kids who needed a place to live, and there was no therapeutic treatment occurring in those homes.”

Basically, the closure of group homes and residential facilities for children and adolescents put more high-needs kids into the therapeutic foster care system. According to DCF’s assessment, the kids who were already placed in TFC were not the high-needs children the TFC system was meant to serve. So now TFC parents are seeing higher acuity among foster children and that shift can be distressing for those parents more acclimated to the prior placement system.

“A lot of the kids they had didn’t really have the high clinical needs,” Williams said. “Now, we have kids with high clinical needs which require them to parent kids with high clinical needs, and that is a tension at the moment, because these are the kids that therapeutic foster care is designed for.”

“We work with families and parents to give them the skills they need to help solve problems of daily living. The kids that are in therapeutic foster care have significant behavioral health challenges and significant traumatic stress responses, and so we know that these kids who have experienced trauma need a specialized intervention and we want to give that to them while they’re in foster care, before we’re helping them get back home,” McKelvey said. “We recognize that it feels different and foster parents are really still learning how to provide this intervention how to work with the kids.”

Ken Mysogland, director of communications for DCF, says that they recognize the tension that comes with a systematic change, and that it can be “uncomfortable” at times, but that the change was made in collaboration with providers and stakeholders in the system with a focus on getting the best outcome for these children in TFC.

“We know parts of this are uncomfortable and there were gaps and there were circumstances where unanticipated consequences popped up,” Mysogland said. “Nothing good happens from something easily changed. We recognize how difficult this has been across the system but it’s the right thing to do for kids.”

For Williams, he says Connecticut is basically at “halftime” when it comes to fully implementing the new FFT model, and, basically, it will require further adjustment as they move forward.

“This model shift, we recognized, would not be a light switch you could just flick on,” Williams said. “We gave ourselves a three-year transition for a paradigm shift and everything else to occur. We’re halfway there. The good news is that we are on we’re on our way, we’re going in the right direction, we’re tweaking as we go along, modifying, making changes, hearing, listening, doing all that so when we do get there it will be what we all envision it to be.”

And part of what is envisioned, by both DCF, and the FFT model, is reuniting kids, even ones dealing with severe mental, emotional, and behavioral issues, with their family or close relatives, part of the push toward kinship care that began a decade ago.

Sixto Cancel grew up in the Connecticut foster care system. He is now the founder and CEO of Think of Us , a nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming the child welfare system in the United States. His organization focuses on working with and hiring people with lived experience in the child welfare system, and he is a big supporter of reducing group homes and placing more children with relatives.

Cancel has become an influential voice in the movement to change how foster children are handled by state governments, including working with state and federal officials to dole out hundreds of millions in pandemic-relief money to foster families during the COVID pandemic.

“I grew up in Connecticut’s foster care system. I entered as an 11-month-old baby and was adopted at the age of nine, and it was a very abusive adoption,” Cancel said in an interview, adding that he reentered the foster system at age 15 and then utilized a program to help him save for college and go on to become the success he is today.

However, it wasn’t until he was 27 years old that he attended a family reunion in New York and discovered family on his father’s side he’d never known before – family with whom he could have been placed instead of going into the foster system and enduring an abusive adoption.

“It was one of those magical moments,” Cancel said. “It’s like the dream for a foster kid to go to a family reunion, and then when I was there, I discovered I had four aunts and uncles who had been foster adoptive parents for longer than I had been alive. That was hard. The whole time they lived fifty-eight miles away.”

Cancel says, according to the data, that children placed with family have far higher high school graduation rates – 95 percent –than those placed in group homes, which is roughly 37 percent. He also notes that foster youth are more likely to experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder than Iraq war veterans.

“Family members have to be at the center in being able to step up in a quick way to be able to take in their children,” Cancel said. “The thing about foster care is no one is obligated to stay in your life.”

The federal government recently made kinship placement easier , no longer requiring that family members become officially licensed foster parents, which can include a number of restrictive hoops families must jump through, along with the logistics of a family having to open up their home to a new member. The government has authorized hundreds of millions per year for states to streamline kinship care.

In that respect, Connecticut is ahead of the game for placing foster youth with relatives. Kinship care, along with reducing reliance on group homes, was part of what helped get DCF out from under federal oversight in 2022, spearheaded by former DCF Commissioner Joette Katz.

In an interview with The Imprint , Katz said that over the course of her career with DCF, they reduced the number of children in congregate care settings and greatly increased the number of children placed with kin, rising from 14 percent to 44 percent of foster kids living with relatives. “People had the wrong idea that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, but it’s far more traumatic for a child to be placed with a stranger than a relative,” Katz said.

Since her departure, kinship care has continued to expand, according to numbers supplied by DCF, with 51 percent of foster kids now living with kin. DCF pays kinship foster care parents the same rate as typical “core” foster parents, between $25.99 and $28.52 per day, depending on the age of the child. The FFT contract is an extension of that policy, aiming to rehabilitate families through therapeutic means so they can be reunited.

According to the RFP, “The Department believes that children do best when living safely at home with their family of origin. When living at home with a parent is not reasonably safe, the best alternative is to live with relatives, kin, or someone who they know who can provide a safe and nurturing home,” and that, “Foster care should only be used as a short-term intervention.”

