Hannah Pelletier will sometimes get a call in the middle of the night from a state caseworker desperate for a place to shelter a child just removed from a home because of abuse or neglect.

She often has a full house already but knows the only other option may be to have the child sleep in a state office, hotel or hospital emergency room.

Nine of the 31 children she took in over the past year had been diagnosed with autism and should qualify for therapeutic services while in foster care, Pelletier told state lawmakers this month. But they are not getting those services, she said, because the state provides them for a maximum of four children at a time in each foster home.

Being a foster parent to some of the most vulnerable children in state custody is a calling, Pelletier said, but one that’s increasingly difficult to follow given a lack of support from the state and a drop in the number of qualified homes.

“We’re still here,” Pelletier told lawmakers. “We still want to help, but we need help ourselves – because right now, we’re drowning.”

She is among numerous Maine foster care parents calling for the state to own up to and fix its problems, including dismissing their concerns about child safety and failing to provide support services and timely reimbursements for their expenses.

As investigations lay bare problems in the state agency that is supposed to protect children from abuse and neglect, a related crisis roils the foster care system, which has lost more than 130 licensed foster homes in the past year.

The shortage of foster care families means some children removed from unsafe homes end up being sheltered in makeshift ways.

The strain on foster families is directly related to the crisis in the child protection office that is the focus of an ongoing probe by the Legislature after a series of child deaths.

Foster families say the payments and reimbursements they receive from the state are often delayed, sometimes for months, causing financial strain on some families. On a deeper level, they cite a lack of trust in and responsiveness from the department – problems fueled by a shortage of caseworkers in the state’s Office of Child and Family Services.

Caseworker turnover is a national problem.

Caseworkers often leave their jobs citing poor leadership, high workloads and forced overtime. And in Maine, the shortage of foster care families adds to the pressure on caseworkers, who have to work overtime shifts watching over children forced to stay in hotels instead of foster homes. So the combination of shortages creates a vicious circle, making both situations worse.

Pelletier and other foster parents who testified before lawmakers and spoke with the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram said they sympathize with caseworkers and do not blame them for the problems, but that the current situation is creating too much pressure on all sides.

The problem, they say, is a broken system that lacks adequate services for behavioral health, mental health and substance use treatment.

Maine is not alone in this foster crisis. The number of foster homes has decreased over the past two years in more than half of the states, according to the most recent Who Cares report, a national count of foster homes by Fostering Media Connections, a nonprofit news organization.

The American Society for Positive Care of Children, a nonprofit committed to ending child maltreatment, says parental drug use means more children nationwide are entering state custody at a time when there are fewer foster homes. Commonly cited reasons why foster parents opt out, the society says, are lack of support from caseworkers and government agencies and lack of training on how to do the job well.

It’s unclear how much the foster shortage affects caseworker decisions about whether a child should be removed from a home.

Staff in Maine’s child protective system cited “concerns related to limited placement options for children entering care as a factor” in developing safety plans allowing children to stay with their families, according to the Maine Safety Science Model 2022 report, which is based on in-depth case reviews by Collaborative Safety LLC, an outside consultant contracted by the state.

But Jackie Farwell, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the child protection system, said the shortage of licensed foster homes doesn’t drive caseworkers’ safety assessments.

“Decisions about seeking removal of a child are driven by the department’s statutory obligation under state and federal law,” she said. “These decisions are made based on whether immediate risk of serious harm or jeopardy (as defined in the statute) has been found.”

A child in state custody should find a permanent living situation within a year of being removed from home, according to national standards from the U.S. Children’s Bureau, whether it’s returning to biological parents or being adopted by a foster family or relative. But foster families say that caseworker turnover seems to reset cases, leaving kids in limbo for far longer than they should be.

Children they care for sometimes are forced to visit their abusers and go home for trial placements even if their biological parents have not made progress.

“We are retraumatizing them over and over and over again because the termination of parental rights has not happened,” foster parent Deborah Brito told lawmakers.

Maine ended four years of steady growth last year when it lost 136 foster homes.

As of October, the state had 1,630 licensed foster homes to care for about 2,500 children in state custody. That’s the lowest number of licensed foster homes since 2019, when the state had 1,517 to care for 2,180 kids.

