Washington's foster kids are spending more nights in hotels and offices this year

Foster youth have slept in hotels or offices around 1,300 times so far this year because there wasn’t an appropriate place for them go on short notice.

That’s 30% more of those stays, or 335 more overnights, than this time last year, according to numbers by the state’s foster care watchdog, the Office of the Family and Children’s Ombuds.

It’s traumatic for foster youth to sleep in a hotel or office, director Patrick Dowd said.

“Children are frightened by that, and their behavior escalates because of that kind of instability," Dowd said. "There have been physical confrontations between children in hotel stays or children against staff that are supervising them.”

It's demoralizing for their social workers to not have an appropriate place for the children, too, he said.

Some kids spend more than 20 days in a hotel or office over the course of a year, according to the office.

That’s often because they have complex needs related to mental illness and developmental disabilities; what’s lacking isn’t simply supply of foster homes, he said.

“What we’re lacking is placements that have the training and ability to meet the needs of these youth that have very challenging behaviors and unaddressed mental health issues or developmental disabilities,” Dowd said.

Forty young people made up a big chunk — hundreds of nights — of the hotel and office stays (known as “placement exceptions”) from September 2018 to the end of August 2019.

“In some ways it’s encouraging that if we can come up with 40 placements or so that would have the resources to meet specialized behavioral needs, mental health issues, developmental disabilities etc., we could really decrease the number of placement exceptions,” Dowd said.

The Department of Children, Youth, and Families is working on a plan to solve the problem, spokesperson Debra Johnson said.

“What we want to do is eliminate hotel stays, because what we know is that that isn’t providing the children or youth the type of supportive environment that will lead to them addressing their needs,” Johnson said.

Nicole Mazen, director of foster care services for nonprofit Amara, pointed to a variety of reasons why foster youth are staying in hotels and offices, including an inadequate number of foster families.

Foster families working with Amara are mostly new or first-time parents, she said.

“When people are coming to foster care, they have a specific vision of the child that they’re going to parent, and it isn’t typically an older child,” Mazen said.

Around 57% of foster youth who stayed in a hotel or office were 10 years old or older.

Families need to be trained to parent older foster children certainly, but that’s not the end of it, Mazen said.

“There’s a need for more of everything,” she said, including emergency places for foster youth to stay short-term, more foster homes and more people to help foster children and their biological families.