Sitting in the audience of the Committee on Children’s STAR Home informational hearing on October 11 was Megan Pilcher, the foster mother of a troubled young girl who, after an extensive history of admissions and discharges from mental health facilities, was eventually placed in the Harwinton STAR Home during a time when the shelter for girls was becoming increasingly destabilized, resulting in numerous arrests of both residents and staff.
In a written statement handed out to the press, Pilcher described her family’s frustration with the mental health services for youth in Connecticut. As her foster daughter grew older, her problems became more severe and Pilcher’s ability to control her behaviors was limited. There was inpatient care, psychiatric hospital admissions, outpatient care, psychiatric residential treatment facilities (PRTF), work with UConn and Yale, but her daughter’s dangerous and suicidal behaviors continued.
Interestingly, the only bright spot in this history came when their daughter was admitted to the Albert J. Solnit Center, Connecticut’s state-run psychiatric facility for adolescents.
“The doctors there were incredible,” Pilcher wrote. “For the first time she was being treated by doctors who truly understood her diagnosis. Her preverbal trauma, early childhood trauma, and relationships with her family were explored. Four months later, our daughter was discharged and came home with a completely different outlook on life. It lasted five months.”
Pilcher then recounts how her daughter spiraled downward once again but was denied re-entry to Solnit and referred for outpatient care despite multiple requests. Even when admitted to inpatient care, she was quickly discharged despite her life being at risk, according to Pilcher. She was also denied several times for re-admission into a PRTF.
Finally, when her daughter was once again being discharged, Pilcher says she and her husband “refused to pick her up stating that we were in fear for her life.” The Department of Children and Families (DCF) was called and Pilcher was charged with neglect. Pilcher’s daughter was then placed in the Harwinton STAR Home, “where she was given zero clinical treatment,” according to Pilcher. Her daughter was eventually arrested during an incident at the home.
The STAR Home is run by the Bridge Family Center, which is contracted by DCF to operate four Short Term Assessment and Respite (STAR) homes in Connecticut. These shelters house adolescents who have been removed from various family situations and are under the care and custody of DCF. However, an investigation by Connecticut Inside Investigator (CII) revealed numerous issues facing the STAR Home in Harwinton.
Pilcher had requested to testify at the hearing but, because it was an informational hearing, the Committee was only looking to hear from primary stakeholders — DCF and the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) and Harwinton town officials.
However, the committee scheduled only two hours for the hearing, nearly all of which was dominated by DCF, giving the OCA only a few minutes and Harwinton town officials no chance at all to discuss their concerns. Bridge Family Center executive director Margaret Hann was not present due to pending litigation, but the court clerk read a submitted statement.
Pilcher’s statement, although not part of the official record, was backed up by findings from the Office of the Child Advocate, Sarah Healy Eagan, who was only given a few short minutes to testify before the end of the hearing. A report about Connecticut’s STAR Home system submitted by the OCA found the shelters are ill-equipped to handle the acuity of the adolescents placed in those homes.
“The STAR home is a shelter-care model that is not designed or resourced to meet the needs of these girls (and boys) – resulting in rising number of incidents affecting the safety and wellbeing of children,” Eagan wrote. “Reliance on STAR homes reflects a flawed system design. There are inadequate treatment options and treatment settings, including specialized foster care, for girls with significant histories of child abuse, neglect, sexual exploitation, and other trauma exposure, many of whom are unable to immediately return to their families.”
Among the issues with the STAR Home model, the OCA found that it is funded at a lower level than other therapeutic group home settings, struggle with maintaining staff, and extensive lengths of stay, with one resident at a STAR home for over 550 days.
“OCA believes that this length of stay data does not reflect cumulative days spent in STAR placements for children that move in and out of such settings, and therefore multiple children’s actual length of stay in STAR homes is longer that what is reflected here,” the report says.
Furthermore, the OCA found that while admissions to STAR homes have increased, admissions to therapeutic group homes and residential treatment centers have declined and that there are “serious logjams at all levels of mental health care for children.”
Among those logjams are extensive waiting lists for needed treatment. According to the OCA, in September of 2023 there were 68 children in emergency departments across the state for behavioral health issues, with 33 needing inpatient psychiatric care and only six available beds. Furthermore, the wait times for inpatient beds at places like Solnit and PRTFs – where Pilcher tried in vain to place her daughter — was over three months. Solnit is reportedly facing staffing shortages since the pandemic, resulting in fewer available beds and resources.
