[opening creaky screen door, knocking on door]
- Tina Czappa: Most foster parents
are really good and they're really loving
and they want to open their home and their family.
But, you have those moments where
it's hard for you to receive
that kind of love and support
because you think, "Okay,
"your entire life is mostly filled
with the abandonment and the rejection."
- Alisha Haase: I mean, I often ask people,
Think about how you would feel, as an adult,
if I walked into your home and said,
"You have to come with me.
"I can't tell you very much about where we're going.
"I don't know when you're going to see your mom and dad again.
"You're gonna leave your school.
"You're gonna leave your friends.
"You're gonna leave your family
and I don't know when you're going to see them again."
- Tina Czappa: At age one,
I was removed from my mom and her significant other.
Trauma is so prevalent
and so highly-prevalent in foster youth
because that's usually why they enter into foster care.
- Grove: One of the hard parts
about being in foster care
is often kids move
two, three, four, or five times.
- Pat Snyder: These kids already
are going through, probably, neglect and abuse at home.
So, there's a couple of ACEs or traumas.
Now suddenly, they're removed from the home they know
and then put into another home.
We're finding that the trauma builds up and continues.
[conversation echoes off ceiling]
- Narrator: State representative Pat Snyder
worked on 11 Legislative foster care bills
signed into law in 2018.
- Pat Snyder: Every single one...
- Narrator: Including provisions increasing incentive funding
to retain foster homes and encourage permanent homes.
He says the need is high for more placements.
UW-Whitewater social work major Tina Czappa
formally advocates for such bills
in her leadership role in a statewide Youth Advisory Council
made up of current and former foster care children.
She says after entering foster care at age one,
she moved repeatedly
between her biological family and foster homes
including emergency placements
due to abuse and neglect.
- They didn't really have places
that they knew where they were going to put me.
In their eyes, like, there's really a struggle,
a shortage foster home placements.
- Narrator: The problem of having enough placements
increasingly plagues those responsible
for making that decision.
- What do you think you're working on that's going right?
- Narrator: Like Dane County juvenile court judge
Shelly Gaylord, presiding here during a hearing
concerning a child in a residential care center.
Gaylord says she likes to accentuate the positive
and give children the first chance to speak.
- Gaylord: We've heard from many children
who've come through the system as foster home placements
talk often about how they feel like
they don't get a chance to talk
and when they do, they feel like nobody hears them.
- Narrator: The girl in court appears by telephone,
updating the judge about
how she's working through her trauma
that resulted from extreme abuse at home.
- Girl: I'm going to sessions a lot more.
And I'm talking more about my trauma history
- I think we're all
in agreement that
the types of trauma that kids are enduring
and repeated trauma that they're enduring,
it just seems to be more severe and more long-lasting.
- Narrator: The reason this was a phone hearing
is because the child was at a treatment center
that's out of state,
400 miles from Wisconsin.
- Fredericks: I think people would be concerned
if they knew that right now our options are so limited¶
that we're sending kids out of state.
We used to have a lot more options for kids.
And I feel like things have just--
over the past nine years I've been here--
just gotten worse and worse in terms of foster homes,
group homes, treatment centers, all of them.
Those options have kind of gone away.
- Narrator: From 2018 into 2019,
Wisconsin placed more than 100 juveniles
in out-of-state residential care centers in 17 states,
placed there because the children
have such high treatment needs they can't be maintained
in their own communities
with existing services.
- Gaylord: When you have higher needs and fewer resources,
that's a perfect storm.
- Narrator: A different Dane County child
placed out of state
talked with us about being so far from family
at a treatment center in Arkansas.
Her parents did not want to show her identity.
- Girl: I want to go home. I really do.
- Narrator: This 14-year-old Wisconsin girl was being treated
at Mill Creek Behavioral Health Care
in a small town an hour south of Little Rock.
Do you know why you had to be sent here
instead of staying there?
- Girl: Because none of the other facilities would accept me
in Wisconsin.
- Benjamin Gonring: The thing
that was really bothering me
and the reason, I think, I was
most happy to have you come
and shine a light on this
is this idea that we're...
Things have gotten to a point
where we're sending kids hundreds of miles away
from whatever supports they have, which are not great,
but they're still the most important supports
in that kid's life.
And the idea that we're sending them 500, 900 miles away
was just unconscionable to me.
- Narrator: Hundreds of miles from home,
the girl in Arkansas
and the girl appearing by telephone in court
where her biological parents had their say.
- Atty: On behalf of the father,
he continues to object to
her being placed out of state.
He thinks she'd be better off
in Wisconsin
closer to her family.
- Narrator: But it was due to extreme abuse by her family
that authorities were forced to remove the child from her home.
The child's artwork fills the office walls of her attorney,
who helped guide her care.
What happened to her resulted in the need
for high-level mental health care
in a secured setting not available in Wisconsin.
- Atty: Brave and being thoughtful...
- Narrator: Judge Gaylord calmly presides over tense interactions,
hearing from the child's mother, also by phone.
- This is going to be slow
when there's a history of this kind of treatment,
frankly, by you... and by others.
[girl's mother starts speaking] - No, ma'am.
Ma'am, It's my-- It's my turn to talk.
- Mother: But she has not had-- She has not had that chance
to deal with...
- Narrator: The process is often fraught.
Gaylord concluded this hearing,
encouraging the girl on the phone
to keep up the hard work of dealing with her trauma.
- Gaylord: Things that happened to you are not your fault.
Things that you do are your responsibility to fix.
Right?
- Narrator: The teenager we visited in Arkansas
said the intensive treatment there helped her,
but she was conflicted
about sending other children like herself out of state.
- Girl: If it's going to help, then go for it.
But I would love to see every kid in Wisconsin
just stay there, just stay at home.
Yes.
- Narrator: Sending children out of state is a last resort.
But even in the home community, the kinds of transitions
children in foster care can experience
layers trauma on top of trauma
according to those who've lived it.
- Tina Czappa: Just the uncertainty of knowing
where your next bed is gonna be,
who's going to be your family next,
and who you can really trust,
who's being there and being real for you.
It's very confusing and unsettling for a child.
- Narrator: Foster youth advocates like Tina Czappa
are giving back.
Hopeful for a new generation,
hopeful because of an emerging awareness
of the impacts of trauma and new responses to it.
She offers this advice to children
who've experienced the trauma of abuse or neglect,
of repeated placements, of being in the system.
- Czappa: You didn't choose it
and it was someone else's choice and control.
And that doesn't make you wrong, or damaged,
or someone that can't be loved.
And that's really an eye-opening important part
in the healing of any trauma that someone goes through
because that's definitely a thought
that occurs very frequently is,
"What is wrong with me?"