The day after she was elected Speaker of the House, Joseline Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s and Anne Arundel) drove to the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore and saw the room where foster children wait until state officials can find an appropriate out-of-home placement for them.
“Sometimes, days go by, weeks, and no one from the Department of Human Services comes to see that child,” she said. “Oftentimes the nurses are the ones, and the doctors, providing clothes and coloring books and books to read and games to play.”
Such “hospital overstays” — children in state custody who have been medically cleared for discharge, but have no place to go — are just one example of the problem of foster children stuck in unlicensed settings, including hotels, motels, offices, or any other space that the state has not approved for foster kids.
It’s a problem that lawmakers like Peña-Melnyk have been grappling with for years. But it’s a problem lawmakers and advocates believe they can finally address in 2026.
In addition to Peña-Melnyk’s House Bill 1559, the House and Senate both have versions of “Kanayiah’s Law,” a proposal named for a teen in state custody who died in a Baltimore hotel last fall. Additionally, the Department of Human Services has taken steps to halt placement of children in unlicensed settings, a policy that would be codified under the bills.
“For my purposes, I don’t care which vehicle is used, as long as we fix the problem,” said Del. Mike Griffith (R-Cecil and Harford), the lead sponsor of Kanayiah’s Law in the House. “We feel like we’re in a really great place in all these things … I’ve got to be honest, I’m incredibly optimistic that we’re going to solve some major issues with the foster care system this year.”
While the issue of foster kids landing in inadequate and unlicensed settings has long been a problem in Maryland, it gained significantly more attention last year after the death of a 16-year-old Kanayiah Ward, who was in state care but living in a Baltimore hotel. Kanayiah’s body was discovered on Sept. 22, and an autopsy subsequently concluded that she died as a result of an overdose of diphenhydramine, an over-the-counter allergy medication.
Also, last year, state auditors released a scathing state audit on the operations at the Department of Human Services that reported significant problems with oversight that potentially risked the safety of children under the state’s care.
That 70-page audit included findings that the department may have approved guardianship homes for children in state care where registered sex offenders lived. It also said officials failed to identify a convicted sex offender who worked in a group foster home and later faced criminal charges involving children under his care.
In October, then-Human Services Secretary Rafael López ordered an immediate end to placing foster kids in unlicensed settings such as hotels or office buildings. Department officials have told lawmakers in hearings this session that there are currently no foster kids living in hotels or office buildings.
The number of hospital overstays has fallen from 20 a year ago to 8 by the end of January, according to the most recent numbers the department could provide. But five of those eight had been in a hospital placement for more than six months. Some advocates argue that dozens of kids are not officially under the department’s care but are facing similar circumstances.
But for lawmakers like Griffith, who has seen foster care firsthand as a child in the Maryland system, there’s still more work to be done.
After his grandmother died, Griffith said he began living with a foster care family at the age of 12 and stayed in that same household until right before he graduated high school, when he moved out.
Seeing the foster system as a kid and now as a legislator, Griffith said that not much has changed – but agrees with Peña-Melnyk that this session could be different.
“From the foster parents I’ve spoken to, these problems feel like they’re largely the same. It feels like there hasn’t been much progress,” he said. “These go back decades. This doesn’t rest on any individual administration.”
Griffith’s bill would create a new ombudsman position for child welfare in the Office of the Attorney General and would require background checks on any adults living in the home where a foster child is placed, not just the foster parent or guardian. His bill would also ban the practice of placing foster kids in unlicensed settings, but he said he is working with the speaker to work out any overlap in their bills.
Peña-Melnyk said her bill is the culmination of work she’s done over the years as a delegate trying to improve the hospital overstay situation. She thinks her 2026 bill “finally got it right” and will help bring state agencies together to make real progress with ending hospital overstays and other improper placements for foster kids.
Besides ending the practice of putting foster kids in an unlicensed setting, Peña-Melnyk’s bill would create a “rapid response placement team” for hospital overstays longer than 72 hours. The team will meet every day until an appropriate placement for the child has been found. Two members would be the hospital overstay coordinators from the Department of Health and Human Services.
For Peña-Melnyk, one of the glaring problems with foster placement is a lack of communication between departments — like Human Services and Health — that might interact with children in hospital overstay situations.
“We assume that all of the departments are talking to each other … that is not the case,” she said last week. “People are busy, try to stay in their lane, but I think when it comes to these children, it is important because they are stranded in these emergency rooms.”
HB 1559 also creates a Child and Youth Placement Review Panel focused entirely on children in unlicensed settings to find adequate placements for them. The bill creates a placement manager position in the Governor’s Office for Children to oversee the panel. It requires state officials to issue monthly reports on children who are hospitalized for overstay.
She said her bill puts “a lot of eyes” on the kids, so they don’t get lost in the administrative process.
“It’s a lot in one bill, and I honestly feel really good about it,” she said of her 16-page bill. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we’ve done it perfectly … but I can tell you that we are on it.”
With just over a month left in the legislative session, Griffith’s and the speaker’s bills will likely get tweaked throughout the legislative process.
But both say that dealing with hospital overstays and unlicensed settings for foster kids is of utmost importance this year – and dozens of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree.
“When I first got to the legislature, one of the things I wanted to work on was foster care reform, but it was so overwhelming and intimidating, because you don’t know where it starts, the problems are so robust and integrated, and it seemed like every level of the system,” Griffith said. “But now we have Kanaiyah’s Law, we have the speaker’s bill, and we have a lot of momentum around this.
“I think a number of things that kind of came together at the same time that created the will and the focus to fix these things,” Griffith said.