Given inadequate resources to deal with foster-care needs of children of all ages, teens may be more likely to be left to fend for themselves because they are older and assumed to be better able to cope, Congleton says. With insufficient money for residential treatment facilities many teens are housed for weeks or months in places designed for delinquent youths, such as Lane County's Skipworth Juvenile Detention Center, says Steve Carmichael, director of the count's Department of Youth Services. As of Friday, we had 44 kids in detention, and 20 of those are CSD cases waiting to go somewhere else. The facility, designed for 30 teenagers, regularly houses 50. Carmichael believes that though there are not enough spaces for all of the teens in need of care, Lane County does not always make the best use of the spaces it has.
Somebody needs to take a look at that.
Statewide, CSD has 700 youths in need of the highest level of treatment and supervision, but only 300 spaces, Congleton says. The rest are sitting somewhere in detention, shelter homes or foster homes where they don't belong. But even for the teens lucky enough to be placed in foster or group care homes, problems still exist, says foster parent Fisher. Treatment and counseling for the problems that first brought the children to CSD still need to be provided or teens will be doomed to repeat the behaviors of their parents, she says. To illustrate her point, Fisher recounts the story of her first foster child, a teenage girl who came from a drug-abusing family and had been molested by her father, then raped by her stepfather.