Jodi Hill-Lilly, Commissioner-designate of the Department of Children and Families, and the State’s Committee on Children unveiled a new service model for the state’s STAR homes, which they call STAR Enhanced, in a press conference today. The group said that these wide-sweeping changes will be implemented immediately.
“It takes all of us working together to best serve our children, youth and families,” said Hill-Lilly. “This is a true team effort that has led us to a new, comprehensive plan that we’re announcing today.”
STAR, which used to stand for Short Term Assessment and Respite homes, has now been renamed to STTAR, standing for Specialized Trauma-Informed Treatment Assessment Reunification homes. In short, the plan calls for an increase in staffing and training of STTAR home staff, an enhancement of the therapeutic programs held at the homes, and a focus on transitioning especially at-risk STTAR home children to higher levels of care as needed. The DCF’s capacity to provide this higher level care will be aided by the creation of two Intensive Transitional Treatment Centers (ITTCs) which will offer children higher-level, clinical care.
These ITTC’s were described by Hill-Lilly as being centers for STTAR home children who are, “in need of intensive treatment supports, and who are disrupting STTAR homes, or who are too acute.” The ITTC’s will be separated by sex, one for males and one for females, and will be able to facilitate 8 children per building. The maximum intended stay of children in ITTC’s will be 30 days. The group hopes that the ITTC’s will be up and running within the next six months, but acknowledged that their proposed locations have not yet been decided upon, and their construction will have to go to bid.
The total cost for all of these changes will be a little over $6 million, estimated DCF CFO Melanie Sparks. This money comes from the DCF’s pre-existing budget, with Sparks explaining that it has been reallocated from the agency’s Congregate Care fund.
“We’ve had a 36 percent reduction in the use of congregate care since 2019,” explained Sparks. “There is about a 28 percent reduction in expenditures, which has allowed us to invest in different services to adjust to the needs of the kids today.”
The changes come following an Inside Investigator article about a troubled STAR Home in Harwinton, that spurred an informational hearing before the Committee on Children and a report by the Office of the Child Advocate. The Harwinton facility has since been closed.
Children’s Committee Co-Chair Liz Linehan (D-Cheshire) said that the committee has been working in tandem with Hill-Lilly with input from other relevant stakeholders, including the Office of the Child Advocate, to create this plan over the past six months. In a previous public hearing on Feb. 29, Child Advocate Sarah Eagan declared that the STAR home model was “not working,” and that a new service model must replace it. Linehan claimed that these changes would represent that new service model.
“What we’ve created is a new model that provides critical changes to the children’s behavioral health system,” said Linehan. “The new STTAR home is focused on trauma informed treatment, which is one of our number one priorities in the children’s committee.”
Since the closure of the Harwinton STAR home, there have been a total of 7 homes in the state, with 6 beds per home. Hill-Lilly announced that the number of beds per home will be lowered to 5 to give a more favorable staff-to-child ratio. She also announced that the Harwinton home will be replaced, bringing the total number of STTAR homes back up to 8. It’s unclear at this time whether the Harwinton home will be reopened, or if a new one will be constructed in its place.
Emphasis was placed on the retraining and development of staff, as well as the hiring of additional staff as needed. Hill-Lilly said that the DCF’s Academy for Workforce Development will offer its subcontracted STTAR home service providers with “access to an increased array of training, resources and course offerings.”
Each home will also have an additional supervisor to oversee STTAR home staff and keep them accountable. Hill-Lilly said these supervisors may be drawn from existing service provider staff, or hired externally, and that the DCF is currently working on writing up the supervisor position’s job duties. She also said that she believes the heightened supervision will allow clinical staff present at the STTAR homes to be able to focus more on providing specialized treatment, instead of taking on the managerial workload expected of the regular staff, which happened frequently in the past.
Hill-Lilly addressed the problem of understaffed facilities, by saying that the DCF is working on creating “a pipeline for upward mobility” for staff in hopes of staving off the high-levels of workforce turnover that STAR homes have seen in the past.
Hill-Lilly also said that more resources will be provided for the enhancement of each STTAR home’s therapeutic programming. On the Feb. 29 hearing, Eagan stated that STAR homes were not “clinical environments.” Lilly described the new therapy programs as being recreational in nature.
“Youth will have less idle time and more opportunities to channel their energy into positive activities, creating a sense of normalcy that not only helps with the healing process but also prepares them for transition into a permanent setting,” said Hill-Lilly.
More serious programming seems to be reserved for the ITTC’s.
“There’s always been therapy and those types of things in the STAR homes,” said Hill-Lilly. “It was intended to be sort of a beginning assessment sort of phase. The intent of the ITTC program will be far more clinical, a step up, if you will, in terms of treatment provision.”
In the OCA’s October 2023 report on STAR homes, it was noted that STAR home children, on average, far exceeded their maximum intended stays of 60 days. That report found that 15 out of 31 children had stayed longer than 100 days in their respective STAR homes. As a result, the STTAR Enhanced program intends to expedite the child placement process. The ITTC’s will be available to place children with higher levels of needs faster than before. Hill-Lilly also announced that the plan will transfer higher needs children into the state’s Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facilities (PRTF’s) at Solnit-South and Solnit-North, in “an expedited manner,” with three beds being available at each campus for children.
“We know our home services need to be intensive and temporary, with the ultimate goal of helping our youth successfully return to their families and their communities,” said Hill-Lilly.
The introduction and immediate implementation of this plan seems to be putting the Committee’s recent legislation, HB 5260 An Act Requiring an Evaluation Of Short-Term Assessment And Respite Group Homes for Children, on hold for the time being. The bill would have mandated Hill-Lilly to submit a yearly report to the Committee, for the purpose of evaluating the STAR homes efficacy on a variety of metrics.
Linehan insisted that the bill, which has since been passed from the committee and filed with the Legislative Commissioners’ Office, is not currently necessary. Linehan stressed the strength of the Committee’s working relationship with the DCF, and insisted that further legislative oversight need not be codified at this time.
“We’ve worked together on this program to put forth all of the action items that the committee wanted to see,” said Linehan. “I’m believing that we’re gonna get that data anyways on a consistent basis, and there will be a follow up. However, please note, if we were to require data to come back to us in statute by December 31st, I’m also not convinced that’s enough data, enough time, to let us know if we need to codify something.”
Linehan said that if the honor system does not work as intended, the Committee will reserve the right to return to the legislation next session if deemed necessary. Republican members of the Committee on Children, Lisa Seminara (R-Avon) and Anne Dauphinais (R-Killingly) emphasized that point in a statement released this afternoon.
“While we’re hopeful that staffing and programmatic shifts will produce safer environments and better outcomes for the at-risk children who need these beds, we, as legislators, must monitor implementation of these changes and continue the conversation about what level of oversight and accountability is needed as we analyze whether this path is working,” reads the statement. “We owe that to the children and the communities where these homes are located.”
Gov. Ned Lamont was also present at today’s press conference. He thanked the Committee and Hill-Lily, and emphasized the state’s focus on ensuring the best possible outcome for its children.
“We’re all here doing what we do in this Capitol building, and at the end of the day, it’s all about the kids,” said Lamont. “We have a continuum; from a Big Brother, Big Sister at school, right through to the STTAR program, right through to the pediatric psychiatric [facilities], and [we’re] doing everything we can to give these kids the very best start in life and make sure they know we love them.”
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