California Reaches Deal to Return Adopted Children From Out of State Facilities for Mental Health Care

“State lawmakers will provide $5 million to help address the problem, a deal Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature struck in a preliminary budget last Friday [June 26, 2026.]

The funding is tied to a new plan that requires California to help parents secure intensive behavioral and mental health services for adoptees from foster care who are transitioning home from out-of-state placements. The recently approved amendment to the state Welfare and Institutions Code outlining benefits to adoptive parents is backed by the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center and the County Welfare Directors Association.

Foster youth advocates called the support critical to preventing families from relinquishing their adopted children back into foster care out of desperation.

“The state really owes it to families to make sure that these young people are OK, and that families are getting what they need to care for them,” said Youth Law Center Executive Director Jennifer Rodriguez.

Treatment options outside California wind down

The state is responsible for the behavioral and mental health care needs of foster youth under its care, kids who bring heavy stories of loss and trauma. But that responsibility shifts to foster youths’ new families once they are adopted.

Securing timely, therapeutic services for them in their own communities is a common challenge that has led to reliance on out-of-state treatment facilities, frequently characterized as a measure of last resort carried out by parents who don’t know what else to do.

Prior to last July, adoptive parents could use funding they received from the state and federal Adoption Assistance Program to pay for that residential care. The state and federal benefit is meant to encourage the adoption of foster children with special needs. In California, the program supports approximately 85,000 adopted children, according to the state’s Department of Social Services. The financial assistance ends at the age of 21.

But the ability to use that adoption benefit for out-of-state treatment ended last year. After The Imprint began asking the state’s 58 counties for data on the practice in early 2025, lawmakers included a prohibition in a budget trailer bill that cut off the funding stream. The reporting revealed that at least 676 foster youth adoptees had been sent to residential treatment programs in Utah, Montana and North Carolina over the prior five-year span.

When California halted the use of Adoption Assistance Program funding for out-of-state residential care last July, a Department of Social Services spokesman said the decision was based on a desire to keep adopted children with their “natural support systems” and families.

At the time, approximately 200 adoptees were living in facilities outside the state, according to the Youth Law Center. The Imprint investigation found that monthly costs per child at some of these centers reached as high as $17,000.

Adoptees whose families had signed 18-month contracts with providers could remain in their out-of-state placements until those agreements expired.

The Department of Social Services has reported that roughly 50 families have sought their county’s help with identifying in-state services, child welfare official Angie Schwartz said. Many have struggled on their own to find programs that address complex needs, or have encountered long waitlists, she said.

Parents’ difficult predicaments

Diana Boyer, a managing director with the County Welfare Directors Association, illustrated the challenges families face when trying to obtain care for foster care adoptees with a story that she told lawmakers during an Assembly Budget Subcommittee hearing about an Orange County adoptee named Adam.

Six years after being adopted at the age of 7, Adam began to act out, Boyer said. His parents sought local mental health care, but his troubling behavior continued to escalate. He was punching, kicking and starting fires.

“An adoptive child is likely to reprocess their trauma in adolescence, yet adoptive families feel unprepared and our systems of care are not adequately resourced to support them,” Boyer told lawmakers at the March meeting.

The boy spent time in a state residential treatment program and later a psychiatric hospital. Eventually, his parents sent him to an out-of-state treatment facility where he continued to act out violently, Boyer said during her testimony.

Today, because Adoption Assistance Program payments can no longer be used to pay for that out-of-state care, his parents do not know where they will turn to next for help. They are “desperate for assistance,” she said.

Specifically, the $352 billion budget agreement approved on June 26 by Newsom allows the Department of Social Services to provide families with additional case management, service coordination and assistance accessing wraparound and other intensive in-home services.

County child welfare agencies will also be required to provide referrals to legal services and advocacy resources that can assist them with navigating any obstacles they encounter while trying to obtain care.

Additionally, the Department of Social Services will be required to track the outcomes of youth returning to California, and it will also be charged with analyzing each adoptee’s case in order to identify the factors that led to them being sent out of state.

Rodriguez said that requirement will help the state develop strategies to address gaps in services that have caused families in crisis to view out-of-state care as the only viable option.”

 

California Lawmakers Reach Deal to Help Adoptive Children Returning from Out-of-State Facilities

[The Imprint 6/29/26 bye Jeremy Loudenback]

REFORM Puzzle Piece