Lawmakers gathered on Wednesday to hear testimony from state auditors and representatives of the Department of Children and Families about a recent report which found that the number of children going missing from DCF care rose rapidly in recent years. During the meeting, lawmakers also said goodbye to DCF Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly, who is leaving the department for a new position at a national nonprofit.
The June audit found that children went missing from DCF care about 3,700 times from fiscal years 2021 to 2023. Over that time period, the number of incidents increased by 42%. The audit also found that DCF hadn’t followed the law in some cases and had failed to implement internal controls to make sure children stayed safe. The vast majority of the cases were teenagers, with fewer than two dozen incidences of children 12 and under running from care.
At Wednesday’s presentation, auditors also highlighted the failure by DCF to track their work on such cases, in about a third of cases failing to document why a child ran away.
The presentation was met with a combination of concern and skepticism by lawmakers from the Committee on Children and the Government Oversight Committee. Some lawmakers pushed back on auditors, questioning whether the audit put too much blame at the feet of DCF, and urged the public to consider the wider array of issues — from lack of funding from the legislature to the complexity of children’s mental health during the COVID pandemic and after.
Rep. Mary Welander, D-Orange, said that some sections of the report read as “rather insulting” to DCF, such as a finding that the lack of assessment in cases of children missing from care “squanders an opportunity to implement strategies to prevent children from going missing from care.”
“I know through my five, six years on [the Committee on Children] that [DCF] is actively working on trying to prevent children from leaving, these are children with high acuity care needs,” Welander said.
Rep. Lucy Dathan, D-New Canaan, asked auditors if there was evidence in the report that DCF was not the following law, or whether the flaws auditors found were merely operational.
Auditor Scott Simoneau, one of the co-authors of the audit, responded that the gaps in tracking information by DCF made it impossible to verify whether the agency was or wasn’t in compliance in many instances. He said that in some cases it was clear that DCF was not following the law, specifically the failure to universally screen children for sex trafficking after they return from being missing from care. In fact, the audit found that in 94% of the cases auditors examined closely, DCF didn’t document whether they screened children for sex trafficking after they’d been returned to care.
“In general if you’re not measuring, you’re not managing well,” Simoneau said. He said that DCF should have a plan of action for identifying children who have been sex trafficked and then a plan for helping them in the aftermath.
Hill-Lilly spoke to the lawmakers in what she said would be her last appearance before a Connecticut legislative committee, on the eve of her retirement from the agency.
Hill-Lilly pointed out that there are differences in the categories of children who go missing from care. The vast majority are children who leave a placement and are not truly “missing,” rather their whereabouts are known to the department. Many times they leave a placement and go to a former home or to stay with a friend. Hill-Lilly said that 70% of children who went missing from care were gone for a day or less.
“It’s important to state that while documentation could have certainly been better maintained, and the policy and practice guide update provides clear guidance on that, follow-up with children missing from care, especially for longer periods and who might be subject to trafficking, has always occurred,” Hill-Lilly told lawmakers.
The outgoing commissioner also said that DCF facilities are all unlocked and staff do not have the right to physically restrain children in order to keep them from leaving.
Hill-Lilly acknowledged that DCF has had an “unsophisticated data system” that the agency is currently replacing.
Part of Wednesday’s discussion centered on the issue of children with significant behavioral health issues who may be going through an acute issue but didn’t meet the criteria for an in-patient hospitalization, “yet residential programs reported that they couldn’t adequately treat them either because the service level was too low,” Simoneau said. “So these gaps meant that children cycled through temporary and even unsafe settings while racking up hundreds of episodes.”
“Once we’ve filled in some of these gaps of some of these services, I hope you’ll see less running away,” Hill-Lilly said. “There is no question about whether or not we need different level of service array to address children’s behavior, which is why we’re standing up these services.”
Dr. Frank Gregory, DCF’s administrator of children’s behavioral health community services, also testified, saying that children often run away because they’ve been told they are expendable, and running away can be a form of despair or protest. He said more resources were needed to prevent children from wanting to run away in the first place.
“Do we have the resources for how this young person and their family got there?” Gregory said. “What are we running short of?”
Hill-Lilly also offered some words of what needs to happen next as a “parting gift,” as she leaves her role as leader of the agency after 37 years of service at DCF.
“I urge you to approach this challenge of children missing from care, not solely as a DCF issue, but one that reflects broader systemic realities,” Hill-Lilly said.
The shadow pandemic, Hill-Lilly said, is a phenomenon of unresolved trauma among the state’s youth that is resulting in mental health, substance abuse issues and developmental disorders. “These complex needs are surfacing in ways that no single system alone can resolve.” She urged collaboration as federal shifts in funding threaten to impact children in the care of DCF.
Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, co-chair of the Committee on Children, was among several legislators who took the opportunity to thank Hill-Lilly for her work at DCF. He said her departure from the department, as someone who had worked her way up from the bottom of the agency to become its leader, was a huge loss for the state. Paris also requested that Hill-Lilly provide recommendations and next steps for the next commissioner, including what she considers to be the agency’s successes as well as its biggest pitfalls.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.