Hundreds of Foster Kids are sleeping in hotels and offices. Over the past year, hundreds of foster children in Texas and other states in the USA slept in hotels and offices because no foster placement was available, according to Department of the Family and Children’s services.

Child removals are often fueled by conditions “endemic to poverty” such as lack of food, housing, and childcare, and disproportionately affect families of color. During the pandemic, many homes have stopped accepting children due to concerns about the coronavirus. However, the problem goes well beyond the pandemic. Over the course of a year ending in August, 220 Texas kids spent 1,863 nights in hotels and offices. As in previous years, Black children were overrepresented in this group compared to foster youth as a whole.

Over the past years years, DFPS has hosted increasingly larger numbers of children in hotels and offices overnight. For some of these youth, the experience does not end with one overnight, but rather can extend for days, weeks, or even months. Each morning these children leave the hotel or office where they spent the previous night, taking all of their belongings with them, with the expectation they will not be returning to the same room, or perhaps even the same hotel. Frequently, due to staff shortages and logistics, these children also spend their evenings transporting other youth who are out of placement. Their meals are consequently improvised as well, and they frequently eat fast food or food from grocery or convenience stores. They also endure ever-shifting arrangements of both the other children and the supervising staff that they spend the night with, a remarkable lack of continuity for the intimacy of these arrangements.

In addition to being traumatic for children, the stays are expensive for taxpayers: In 2017, DFPS estimated each night at a hotel cost $2,100, most of which covers caseworkers and working overtime. Foster youth in general, are far more likely than others to end up in jails, prisons and hospital emergency rooms, where taxpayers foot the bill.

 

The causes for the shortage: 

1. State officials attribute the stays to lack of resources! With nowhere else to go, the state’s most at-risk kids — and their caseworkers — are faced with limited options. 

2. A persistent chronic shortage of people willing to take in the children who end up in the state’s care as a result of abuse, neglect or just plain poverty. During the pandemic, the number of foster parents offering their homes, dropped down in over 30%. Another disturbing trend we have seen: foster parents surrounding foster children back to foster care, after losing a job, experiencing a financial difficulties or getting sick.