In a court hearing last spring, the new head of the Department of Children and Family Services promised improvements in placements for children in state care, who critics say are far too often kept in jails, psychiatric wards, offices or other inappropriate settings, by the end of 2024.
Last week, DCFS Director Heidi Mueller said the agency has done better in placing children in proper settings and shared new findings showing fewer kids are sleeping in government offices, a key subject of complaints from watchdogs. But data released at the end of last year indicates that while there were pockets of improvement during her initial months in office, troubling issues persist and the agency is far from solving its child placement problem.
Nonetheless, even a small step in the right direction was enough to win qualified praise from Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, an ardent DCFS critic who in recent years has filed a number of cases that led to contempt charges against the agency.
“The good news is for the first time in years and years, DCFS seems to be on the right track, but it still has a long slog to go,” Golbert said last week.
“I think we might be at the cusp of some microchanges,” he said. “Which, by the way, is more than we’ve had in a long time.”
Mueller took over at DCFS last Feb. 1, becoming the latest director charged with righting the perennially troubled department, which had 15 directors in 20 years before she got the job.
Under her watch DCFS has provided dozens of additional beds for foster kids, while there also has been a decrease in situations where children have been kept in detention centers beyond the time deemed necessary, according to the department.
However, stays in emergency rooms and emergency temporary shelters have remained high, according to a DCFS report to state legislators on youths awaiting placement that covered the fiscal year ending in June. Across every category DCFS tracks, there were 1,656 instances last fiscal year of kids awaiting placement as they were improperly kept in detention, emergency rooms, emergency placements or other facilities, the report found.
The 2024 report includes more than 700 instances involving about 550 children who were kept in DCFS state offices or other child welfare offices overnight in fiscal 2024. Those included children 3 years old and younger, though most instances occurred among older teenagers.
The practice, which Mueller acknowledged became more prevalent in the past five to 10 years, has become a lightning rod for department critics. Mueller has repeatedly said she wants to end it, both for kids’ well-being and for the staffers who may need to wait all night with them.
“This is something that right away, when I came on board, we decided we were going to tackle,” Mueller said.
New procedures implemented in November 2024 — the effect of which wouldn’t be reflected in the department report released in December — are already showing promise, Mueller said in a video interview. DCFS last year launched “emergency resource homes,” or emergency foster homes that have agreed to take in kids around the clock, as part of that plan. It also started training staff members to know what facilities might be available at difficult hours, she said.
Since those and other changes have been implemented, the average number of kids held in offices overnight has fallen from about 10 on any given night to about two, she said. The length of time kids end up staying in offices has also dropped from almost four and a half days to a little over one day, she said.
This month, there was a streak of four to five days during which there were no children housed in DCFS offices, Mueller said.
“We’re trying to really get to the point where it’s a thing of the past,” she said.
Golbert said being forced to stay in an office overnight can amount “a third trauma in like the same day for these kids,” after they may have experienced trauma from the treatment of their parents and again as they’re taken into DCFS custody. He expressed concern over data kept by his office that showed an uptick in the first six months of 2024 compared with calendar year 2023.
Mueller on Thursday said she expects improvements year over year, given the reforms she’s implemented. The data showing where DCFS is at this time this year compared with last year won’t be released until the end of 2025.
While the average length of stay in psychiatric wards beyond medical necessity improved in fiscal 2024 compared with fiscal 2023, it was still longer than in the fiscal years ending in 2021 or 2022, the DCFS report said. And at more than 86 days on average, it means hundreds of kids were kept in hospitals for weeks or months longer than they likely needed to be there.
In the fiscal year ending in June 2024, 238 children were kept in psychiatric wards after they were clinically deemed ready to leave, a 28% reduction from the previous fiscal year, according to DCFS data.
Emergency room stays beyond 24 hours while awaiting other placement have remained high for the past three years after an increase 2022, with about 300 kids kept in ERs longer than necessary in both fiscal 2023 and 2024.
Keeping children in an emergency room because there’s no other place to house them can create an “unholy cycle” in which kids’ deeper psychiatric needs aren’t addressed, Golbert said.
Mueller acknowledged the number of children kept in ERs has remained close to unchanged during her first year but shifted some of the blame to a lack of psychiatric beds statewide, a situation she has no direct control over.
One area that has seen clearer improvement since 2021 is the number of children kept in juvenile detention beyond a scheduled release date because DCFS has no other place for the child to go. Mueller said her experience and the relationships she developed as head of the Department of Juvenile Justice, the job she held until taking over at DCFS, contributed to last year’s improvement.
Golbert credited a 2023 class action lawsuit against DCFS, which said the department wrongfully failed to pick children up from juvenile detention, with adding urgency to the issue.
A variety of factors can lead to DCFS placing kids in less than idea situations, Mueller said. For example, a small child may end up in a DCFS office overnight if a DCFS worker takes them into state custody in the middle of the night, she said. Older kids might end up there if they get put out by a group home or run away and are picked up by police, she said.
The department is working on creating smaller, more home-like spaces, Mueller said. Last year, DCFS added about 80 new beds, according to the department, including sites specifically for LGBTQ youths, kids on the autism spectrum or those with complex medical needs.
Still, Golbert and other advocates have argued there are just not enough available, appropriate placement options, creating situations they say are unacceptable.
He put some of the blame on former Gov. Bruce Rauner, who eliminated hundreds of residential beds during his four years in office in an attempt to prioritize specialized foster care. The department still hasn’t made up for those lost beds, Golbert said.
But at some point, with the Pritzker administration in power for six years, Golbert said, “you have to claim it as your problem.”
Mueller faced questions on the long-standing issue at a hearing last year, in which Cook County Judge Patrick Murphy accused the agency of allowing kids’ conditions to worsen by improperly keeping them in emergency or psychiatric facilities.
“I’m not going to promise you … that we are going to solve everything in six months,” Mueller said at the time. But, she added: “By the end of this calendar year, you will definitely see improvement.”
Since Pritzker took office in 2019, the DCFS budget has increased by more than $1 billion, according to state records. It was greater than $2 billion during the year covered by the latest full report on placement, and was set to get higher this fiscal year.
Mueller’s predecessor, Pritzker appointee Marc Smith, was held in contempt of court a number of times for violating court orders by failing to find children appropriate placements in a timely manner, though all or most of those orders were later vacated.
Part of Mueller’s vision for the department, she said, is a focus on services for children with families, “so that they can be stable and don’t have to escalate into hospitalization and residential care in the first place.”
Republican Rep. Steve Reick of Woodstock, the top Republican on the Adoption and Child Welfare Committee, said he wants answers from DCFS on the ongoing placement issue, but that there’s “no future” in assigning blame.
“This is an agency that’s so sclerotic that just trying to get it off of dead center is a task in and of itself,” he said. “And I want to give the new agency director as much help as I possibly can.”