Farwell said the state grew the number of foster homes between 2019 and 2022 by increasing compensation and support – and while the number of licensed homes declined in the past year, the state has placed more children in the homes of relatives. In the last year, the number of unlicensed “kinship” foster homes has increased by about 300, she said. Those families don’t get the same training or financial support as licensed foster homes.

“The Department is grateful to families who have stepped up to serve Maine children and we remain committed to supporting them,” Farwell said in an email.

She said the department is working to fix the issues highlighted by foster families in legislative hearings this month, including delayed and incorrect payments to foster parents.

She said families waiting months for payments are outliers, and the department’s data shows average waits of 23 days, with 95% of payments being made within 20 days.

“The department values the care provided by resource (foster) families to Maine children and is taking steps to improve timeliness of payments,” Farwell said.

CRITICAL ROLE

Foster homes are an integral part of the child welfare system. They provide safe harbor for children removed from their families because of abuse or neglect while the families address safety concerns that led to the removal, by taking actions such as separating from a domestic abuser or getting treatment for substance use.

Lawmakers initially began examining failures in the state’s child welfare system two years ago in response to four 2021 child abuse deaths that occurred within weeks of one another. But the inquiry has broadened over time.

The focus has been largely on caseworkers and the challenges they face – primarily high caseloads because of a lack of staff and rapid turnover. But lawmakers have started hearing about how those staffing challenges ripple outward into foster care, especially for foster parents working with children with high needs.

Debbie De Julio, who has fostered children with serious behavioral health needs for 23 years, recently spoke at a hearing.

“I’m done,” she told lawmakers. “I’m done. Just like everybody else, there is no support for us.”

She said foster parents are made to feel like “the bad guys” when they seek help from the state. “You’re the enemies when you stand up for what a child needs.”

Foster families told lawmakers about an array of problems, including having children with behavioral health needs placed in homes that are ill equipped to handle them.

Foster parents say their goal is reunify children with their families, as long as doing so is safe. But they say they are often shut out by the system, which they believe protects parental rights over child safety.

“Our DHHS system is really focused on parents and it’s not child-centered,” said Brito, the foster parent. “Your hands are tied behind your back, and you’re supposed to be taking care of these children. These children can’t stand up for themselves. They’re walking through this with big wide eyes expecting the adult in front of them to take care of them and keep them safe.”

Jamie Brooks’ case is an example of the way these systems are supposed to work. She told lawmakers that when her children entered state custody in 2003, she developed a good relationship with the family that fostered them. She said the experience helped her break out of intergenerational involvement with the state, caused by a complex tangle of untreated substance use, mental health issues and power and control dynamics in her family.

Brooks told lawmakers that her children’s foster mother was a constant source of a support over a 14-month period that ended with her getting her kids back and becoming financially independent.

“She parented in a way that I had never seen before and showed me that there are different ways to have relationships with my children,” she said, fighting back tears. “She had loving and direct conversations with me when I thought it might be better to give up. She believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself.”

Brooks and her children have not been involved with the state since, she told lawmakers.

CHILDREN IN LIMBO

Pelletier is one of the 212 foster parents in Maine who accept children with significant developmental, emotional or medical needs, including autism. The state did not provide data, despite repeated requests, to compare that number to previous years.

Pelletier said Child and Family Services does not fully assess foster children’s needs until they’ve been in a foster home for 90 days. Its inability to immediately assess the needs of a child is leading to high-needs kids being placed in homes not trained or equipped to help them. That leads to disrupted placements, which can be traumatic for children and lead to foster family burnout, she said.

“We are disengaging our foster families by giving them kids that are higher level of needs than they are able to handle and not giving them the support they need to handle them,” Pelletier said. “We have those people providing care to these children when we’re not providing them appropriate rates and services, while we expect them to do the same work.”

Pelletier’s home is licensed as a therapeutic foster home, which provides her with additional support services and a higher reimbursement rate. A therapeutic foster family receives as much as $75 a day to care for a child, while a regular foster home receives $25 and a kinship foster home receives $18.

But even Pelletier’s state license only allows for services and reimbursements for four children under the age of 16 at a time, she said.