All of this creates a downward pressure on STAR Homes to fill in the gaps of Connecticut’s overburdened adolescent mental health system, which was brought to the breaking point during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike higher levels of treatment like therapeutic group homes, the STAR homes cannot reject an admission from DCF; they have to take the adolescent regardless of their acuity or history.
Included in Harwinton First Selectman Michael Criss’s written testimony, which has not yet been posted to the committee’s testimony page, was an email from a former Bridge Family Center STAR Home resident who said conditions in the home when she lived there in 2010 are not different from what was uncovered in 2023.
“I was shocked to read that so many of the issues that I experienced then are still happening,” the former resident wrote, “It was a horrific nightmare.” Although she identified herself in the email, we are withholding that information as Criss’s statement has not yet been publicly posted
“I am still in touch with some of the girls on Facebook, including those who ‘acted out.’” the former resident wrote. “In recent years, I’ve asked them what drove them to act so erratically. It was simple, to them: after being abused by their families, they were dumped at a shelter, isolated from communities, supervised by people who made it clear they didn’t care, sometimes visited by a social worker who definitely didn’t care, and told over and over nobody wanted them. It drove them to insanity.”
She goes on to say that the girls had to fight to get new clothes, haircuts, and personal hygiene products during her time there and said that “sex trafficking was also rampant at the shelters and group homes I lived in.”
“It was this neglect that served as a pipeline for these girls to be manipulated by abusers, and I am deeply sickened this is still happening,” the former resident wrote.
Neither Criss, nor Chief of Service for the Harwinton Ambulance Association Kevin Ferrarotti were left time to testify before the committee, but both submitted written testimony critiquing the overall mental health care system for children and expressing hope that the Committee on Children can help in addressing concerns.
“I am not here to place blame on any one organization, however I am here to help legislators and all involved to revamp a very broken system that needs a complete overhaul and accountability,” Criss wrote. “We are clearly not doing enough to assist our troubled youth in creating a better life and making available the resources needed to break the horrific life cycle they have been exposed to.”
“As I mentioned to the deputy commissioner [of DCF] recently at a meeting with key stakeholders in August, I am hopeful for a good outcome,” Ferrarotti wrote. “However, I am not sure if that is possible given the individuals looking to fix the solution are the same exact individuals who have overseen this issue for decades. I am hopeful this committee can somehow assure that any future operations at this home can be done safely and appropriately.”
Speaking with reporters after the end of the hearing, Criss said he was upset he didn’t get a chance to testify, noting that the number of emergency calls to the shelter in Harwinton had gone from 30 calls in six years to 87 calls in seven months.
“That’s a huge decline in services for these youth and we’re failing them,” Criss said. “I’m hoping that this is just the beginning and I hope there’s more hearings where we’ll have the opportunity to testify about problem-solving efforts to try to get through the system. This system has a lot of flaws in it and the only reason why DCF came to Harwinton is because we demanded DCF come to Harwinton and because we refused to meet with Bridge Family without DCF present.”
“We warned a year in advance that this escalation was coming,” Criss continued. “It happened because these children are being placed in a home that does not provide the proper care, does not have the proper safety precautions, does not have the proper training.”
Children’s Committee co-chairs Rep. Liz Linehan, D-Cheshire, and Sen. Ceci Maher, D-Wilton, said there will be future hearings and that this was only the first.
“We are here solely for the purpose to determine how the legislature can support these kids within these communities, whether it be at the STAR homes or whether it be in other therapeutic residency programs,” Linehan said during her opening remarks. “Our job here in the legislature and especially at the Committee on Children is to ensure that all kids lead happy, healthy lives in the state of Connecticut.”
The STAR Home in Harwinton was essentially emptied of all girls but one by DCF, moving the teenagers to other facilities as the department awaits corrective action by the Bridge Family Center so that it can begin receiving residents again. The Bridge Family Center is currently facing a lawsuit from the family of a former resident who allege the STAR Home exposed their adolescent daughter to inappropriate and illegal activities, including sexual assault.
But for Pilcher and her daughter, however, the state’s mental health system for adolescents fell short and her daughter’s experience in the STAR Home did not result in a positive outcome, but rather resulted in a detention center.
“When DCF says the children of the STAR home were sent to alternate facilities, my child went to Hartford detention,” Pilcher wrote. “The state of Connecticut didn’t have a bed for her in a psychiatric hospital, but they had a bed for her in jail.”
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