Chicago — Every year, thousands of Illinois children are removed from their homes or transferred from psychiatric hospitals after cases of alleged abuse or neglect. Removals like this are supposed to make kids safer but public records show that last year hundreds of children instead ended up sleeping in social workers’ offices, in empty wings of residential treatment facilities, or were left in psychiatric hospitals or jail cells months after a judge ordered their release.
It’s a long-standing problem, and several Illinois advocates for children say they’ve seen little improvement this year.
The children are the casualties of the years-long partisan budget battle between former Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, and former state House Speaker Mike Madigan, a Democrat. During the 2015-2017 budget impasse dozens of group homes were forced to close after the state cut funding. Department of Children and Family Services officials promised to add new foster homes especially for children with significant behavioral and mental health conditions, but few of these specialized foster homes were created.
At the same time, beds at existing residential treatment facilities that care for children with behavioral and mental health conditions often go unfilled because these private facilities don’t have enough staff amid the pandemic-induced human services hiring crisis, facility operators and advocates say.
““It’s hard to think of a more profound civil rights violation.”
Charles Golbert, Cook County public guardian
The shortage of places to put kids has been exacerbated by an increase in the number of Illinois kids removed from their homes from 2017 to 2021 — the majority due to neglect rather than abuse — according to the most recent federal data available. That increase stands in contrast to the general national downward trend of children entering the child welfare system.
Officials with the Department of Children and Family Services say they’re working hard to add more safe, appropriate homes or group homes for children in foster care.
But Charles Golbert, the Cook County public guardian and an official advocate for children in the child welfare system, has described the situation as “wasted children’s lives.”
“It’s hard to think of a more profound civil rights violation,” he said in a 2021 court filing on the 30th anniversary of a 1988 federal consent decree mandating the state to find more placements for children, hire more DCFS staff and reduce caseworkers’ workloads.
Children in DCFS custody
In 2022, 517 children (about 2.2% of all children who spent time in DCFS custody that year) slept in offices or in empty wings or floors of residential treatment facilities and conference centers, according to data obtained from DCFS from a Youth Today open records request.
For a time, DCFS called these makeshift placements “welcome centers.”
According to Golbert, in some Cook County welcome centers — the state’s most populous county, which contains Chicago — children often lacked basic necessities such as showers, fresh food, education and mental health services. Some centers had been no more than windowless rooms with an air mattress, where children spent days and sometimes weeks, he said.
The department said it has closed all but one such facility as of February: a facility called the Norman Sleezer Youth Home in northwest Illinois, about two hours from Chicago. According to the department, only six children have slept in welcome centers from January 2023 through the end of March, the most recent data available.
But Golbert said children continue to be placed in offices, conference centers and other facilities, although DCFS no longer calls them “welcome centers.”
“We know now that kids do not do well in long-term residential stays where they’re in an institution.”
Heidi Dalenberg, ACLU of Illinois
“This is kind of a game DCFS plays,” said Golbert, the Cook County Public Guardian.
“They took construction paper and crayon basically and wrote ‘welcome center’ … and then they got in trouble for the welcome center. But the statistics about kids sleeping on the floors of offices and psychiatric wards and locked in jails for months … speak for themselves, under whatever nomenclature DCFS comes up with.”
Additionally, hundreds of Illinois children are kept in psychiatric hospitals even after doctors have cleared them to leave. A 2018 ProPublica investigation found that almost 30% of all Illinois foster children were hospitalized longer than was medically necessary. The figure covers almost 6,000 psychiatric hospitalizations between 2015 and 2017 and sparked an ongoing class-action lawsuit from the Cook County Public Guardian.
Since then, the number of children kept in psychiatric hospitals beyond medical necessity has risen, from 75 kids in 2014 to 356 kids in 2021 – less than 2% of all children in DCFS care – before tapering off slightly to 309 kids in 2022, according to Cook County Public Guardian data
“We know now that kids do not do well in long-term residential stays where they’re in an institution,” said Heidi Dalenberg, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois who’s trying to help make systemic changes in the state’s child welfare system. “They’re making some progress in reducing the number of kids this happens to and reducing the length of time it takes to get a kid into an appropriate placement, but it is not solved by any means.”
‘Misuse of residential capacity’
Dalenberg — who’s also the lead attorney in ongoing negotiations stemming from a 1988 federal consent decree over these same problems — argues that there are many existing beds at residential treatment facilities where children could go instead of social workers’ offices or welcome centers.
“Everybody’s knocking on the door and nobody can get in. It is a system [based on] misuse of the residential capacity,” Dalenberg said.
Group homes and residential treatment centers for kids can’t hire enough staff amid hiring challenges brought on by the pandemic in human services more broadly. And, Dalenberg said, the state isn’t doing enough to help families where kids are at risk of mistreatment before removal or foster families struggling to care for children with disabilities.
Kara Teeple, CEO of Lawrence Hall, a residential treatment facility for foster youth with serious mental and behavioral challenges, said that low pay has been a big factor behind the staff shortage. Providers like Lawrence Hall last year got their first major rate increase in more than a decade, but “financially, it still doesn’t add up,” Teeple said.
In 2023, DCFS increased pay for child care workers at private residential centers from $16.62 to $19.62 per hour and increased reimbursement rates for most specialized foster care facilities by 11.74%, according to a department document. Job requirements include a bachelor’s degree in a human service field or five years of experience and a high school degree.
Many people also leave the field due to burnout or go back to school to get a higher-paying, less stressful job, she said.
