The New Hampshire House has voted to eliminate the Office of the Child Advocate as part of its state spending plan.
An annual report from the office points to progress made within New Hampshire's child serving agencies, but also brings forward areas of concern, notably the well-being of children placed in institutional settings.
Child Advocate Cassandra Sanchez joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about the report and the role of the office as it faces defunding from state lawmakers.
Transcript
As we're talking now, the House is voting on the state budget proposal, which includes a plan to eliminate the office of the Child Advocate. The Senate and the governor would still have to sign off on that, but what is at stake if your office is defunded?
There's so much at stake. It's hard to briefly summarize it because there is so much that we cover, so trying to put a specific answer to that or a dollar amount to that is the hardest piece to explain. Really, I just think about our children. I think about there not being a voice for our children and additional eyes to ensure [their] safety.
As an office, we cover such a broad range of child-serving agencies. Our oversight includes all child-serving executive branch agencies, as well as any entity that is contracted or certified with them for payment. So that is inclusive of all the residential facilities where our children are placed. And that is a large aspect of our role, going in-person to those facilities, checking in with children, learning about the programming that's offered, [and] ensuring adequate care. Review of restraint and seclusion reports is another large aspect of the role of our office.
So it's the balance of information at the micro level, which is advocating for an individual child in that situation and then the information that we're gathering, then assessing it on a macro level to inform system change.
There's no other agency in the state that does what we do, actually. There is an ombudsman within DHHS [Department of Health and Human Services]. There is also a Constituent Relations Department within DCYF [Division for Children, Youth and Families]. Neither of them are going out to meet with children. They're only receiving complaints from the public. Neither of those entities are reviewing restraint and seclusion reports. Neither of those entities inform the legislature or the public about the types of calls that they're managing. So a lot of the core functions of our office do not overlap whatsoever with these services. But we have heard it's just another duplicative service. So that to me means that clearly we have more work to do to educate the public and our legislators on our office and the importance of our work.
Let's turn to your annual report. Your office found that fewer children died while under DCYF's care last year compared to prior years. What did these numbers tell us?
It's still an evolving story, I think. We're always trying to learn from these incidents.
It's good to see less numbers overall, but why are we having such a high fatality rate in our children [age] one and under? So it's something to keep an eye on. There's been a high number of unexplained potential safe sleep situations. That is an issue that we have been aware of [and] that DCYF has been aware of. They have been increasing their messaging [for] families that have young babies in the home when they're meeting with them, messaging around what safe sleep means [and] how to ensure that they have the appropriate setup in their home for their child. So I think that increase in messaging is helping.
It's beyond, how do we ensure that our families are meeting their children's needs? It's also, how are they informed on prevention—and specifically accident prevention—when there's young children in their home?
Your office also spent more time visiting with children who've been placed in residential facilities by the state. What are the concerns that you've been hearing from children when you visit them?
Since I came into the office, it was a large focus of mine to spend a lot of time in facilities and get to know the facilities across our state, because we have such a high percentage of children in care that are in placement, higher than the national average. And those children need to have a voice in those settings, so we've really focused on that over time.
We hear a real mix at facilities when we meet with children. One of the reasons for that is the facilities provide so many different services depending on the level [needed], when looking at clinical services, the amount of supervision, access to the community that children have.
The feedback that we're getting from children, typically on the higher end, we're hearing that they don't have as much access to the community. We're hearing from older children in residential facilities that they're really fearful of turning 18, because they do not feel prepared to go out and live on their own. Not all of the programs are offering those life skills that children need. So we're hearing 16 [and] 17 year olds [are] already anxious and worried about what's going to come when they turn 18, because they do not feel that the programs are providing them the experiences that they need to be prepared.
The report says that currently New Hampshire doesn't have the resources, the homes, the facilities, necessary for many children, which is why children are placed out of state. What more needs to be done at the state level so that New Hampshire can manage the care of children right here?
First and foremost, we need foster homes for these kids. Support of our foster parents was identified as a very critical need over the past year. We ourselves in the Office of the Child Advocate have heard from foster parents with concerns for support that they need, needing more from DCYF to feel that they could manage behaviors of the children in their homes.
Some of that takes a shift in looking at what we are prioritizing as a state. Are we prioritizing supporting residential facilities, or are we prioritizing supporting children and community based settings? And so there needs to be a bit of that culture shift there. That's another aspect that we are constantly advocating for with DCYF to ensure that they are focusing on that support. And we have seen some recent shifts from them.
So there's some other proposed cuts in the budget that could also threaten some of the work you do. That includes some proposals to shut down a mental health resource website for children and to delay offering legal counsel to children until 2027. How are you preparing for these other possible spending cuts?
We are equally as worried about those cuts as well. The work to get counsel for children was another big push, working with our advocacy partners on the need for children to have that independent counsel that is able to go to the court and represent their expressed interest. Unfortunately, that has been proposed to be put on hold and pushed out.
We're looking at the elimination of our office, [which] checks in on kids in that setting, and then not having the attorneys that were going to be coming into play to support those children. If both of these [proposed cuts] move forward, we would be taking so many steps backwards in the protections that our state has put in place for children that are in those vulnerable situations.
I'm also worried about the website that you referenced. One of the first things that we hear from families that call our office, particularly those seeking out services for their own child and their home, is that [they] do not know how to navigate this system. And we're often sending them to this website.
Where are these families going to go if they can't call our office to get connected to services, and they're already struggling to navigate the system and don't feel that others in the system are guiding them to the appropriate service within the time they need to? What happens is then, our children's needs aren't met and that they escalate. That's how we are seeing more children with acuity ending up in emergency departments waiting to get beds at Hampstead Hospital. That bottlenecks the entire system. As opposed to getting some of those preventative services in the home earlier on, and then the children remain in the home, and they never have to go to that higher level of a Hampstead hospital stay.
