On Feb. 29, members of the Committee on Children held a public hearing on HB 5260, titled An Act Requiring An Evaluation Of Short-Term Assessment And Respite Group Homes For Children. The push to review STAR homes comes as a third lawsuit was filed this week amid rape and abuse allegations at a STAR home in Harwinton that has since been closed.
The proposed bill would require Department of Children and Families (DCF) Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lily to submit a report by Jan. 1, 2025, that evaluates the STAR homes on four factors; the homes’ ability to provide care to children with significant behavioral health needs, ability to retain qualified staff, ability of the DCF to provide specialized training to their staff and the availability of structured therapeutic and clinical services in the homes.
While several lawmakers and advocates alike agreed that the bill is a step in the right direction, all agreed that it should ideally go even further in addressing the problems presented by STAR homes in their current state. Among the problems listed were an outdated service model, lack of oversight and lack of funding.
“STAR home level of care is critical to ensuring that these youth receive necessary assessment and support while continuing to find the most appropriate treatment modalities to meet their needs,” said Hill-Lily. “Evaluation of all our service types, including STAR programs, is continuous.”
STAR homes are intended to be short-term foster homes, where children who have been removed from their homes by the DCF, or those who have no other placement option available at the time, can be psychologically assessed, provided short-term treatment, introduced to additional clinical resources as needed, and eventually discharged towards more permanent placements.
Connecticut Child Advocate Sarah Eagan, who was also present at the meeting, was very blunt in her assessment of STAR homes in their current state.
“The STAR homes are not working,” said Eagan. “It’s an old model, it doesn’t work.”
Eagan said that the homes may work to place children temporarily as an emergency shelter, but that the STAR homes themselves are not “treatment settings.” She went on to cite her October 2023 report on STAR homes to paint a picture of how dire the circumstances are within the average home, and how inadequate their current model is to providing the kinds of services that STAR home kids need.
Per the report, there were 31 children in STAR homes on Oct. 4, 2023, ranging in age from 13-18, which Eagan noted as being a “big swing in age” for children in a group setting. 90 percent of the children identified as people of color. While STAR homes are supposed to serve as short-term facilities, with the intended maximum being 60 days, the children in that study were found to have been in STAR home care anywhere from 5 to 553 days. Half of those children were in STAR homes for more than 100 days.
Seventeen out of the 21 girls held in STAR homes had a history of sexual abuse, almost all of them having a history of suicidal behavior, and at least one of whom had been documented as being at risk of sex trafficking. Severe mental health and behavioral problems were the norm, with common diagnoses including PTSD, major depressive disorder, reactive attachment disorder and intellectual disability.
Eagan described the homes as revolving doors; group therapy was near impossible to provide as girls were constantly going in and out of the hospital for psychiatric treatment or running away. Eagan said the median number of placements that children get when put in STAR homes is 8. One of the girls in STAR home custody at the time of the study had been placed 23 times since being put under DCF care in 2021.
“That’s the level of care in a nutshell,” said Eagan. “That’s who we’re serving.”
Eagan said that while it is important to have STAR homes for their usage as emergency shelters for when kids are placed under DCF custody on short notice, they can not be viewed as adequately staffed or prepared to take children in for long periods or provide them the level of care and resources that they need.
“It’s a system problem,” said Eagan. “When we have a child [who’s] traumatized, abandoned, rejected in their minds, let down by adults in their life probably consistently for a long time, coming into our care as state custodians; what does that engagement and service delivery need to look like?”
The challenge, Eagan went on to say, is how the system can deliver an overarching care system for these children that gives some semblance of permanence. Eagan described the constant movement endemic of STAR home children as a massive barrier towards making breakthroughs. She proposed the state find a way to get them long-lasting, more permanent care providers to work one-on-one with children once they enter STAR homes and stay with the children once they leave STAR homes, so as to “not have to start them all over again.”
Eagan believes funding is a critical issue. She said that even in its current model, staff are underpaid compared to market price, which impacts staff retention. Changing the service model of STAR homes and increasing the level of care they provide will cost even more.
“It’s really important, it’s really urgent, I think there are things we have to do this session from a funding perspective to address that,” insisted Eagan. “There are things we have to do urgently around the model, and if we want to ask our providers to do more clinically, we’re going to have to pay them for it.”
Eagan said that she spoke with a former DCF child turned advocacy colleague on the subject, who brought up the point to Eagan that improving the STAR homes still won’t fully solve the problem of providing meaningful service to the kids they take in.
“She said to me, ‘It’s not enough to make a STAR home better, because it misses the point of how do we look at who these kids are and how they got here?,’” said Eagan.
Eagan said this colleague recommended the creation of a permanent advisory structure for state group homes that contains those with lived experience in group homes, operates based on the expertise of the provider community and constantly makes policy recommendations to both the DCF and state policymakers on DCF programming.
“I think that structure fits very neatly in the existing DCF statewide advisory committee structure, which is already authorized to be receiving reports from facilities,” said Eagan.
That colleague Eagan spoke of is Ivelisse Correa, who later gave her own verbal testimony. As a former DCF child, she offered her perspective on the ways DCF can improve. Correa said that she was placed under DCF custody as a result of her father being jailed on marijuana charges.
“I am extremely representative of the efficiency of the programs offered then and now,” said Correa. “I am still healing from the trauma I faced as a throwaway child in the Connecticut DCF system and when I speak to you today my heart aches because very little has changed.”
Correa said that every program under DCF care should be required to make reports and be audited as frequently as possible, so programs can be evaluated and funding can be distributed appropriately. She also advocated for follow-up surveys on DCF children as adults and echoed Eagan’s earlier calls for better wages for service providers.
“We need to know the efficiency of the programs being offered as well and how many children graduate from these programs,” said Correa. “A significant portion of the girls I lived with have graduated to inmate numbers, if they’re not dead.”
Correa said that she saw significant money going to programs, but didn’t see positive results. She said that girls were often threatened with being sent to Long Lane School, a now closed Middletown jail that used to serve as the state’s prison for juvenile females. It was notorious for its mistreatment of inmates, and was eventually shut down in 2003 following the suicide death of Tabitha Ann Brendle, a 15-year old inmate. Correa said she was an inmate of Long Lane herself at one point.
Committee Chair Liz Linehan, D-Cheshire, was especially moved by Correa’s testimony, and requested it be submitted in its written form so that it may be referred to by the Committee in the future. Linehan stated that Correa’s input would “be extremely, extremely valuable.”
“I make no secret of the fact that I grew up labeled as a troubled youth, but I was threatened with Long Lane all the time,” said Linehan, choking back tears. “So when you said that it sent a shock through my body.”
Ultimately, the Committee itself hopes to revise the bill to take further action. Committee Chairs Linehan and Ceci Maher, D-Wilton, ranking members Anne Dauphinais, R-Killingly, and Lisa Seminara, R-Avon, and the House Republican Caucus all submitted written testimony to the same effect.
“We believe this bill misses the mark by inaccurately suggesting that STAR homes offer some level of services and care that can be evaluated for their effectiveness – but those services simply don’t exist,” reads the testimony. “Any legislation moving forward needs to require DCF to provide such services and match them with appropriate resources and provider training so providers can effectively care for the complex needs of these children.”
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