After operating a string of unlicensed group homes that often traumatized already troubled foster teens, Santa Clara County’s board of supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved an ambitious plan to expand its network of foster families and create therapeutic homes for teens with severe mental health challenges.
The move comes nearly a year after the Bay Area News Group began exposing how, since 2020, the county had been operating up to 10 “scattered sites,” or group homes that have been the scenes of numerous police calls, incidents of assault and battery, psychological breakdowns, at least one alleged rape and a fentanyl overdose.
Supervisors Sylvia Arenas and Susan Ellenberg led the board in approving $2 million to start implementing the plan, which includes opening four therapeutic homes with professional staff as early as spring 2026 that will house no more than two foster teens at a time — an attempt to solve a problem that helped doom a similar program six years ago.
“I just wish I could click my heels and just make that happen” sooner, said Arenas, who has led the effort to revamp the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Services over the past year since the Bay Area News Group first investigated the fentanyl overdose death of baby Phoenix Castro and then the county’s group homes for older foster children.
The county’s main emphasis in the new strategy, however, will be a far cheaper and more nurturing solution than the high-level therapeutic homes — expanding the network of foster family homes that can handle high risk teenagers. To relieve a major financial barrier to recruiting foster families, the county or a contracted foster agency would lease or buy more than a dozen homes that foster parents could move into and care for foster teens. Those teens, instead of being kicked out in about six months like they are now, will be able to stay longer and form deeper bonds, while the foster parents would have easier access to respite time.
The plan was welcome news by at least one 17-year-old foster youth, who was sent to live in a scattered site when she said she was timed out of a foster home with a foster parent. Her life spiraled at the group home, where she called police numerous times after being involved in fights with other teenagers and staff. She said she barely ate the hospital food delivered each day in trays and rarely went to school.
“We’re in foster care because we don’t have someone who loves us,” said the girl, whom the Bay Area News Group is not naming because she is a minor.
Ever since she moved back in with the same foster mother and niece last month, “I’ve been doing way better. I’ve been going to school. She helps me with my homework. She keeps me on track. She’s just always there for me.”
Steve Baron, a member of the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council, said the county plan appears “well thought out.”
“They have to monitor all of this as it goes along,” he said. “These kinds of things often take adjustments as time goes on. But it seems like a dramatic improvement over what has been happening.”
The number of caregivers willing to take on those troubled teens has been cratering in recent years for numerous reasons, including the high stress of caring for them, the low monthly housing stipend of $1,000 to $2,000, the lack of respite time, the county’s child welfare agency said in its report to the board. On average, a foster parent is paid about $6,000 a month.
Now, the county’s foster family agencies — Seneca, Pacific Clinics and Rebekah Children’s Services — are contracted to operate 27 high-needs foster homes. But without enough foster parents, they run only 14 of them. The new plan calls for reactivating or establishing 13 more.
Even with mental health services for the foster teens and caregiver support ,and respite time in these intensive foster family setting, they will still be “many times less expensive” than operating the scattered sites or the high-level therapeutic homes, the county report found.
The county, whose purpose is to provide safety net services to its residents, broke out the annual net costs of plan:
- $176,000 per bed – for a high needs foster youth to stay with a foster parent in an Intensive Services Foster Care home
- $846,500 per bed – community organization-run, high-level therapeutic foster home for no more than two youths (Short-term Residential Therapeutic Program)
- $1.6 million per bed – for the same therapeutic home for two youths if the county ran it instead, which supervisors say is an important backup if the contractor backs out.
The new unregulated scattered sites opened in 2020 in the midst of statewide child welfare reforms that discouraged group homes, where foster teenagers in particular endured poor conditions and outcomes. Instead, the laws implemented rules to establish high-level therapeutic homes, which exist in several surrounding counties. Several contractors in Santa Clara County briefly opened a few of these homes, but packed them with as many as eight high-risk teenagers, didn’t properly train staff, had numerous problems and lost their state licenses.
The county’s new plan is to open new, smaller versions of these, with no more than two teens in each.