The Board of Public Works voted unanimously Wednesday to approve up to $1.2 billion over five years for contracts with licensed group homes, adding bed capacity that state officials hope will end the practice of hospital overstays for foster children.
The contracts will add 37 beds in licensed group homes with specialized staff for children who are committed to the local social services departments within the state, according to the BPW meeting agenda documents.
The additional beds will limit the number of children who are placed into hospital overstays — children who are medically ready to be discharged from a hospital, but kept there because the Maryland Department of Human Services has nowhere else to place them, Interim Human Services Secretary Gloria Brown Burnett told the board.
The move was welcomed by state officials.
“These are children in crisis who need stability, therapy, and compassionate care,” House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk said in a statement from her office. “The bright lights and constant noise of an emergency room are the opposite of that. When kids are waiting weeks or even months for a placement, it tells us the system isn’t working.”
DHS has been under fire in the last year, after the release of a 70-page audit that revealed the department approved guardianship in homes where registered sex offenders lived. It also failed to identify a convicted sex offender who worked in a group foster home and later faced criminal charges with children under his care.
Five days after the audit was released, 16-year-old Kanaiyah Ward was found dead on Sept. 22 in a room at a Residence Inn by Marriott while under the care of DHS.
“No foster kid is in the system for a good reason,” said Del. Mike Griffith (R– Harford and Cecil), who was a foster kid himself. “Something bad has happened to them to lead them to this place. And then for the state to do further harm by putting them in an unsafe setting, or without proper supervision or guidance or structure, just adds insult to injury.”
That was echoed by Comptroller Brooke Lierman, a member of the Board of Public Works, who said that even one child in a hospital overstay is still one too many.
Lierman praised Brown Burnett, saying that under this administration, the state has seen an 86% increase in kinship caregivers in the past year, decreasing the overall need for out-of-home placements of children.
With Wednesday’s contract approval, the state will enter into nine separate three-year contracts that would start April 1 of this year, initially totaling about $744 million. The contracts come with an option for a two-year-renewal, for about $495 million.
Griffith said that the General Assembly often throws money at matters that aren’t the responsibility of the state. He added that one of the things that does fall under the state’s responsibility is foster kids, since they are vulnerable wards of the state.
“If we’re going to invest dollars, it should be in things that are actually our core responsibility,” he said. “So investing in making sure that these kids have a chance is, I believe, appropriate.”
This effort is one of many this session, alongside Griffith’s proposed Kanaiyah’s Law, that would prohibit children from being placed in unlicensed settings, as well as Peña-Melnyk’s House Bill 1559, which would prohibit DHS from administering its out-of-home placement program and would establish a panel to analyze instances where a child is placed in an unlicensed setting.
“Funding alone will not address all the challenges,” Peña-Melnyk said in her statement. “That’s why the House is also moving legislation I have sponsored to help fix this unacceptable situation.”
Maryland lawmakers have tried to end the practice of hospital and hotel overstays for years. Lierman said at the board meeting that when she served in the House in 2020, she introduced a bill that also proposed ending hospital overstays for foster youth.
“I did think that at the time we were on the path toward ending these practices,” Lierman said. “And it’s challenging and disheartening that we are still confronting these issues.”
Griffith said he’s just hopeful that this session will finally bring lasting change to how the state treats the children under its care.
“We can do better,” Griffith said. “And now we’re finally doing better.”