With so few therapeutic foster homes, Pelletier said she often takes in kids when they have no place else to go – at least temporarily so they don’t have to go into some sort of makeshift shelter situation.

It’s not clear how many children are in limbo waiting for a foster care placement at any one time. DHHS did not provide information about the number of children staying in hotels or emergency rooms, despite repeated requests for the data. The Press Herald first requested information about hotel use on Nov. 9 and began requesting information about emergency rooms on Dec. 13.

Mark Moran, a hospital social worker who chairs the Maine Child Death and Serious Injury Review Panel, a multidisciplinary panel set up by the state, said a lack of therapeutic foster homes is causing more children to languish in emergency rooms while they wait for beds at a residential treatment facilities. Sometimes a child will be dropped off at an emergency room by a parent or foster parent who can no longer manage the child, he said.

Moran said he’s aware of a child who spent three or four months in an emergency room with no window waiting for a placement, likely experiencing additional trauma from the isolation and exposure to scenes in the ER.

“I have been in my current job for almost 18 years, and prior to the last few years, I don’t really remember kids languishing in emergency departments as a big issue,” Moran said. “It certainly wasn’t something I heard about from my colleagues in other hospitals around the state. I think likely there were more appropriate resources in the communities.”

Beth Fournier said she and her husband have been foster parents in the Portland area for the past six years. She started a nonprofit, Nana’s House, to provide free supplies such as kits for infants that include diapers and wipes and formula after seeing caseworkers and foster parents scramble to find supplies for children coming into state custody.

Troubled by stories of children sleeping in offices, hotel rooms and ERs, Fournier said she would like to open up a bridge home where children new to state custody could be brought, cleaned up, fed, given time to rest and assessed for appropriate placement in foster care.

She said she has a location in South Portland, but needs DHHS approval to partner with her nonprofit, which she hasn’t received.

“I want to bring light and awareness to solutions, not just problems,” Fournier said. “We have this opportunity to provide something that can help hopefully retain caseworkers and hopefully provide a less traumatic experience and environment.”

When asked about the Nana’s House proposal, Farwell, the DHHS spokesperson, suggested in an email that such a facility is not needed.

“OCFS is typically able to match children who are entering state care for the first time with a resource home,” Farwell said. “When children enter care, staff access supplies for the child that are already available within the district, go to the store to purchase these items through a purchase order, or give the purchase order to the family so they can purchase the supplies. … Hoteling is more likely to result when a resource home is unable to continue caring for a child or the child has been discharged from the hospital and no resource homes are immediately available.”

FINANCIAL STRAIN

Mary Gene Rumery has been a foster parent for six years and has fostered seven kids. She and her husband adopted four of them when reunification efforts failed.

Like other foster parents, Rumery said she doesn’t do it for the money. She said her family is financially secure enough to wait for delayed payments, though many foster parents are not.

“If I didn’t have a husband who works the way he does, we would be under hardship,” she said.

Rumery said she once had to wait five months to receive about $10,000 in reimbursements. She has been waiting months for reimbursement for providing respite care for another foster family, she said, and the mileage reimbursements for transporting foster children rarely match the amounts she’s put in for.

Rumery said her experiences have varied, depending on the child welfare district she’s working with.

“You get little to no support from the districts. You’re told one thing and then something else happens,” she said. “But I have been able to find a little more hope that things are going to change.”

Sen. Craig Hickman, who chairs the Government Oversight Committee, which is reviewing the child welfare system, said at a recent meeting that one foster parent was waiting for $5,000 in reimbursements and was told by the department to go to a food pantry to feed the foster child.

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes, a nonprofit established by a former state senator to collect front-line feedback on the child protective system, is recommending that an advocacy group be created for foster parents.

Melanie Blair, a foster parent who works with the nonprofit said families like hers are given “inauthentic sympathy” as the department pushes “an ideology of family preservation … at all costs.”

“While we pass the buck from one person or another and hide behind the the smoke screen of dysfunction, children are stuck, lost and scared in the smoke,” Blair said. “They’re being retraumatized or worse by the policies that are failing them. It’s time to clear out the smoke, the toxic culture and those who perpetrated it.”

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