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Advocates are turned away in 2023 from touring the Warren E. Thornton Youth Center where Sacramento County officials were housing foster youth. Instead of the center, the county now places the youth temporarily in houses with a capacity of six, but the youths are vulnerable to sexual exploitation, a grand jury report found.<\/p>\n
REN\u00c9E C. BYER<\/p>\n
Sacramento Bee file<\/p>\n
Foster youth living in Sacramento County-run houses while awaiting a permanent home are vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and the staff that runs them is undertrained, a new grand jury report found.<\/a><\/p>\n The report, released this week, found that the county should stop moving youths at risk of sexual exploitation into the three \u201cwelcome homes,\u201d where foster youth live temporarily while awaiting placement in permanent homes. Since the grand jury\u2019s last examination in 2023<\/a>, the county has achieved state licensing for the homes and started providing the public and Board of Supervisors data on the hundreds of unauthorized absences per quarter, the report found. However, the county still needs to hire a specialized contractor to run the homes, release additional data on unauthorized absences, and start including sexual exploitation history in their missing person reports to deputies, the report said.<\/p>\n From April to June 2025, the most recent data available, 240 kids left the three \u201cwelcome homes\u201d without authorization, the report found. Some were just gone for an hour or two, but any unauthorized absence raises \u201calarm bells,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n The California Foster Youth Bill of Rights<\/a> comes into play when deciding what rules the county can place on the youths.<\/p>\n \u201cFoster youth\u2019s freedom of movement is guaranteed in the Foster Youth Bill of Rights, and provides foster youth with the right to engage in extracurricular school or community activities,\u201d the report said. \u201cHowever, witnesses the Grand Jury interviewed specifically expressed concerns that youth manipulate the freedom the Bill of Rights allows, resulting in a high number of unauthorized absences.\u201d<\/p>\n Larry Fluharty, the Office of the California Foster Care ombudsperson and an expert in the Foster Youth Bill of Rights, said that while youth have rights of movement, their safety is also important. He said he thinks the county should close the temporary homes altogether.<\/p>\n \u201cThe OFCO realizes that youth who leave placement without permission are in jeopardy of great harm while at large and that trafficking of youth is a serious and complicated problem,\u201d Fluharty said. \u201c \u2018Welcome Homes\u2019 are not a placement and therefore not an appropriate placement for any youth.\u201d<\/p>\n Use of \u2018Welcome Homes\u2019 replaced former jail facility<\/p>\n The issue of where to place teenagers as they await permanent homes has plagued the county for years. The county in 2022 started using cells in a former juvenile detention facility for the teens, prompting Fluharty to send a letter to the county, reported first by The Sacramento Bee.<\/a> Under pressure from legislators, the county stopped using the facility<\/a> for foster youth in 2023, which Fluharty called \u201cprogress.\u201d<\/p>\n The county is still not using the former juvenile detention facility, said Macy Obernuefemann, a county spokesperson. Instead it uses the three “welcome homes,\u201d which each have a capacity of six youths, most of whom are 16 and 17. Despite recent county budget cuts for the fiscal year that started Wednesday, the county did not make any cuts to the welcome homes, she said.<\/p>\n The county had no comment on the grand jury report, but Obernuefmann said it would file a response within the required 90 days.<\/p>\n The last time the grand jury did a report on the county\u2019s foster care system<\/a>, in 2023, the county said it planned to hire a specialized contractor to take over running the temporary homes from the county staff, the report said. That has not happened.<\/p>\n \u201cInexperienced staff, who receive on the job training, do not possess these skills,\u201d the report said. \u201cWitnesses admit that (the county) was not prepared to operate Welcome Homes and was not in the business of doing so when they opened. They have shown improvement but continue to face challenges with youth who walk away from the Welcome Homes, as seen in (the quarterly reports), and these youth continue to face potential exploitation.\u201d<\/p>\n Grand jury recommends more data on absences<\/p>\n When the youths leave without authorization and the county files missing person reports with the sheriff\u2019s office, it does not always include whether the youth is at-risk of sexual exploitation, the report said. It should by Dec. 31, the report recommended.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unknown how many of the 240 runaways were only gone an hour, or how many were gone longer. The report suggested the county start including those details in its quarterly reports to the Board of Supervisors and public.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough Welcome Homes have made progress and the foster youth residents are living in a licensed environment, the lack of specific data regarding unauthorized absences keeps the problem of sexually exploited youth out of the public eye and masks this ongoing serious problem in the county,\u201d the report found.<\/p>\n Related Stories from Sacramento Bee<\/p>\n
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