Under the program, the FFT foster family and child will receive 6-9 months of weekly therapeutic interventions, while the contractor also works with the birth family to be able to successfully reunify. Once reunification occurs, the contractor will continue weekly in-home visits for 2-4 months. Following that, the contractor is required to maintain case management for two to four years on a fee-for-service basis.

The contract acknowledges, however, that roughly 25 percent of FFT youth are never successfully reunified.

“A long time ago they figured out that it costs them money to take care of other people’s kids, so if we can find kinships, if we can send kids home, even if it isn’t a better place for them, we don’t have to pay anymore,” former program director John said. “They say kids belong at home and of course they do, but we’re talking about kids with treatment needs, kids who have been abused and neglected. Not everyone can go home.”

The Burns say that one of their foster girls underwent six months of therapy under the FFT model, but it was ultimately determined that the family wasn’t suitable for reunification. The state is now seeking other family members that might be suitable for placement.

“This is a year and half later, not six months. Maybe it’s just an unrealistic goal,” Mike said. “The reason that most kids get out their birth homes is because there’s serious issues and the whole family can’t be reformed in six months or a year.”

“It’s also a new program, and everything needs time to make adjustments,” Kate said.

It wasn’t just the change of contract and therapeutic foster care model that has led to fewer families willing to take in troubled youth, according to the parents. Rather it was a combination of the new model, economic forces, and COVID.

Jan, a former therapeutic foster parent who wishes to remain anonymous, says most foster parents come from lower-income households and when the economy turns bad or inflation starts to rise to the levels seen in 2022, those potential foster families reassess what they can reasonably handle.

“Most of the families who foster are in the lower socio-economic strata,” Jan said. “They’re also families who have lower educational attainment, and when you can’t put food on the table for your own family and you’re working two jobs because your rent just went up, or you haven’t received a raise in a couple years, or you were out of work because of COVID, then you see less families. There’s kind of like this perfect storm going on that is impacting the state’s ability to meet these kids’ needs.”

Williams says that since COVID, foster parents in Connecticut and across the country are deciding to walk away. “There’s been a shift in our nation and in Connecticut,” Williams said. “We’re seeing a lot of that kind of resignation occurring among folks as it relates to this work and … it’s coming at the worst time, because of the needs that are coming in of some of the children with the highest acuity.”

The numbers, somewhat, bear this out. The number of Connecticut youth in foster care has been declining since 2012 when there were 4,563 children in foster care, according to Foster Care Capacity . The number spiked in 2019 to 4,421 before dropping to 3,069 in 2023.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of licensed foster homes and relatives caring for children also decreased, most notably following an uptick in 2021. However, between 2021 and 2023, the number of licensed foster homes decreased by 479 and relatives caring for foster children, known as kinship care, decreased by 361.

“We absolutely have a need for foster parents, without a doubt, and foster parents who are willing to parent our most vulnerable and children with complex needs,” Liriano said, adding that her team was on the phone till 10 p.m. on a Friday night trying to find a foster home for an autistic, non-verbal child. “It has been a struggle, so do we have a need? Absolutely. But I want to be clear that we just don’t want anybody, we are being selective because our children are worthy and deserving of excellent parenting.”

“The type of parent that we need in Connecticut is one that understands that they’re part of the network, so that that means that you must embrace the children’s parents, you must embrace the children’s siblings and families, and work in partnership with them to co-parent, to share the parenting regardless of what brought them into the system,” Liriano said. “At times that can be very difficult and challenging because of narratives that they may have about the families, can be difficult because of the children and their experiences.”

DCF has been advertising for foster parents on social media but recruitment for therapeutic care is largely the purview of the contracting agencies, whereas “core” foster care or kinship care recruitment is largely handled by DCF.

But years of high inflation, reliance on foster parents to take in kids with higher acuity and needs, a switch to a new therapeutic foster care model, and the department taking more financial control over stipends and wraparound funding has sharpened conflicting views – historic or otherwise – between DCF and some of the parents who have spent decades caring for children in the department’s custody.

“The biggest recruiting tool is word of mouth and when you have foster parents increasingly disgruntled and increasingly unsupported, they’re not going to help you go find other foster parents,” John said. “So, they greatly reduce their potential to attract other foster parents by disenfranchising the existing body of foster parents.”

“They act like we’re trying to get over on them as foster parents,” Jan said. “Whereas, if you’re asking us to do something that is out of the ordinary and perhaps out of our comfort zone, one would think you’d want us as comfortable as possible so we could be as successful as possible.”

Nearly one month following CII’s interview with DCF officials, Connecticut licensed foster parents received notice of a 5 percent increase to their monthly stipend rate in a letter from DCF Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly.

“The compassion, attention and love you provide our children, youth and their families are appreciated beyond words. During one of the most traumatic and uncertain times in the life of a child – you open your homes and your hearts – to them,” Hill-Lilly wrote. “It is recognized that providing excellent care is emotional and complex. My Administration is currently looking into the support we provide to licensed caregivers and how are system can evolve given the current needs of the children, youth and families who come to our attention.”

“This is one tangible example of how we can immediately enhance our support,” the letter continues. “On behalf of all of us in the Department of Children and Families, we are grateful for each one of you and look forward to continuing our work together.”

Best Interest of the Child: One mother’s fight against a claim of parental alienation

Grave Concern: A DCF-funded shelter for teen girls loses control

Twisted: Jennifers’ Law gets turned on its head in chaotic family court case

The post “Perfect Storm:” CT foster parents say they’re being left behind appeared first on Connecticut Inside Investigator .