DCFS too is scrambling to find enough workers and retain them, which has fed into safety problems for both children and workers.
Rep. Terra Costa Howard, who chairs the House Adoption and Child Welfare Committee and sits on another panel that determines the state’s human services budget, said DCFS is considering an internal personnel change to cut bureaucratic red tape that has bogged down the hiring process, making it harder to staff facilities that care for youth.
‘It’s more than just dollars’
The state director of child welfare services, Marc Smith, has told lawmakers, reporters and others that it will take time to get the department back under control after it was starved for years during a budget standoff between former Gov. Rauner and former Illinois House Speaker Madigan.
But more than four years into his tenure, some advocates say Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration has made little headway on addressing the fundamental causes behind the placement crisis.
“No one has come to me and said, ‘Gosh, if we only had more money, we could fix this.’ I think we’re at the point where it’s more than just dollars. I think it’s direction.”
State Sen. Julie Morrison
Pritzker’s office did not return a request for comment on this story.
State Sen. Julie Morrison, D-Deerfield, has for years worked on efforts to reform the department. She did not return calls to Youth Today for this story.
Morrison, like other lawmakers, has expressed extreme dismay about the department’s response to the “stuck kids docket,” as it’s known in some Cook County legal circles — children in DCFS custody who are being housed in offices, in jails and hospitals beyond legal or medical necessity, and other places not designed for kids to grow up in.
“This problem was there when he walked in the door. And I know [DCFS Director Marc Smith] is just one person, but I do feel like we’ve appropriated a lot of funding for DCFS,” Morrison told the Better Government Association last year. “No one has come to me and said, ‘Gosh, if we only had more money, we could fix this.’ I think we’re at the point where it’s more than just dollars. I think it’s direction.”
Heather Tarczan, a spokeswoman for DCFS, blamed the lack of appropriate placements on the previous administration’s budget standoff more than five years ago.
“When the [J.B. Pritzker] administration took office five years ago, DCFS was completely gutted,” Tarczan said. “It was one of those organizations that was just hollowed out … there were not places set up for children that needed places to stay.”
The department is investing in creating more placements for children, she said.
The department received a $75 million funding increase under the state budget approved this spring — significantly less than the $197.8 million it requested.
DCFS is working with “a half-dozen agencies” to expand the number of emergency beds and group placements for children, Tarczan said in an email. That includes adding 49 emergency placements throughout the state and in Cook County.
Tarczan also said new congregate care beds have been added, with more planned.
The numbers cited, however, are nowhere near the number of children — more than 500 — who slept in welcome centers or social workers’ offices for at least one night over the course of 2022.
So where are those children sleeping now?
“DCFS is always recruiting new foster families and works with community partners across the state to ensure appropriate placements for our children exist.”
Heather Tarczan, Illinois DCFS
“We just don’t know,” said NASW’s Hillman. “It is concerning that the department has not been able to provide more clarity on how they have been addressing emergency placement.”
In response to a question about the discrepancy between the number of emergency and congregate beds added and the number of children who slept in offices and limbo placements last year, DCFS spokesman Tarczan wrote:
“Please keep in mind, some foster homes will take more than one child, there are fictive kin placements, congregate care and emergency placements. DCFS is always recruiting new foster families and works with community partners across the state to ensure appropriate placements for our children exist.”
Most of the residential treatment facilities where DCFS had operated emergency centers either declined interviews or did not return phone calls and emails from Youth Today.
Emily Moen, a spokeswoman for a facility previously listed as a DCFS welcome center location called Thresholds, said in an email, “We continue to work with DCFS whenever they reach out on a case-by-case-basis.”
Rising number of abuse and neglect investigations
Nationally, the number of children entering the child welfare system declined from 2018-2021, the most recent federal data available. But in Illinois, the number of children entering state care rose over the same period.
The number of total kids in the Illinois DCFS system declined slightly in 2022 and is projected to decrease in 2023 and 2024, according to a DCFS budget presentation asking the state legislature for a 10.9% funding increase.
Despite the projected decline, the number of DCFS investigations into abuse and neglect has been on the rise, the presentation shows.
In 2024, the state expects more than 97,600 child welfare investigations – an increase from just under 96,000 projected in 2023 and roughly 94,700 in 2022, according to DCFS.
Tim Decker, senior policy director with the Anne E. Casey Foundation and former director of the Missouri Children’s Division said increased abuse and neglect reporting usually coincides with stress and economic hardship for families. Today, many families are still recovering financially from the pandemic and dealing with the fastest inflation the country has seen in decades.
“There’s a pretty well demonstrated connection between economic hardship and reporting to child abuse and neglect,” Decker said. “When there’s high levels of community support, we know reporting goes down.”
Naomi Riley, a conservative commentator and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that states like Illinois need more congregate care facilities to place children so they don’t end up stuck in jails, hospitals or sleeping in social workers offices.
Riley said nationwide she’s hearing about kids stuck between placements.
“It’s becoming more and more common,” she said. “It’s happening in states that are wealthier and that are poorer. It’s happening in Massachusetts, in Texas, in Kansas — it’s really hard to find a state that does not have this problem.”
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Michael Gerstein is a Chicago-based journalist.
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A correction was made on July 6, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated the percentage of all children in DCFS care who were kept in psychiatric hospitals beyond medical necessity in 2021. The percentage was less than 2%, not approximately 29%.
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The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a supporter of Youth Today. Read our editorial independence policy.
