Sacramento County government cares more about cops than vulnerable kids | Opinion
No one knows what to do with teens in California’s foster care. As a result, our most vulnerable children are being moved further away from their communities — and many are simply running away.
Specialized group care homes are increasingly closing thanks to a decade-old law that requires the state to place children into family care over group care facilities. Simultaneously, an insurance crisis has made it nearly impossible to insure these group residential programs.
Now, new research — and a scathing Sacramento County Grand Jury report — have shed light on exactly how teenage foster children are being lost in the widening cracks of the crumbling foster care system, where they are subject to a greater risk of sexual exploitation, substance abuse and homelessness.
And Sacramento County, which just restored $8 million in budget funding to the Sheriff’s Office and even more to the District Attorney’s Office, has carved millions out of every other department to cover a $101 million budget deficit — including the Department of Child, Family and Adult Services which oversees the county’s foster care system.
We cannot thrive as a community when so much public money goes toward law enforcement and so little goes toward caring for those who need it most. Steady, reliable funding from the county provides the additional social workers, placement coordinators, foster family recruitment, behavioral health services and contracts with providers that these children need to succeed.
It’s clear that California’s well-intentioned shift toward family placement has outpaced its ability to care for the teenagers who cannot safely live in family homes, and Sacramento County is making budget choices that worsen that problem.
State pushes families over group care
The research all points to one, overwhelming fact: When a child enters the foster care system, they’re best placed to succeed in life with a foster family. That was the idea behind 2015’s Assembly Bill 403, which fundamentally altered the state’s approach to foster care, shifting the child welfare system to prioritize family-based placements. It also restricted group homes to short-term therapeutic interventions.
But not every child is a perfect case study; some have specific mental health or behavioral struggles. Some are pregnant or already parents. Some are returning from juvenile detention or were sexually trafficked. In these cases and more, specific therapeutic needs cannot be addressed by untrained foster families, leading to constant shuffling between homes and an unsteady life for vulnerable children.
And, if no foster families are available, these children still need a place to lay their heads for short-term stays while one can be found.
The answer has always been congregate care homes, called Short-Term Residential Therapeutic Programs, or STRTPs, that provide therapy-informed care and 24-hour supervision.
In 2024, I visited a local STRTP called Progress Ranch near downtown Davis that hosted foster boys ages 6-13 with severe behavioral health needs. I saw firsthand how the home was made to look as welcoming and ordinary as possible. A puppy roamed freely through the rooms, and each child was given a handmade quilt that they would be able to take with them when they graduated from the program and were placed with a foster family.
Despite the severity of their needs, the children were well-cared for and loved. But Progress Ranch has since closed.
Sacramento County makes it worse
Sacramento County, in particular, has struggled for years with how to find safe, permanent housing for foster children.
A grand jury investigation of the issue in 2023 said the county was continuing “to fail — after many years — in its efforts to find safe permanent housing for foster teenagers who are housed in temporary facilities.” It also said that, in Sacramento County, “teenagers are virtually invisible because they are not a priority” in the foster system.
As a result, Sacramento County instituted a program in 2024 known as the Welcome Homes, and now operates three of them. These homes are a transitional residential facility for foster children between the ages of 6–17, and a far better option than the county housing children in cells in a former juvenile detention facility, which it did for six months in 2022.
Foster children can stay for a maximum of 10 days during the search for a more permanent placement, taking one of the roles that STRTPs once provided.
But the Grand Jury report found that, while the county had succeeded in improving conditions at the Welcome Homes, they remain “an inappropriate placement for sexually exploited youth and youth who are at risk of sexual exploitation, because Temporary Shelter Care Facilities are not a therapeutic setting” — the kind of placement an STRTP can provide.
The report also found that the required, annual report on the Welcome Homes was never filed for 2024-25, leaving investigators completely in the dark as to its progress.
The consequences of this lack of transparency are not abstract, they are sexual exploitation, homelessness and addiction, feeding an already dire crisis on our streets.
A community should be judged by who it chooses to help. So, who are we helping?
