Sacramento County moving troubled foster care unit from Children’s Receiving Home campus

Sacramento County is moving its beleaguered foster care unit away from the Children’s Receiving Home campus this week and into a government building on Bradshaw Road.

The county office, designed as a short-term “intake” unit, was regularly turned into a makeshift shelter to house children who could not be placed quickly in a foster home or with a relative.

Even after the state Department of Social Services ordered the county to close the “unlicensed shelter” in 2016, children continued to stay overnight in the office space on Auburn Boulevard and Watt Avenue.

The move ends a nearly two-decade-long arrangement with the region’s largest group home. The intake office, now known as the Centralized Placement Support Unit, was on-site next to the nonprofit Children’s Receiving Home as far back as 2001.

Talks of moving the office started in 2016, a county spokeswoman said. But the plans never materialized.

Meanwhile, children would go AWOL and refuse placement only to return to the intake office again and again. As a result, a small number of children were able to use the facility as a place to hangout, mingling with the other kids who lived in the shelter next door.

“I don’t know if it’s a departure from that working relationship, but that unit has been out there for a decade or more. It could be a different relationship,” said Sacramento County Supervisor Don Nottoli. “What that means, I can’t say that (it’s) good or bad. I have to imagine if you don’t have the connectivity on an all-time basis, it will change some things.”

The close physical ties resulted in a stronger relationship with the Children’s Receiving Home, which has struggled with runaways, adequate staffing and frequent citations by state regulators, a recent investigation by The Sacramento Bee found. Over the years, the county came to rely on the group home, increasing its contract by $700,000 to accept children into a temporary shelter.

The arrangement gave social workers a place to send the children in need of a foster home. Now the county no longer sends as many children to the shelter, county officials said.

“We’ve made great improvements in this area with respect to the number of youth staying at the (intake office), in part because we increased the contract with the Children’s Receiving Home,” Michelle Callejas, who oversees the county’s Department of Child, Family and Adult Services, said earlier this year.

‘High crime neighborhood’

It wasn’t enough. As recent as March, the CPSU still had children staying overnight in an office space that was not designed for residential use, Callejas said.

“We do still have some kids that stay there for longer periods of time,” she said. “Sometimes we do find placements for kids. They can choose not to go.”

The relocation only came together in the last few weeks after the county found an appropriate space, spokeswoman Brenda Bongiorno said in an email.

The county had been warned in recent years to migrate from the site, most recently after a 2018 grand jury investigation.

The grand jury’s report found that the unit was located in a “high crime neighborhood” that placed children and staff in “undue danger.” They recommended moving the facility to a “safer environment.”

It’s unclear what it means for the relationship between the county and the nonprofit receiving home. Bongiorno said the county will continue to use the home as a temporary shelter by transporting children there instead. It’s also possible the children could reside at the government complex on Bradshaw Road overnight, she said.

This story was originally published September 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.