CCR

The woman used a thick extension cord on her foster children. Welts rose. Bruises formed. Fear became the norm inside the Watts neighborhood home in Los Angeles where LaToya Cooper and six other children were sent to live.

In 2015, California Assemblymember Mark Stone (D) introduced legislation that launched the state’s Continuum of Care Reform (CCR), an overhaul of the state’s foster care system. Under 2015’s Assembly Bill (AB) 403, Stone put into place the foundation of the reforms: dramatically scaling back a reliance on group homes as placements for children in the foster care system, and seeking to place more children in the homes of relatives and foster parents.

Efforts like Continuum of Care Reform in California are part of the statewide goal to place more foster youth in family settings. However, many county child welfare agencies are struggling to meet these goals due to a shortage of available resource families, a group that includes both foster parents and kinship caregivers.

In 2017, California began implementing statewide reforms of its foster care system, a sprawling initiative designed to reduce the role of group homes and rely more heavily on relatives and foster homes.

Mahoganie LaFranks initially welcomed the opportunity to bring 16-year-old foster youth Tiffany* into her Long Beach home this past year. In September, LaFranks started the process to be formally licensed as a resource parent under California’s new approval process, a key part of child welfare reforms in California that started in January.

On a sunny Tuesday morning, the day after Labor Day, tempers flared among some of the students at a small high school located on an island in the San Francisco Bay.

As new reforms change the way group homes in the state operate, the struggles of a facility that aims to help sexually exploited children in the Bay Area illustrates the uncertain future of services for the vulnerable group.

A year and a half after Los Angeles County shut a pair of emergency shelters for hard-to-place foster youth, Astrid Heppenstall Heger is still working to find ways to reach the county’s “invisble children.”

California is moving forward with a pair of initiatives designed to increase its supply of foster parents, while grappling with sweeping reforms to its foster care system. A big part of that effort is a bill now under consideration in California’s state legislature that would reduce the number of crimes that bar a person from becoming a foster parent.