Maryland Placed Foster Children With Sex Offenders And A Convicted Murderer

Maryland’s foster care programs failed to perform background checks, leading to 10 children living in foster homes with sex offenders and a convicted murderer being paid to provide “one-on-one” care for children in hotels, a new audit found.

Auditors from the Maryland General Assembly’s Department of Legislative Services found pervasive problems, including the fact that up to 38% of foster children may not even be attending school, despite the state claiming in its database that virtually all children were in school.

In one case, Maryland claimed to have reviewed a group foster home in 2023, but did not flag that it was employing a man who had been convicted of sexual assault on a minor in 2014, the audit said. Three months after the bungled review, the sex offender “allegedly transported three foster care children for inappropriate activity,” and was “subsequently charged with crimes involving children under his care.”

Even then, the Maryland Department of Human Services’s Social Services Administration (SSA) “could not document any corrective action as a result of this incident to ensure the criminal background checks were in fact obtained,” the audit found.

Delegate Kathy Szeliga (R-Baltimore County) said the “audit of Maryland’s Social Services is absolutely abhorrent and reads like criminal negligence. The 72-page report reveals shocking recklessness in the care of foster children.”

“Governor Wes Moore must immediately fire someone,” she said in a statement. “The buck stops with [Maryland Department of Human Services Secretary Rafael Lopez] or the Executive Director of the Social Services Administration, Dr. Alger Studstill, Jr.”

Auditors were able to detect what the social service agencies did not by simply comparing the sex offender registry with a list of foster homes.

“For example, one individual convicted of sexual misconduct with a minor had the same address as a guardianship home with 4 children between the ages of 4 and 8. SSA was not aware of any of these individuals until we provided them our match results,” the audit found.

County social services agencies are responsible for performing background checks at most foster homes, while the state Social Services Administration is responsible for ensuring that the background checks have been completed. Yet county agencies may have failed to do so as much as half the time, while SSA appeared to simply rubber-stamp their paperwork, whether it was correct or not. “We tested 10 foster care homes that SSA reviewed in December 2023 and noted that SSA concluded that background checks were performed for all individuals in these homes even though there was no evidence of a criminal background check for individuals in 5 of the homes,” the audit said.

The SSA also “did not have a procedure to ensure that criminal background checks were obtained for vendors that provided one-on-one services to foster care children in hotels.” One such contractor employed a convicted murderer, the audit found.

Hundreds of foster children were placed in such hotels “under the supervision of providers that were not licensed,” at a cost of $1,259 per day, even though the highest approved rate for treatment foster care was $281, it found.

During fiscal year 2024, Maryland counties’ social services agencies received 17,000 allegations of abuse and neglect. Many counties were massively late in investigating the allegations, but “SSA did not report child abuse and neglect investigations that were not completed within 60 days to the General Assembly as required by State law,” the audit found.

Dr. Alger M. Studstill, Jr. leads Maryland’s Social Services Administration.

The Social Services Agency offered “questionable” excuses for the delayed investigations, including “a natural disaster that occurred between February 2024 and September 2024,” even though no one could point to a natural disaster in the region during that time period.

The foster care system pays people to take care of children, but Maryland’s agency made little effort to make sure that this money didn’t go to people who were mistreating the children, or even had no foster children. The state Social Services Administration “did not investigate and recover up to $34.5 million in overpayments to public foster care providers,” the audit said.

There was evidence that some people getting paid to raise foster children were not meeting their basic obligations. Some children had not received a dental exam in up to seven years. A quarter of all foster children had not been taken to their required annual physical exams.

SSA’s job was to review paperwork to flag these problems. But even when it flagged that there was no evidence of a particular claim that a child had been given the necessary services, a year later, almost all of those cases were still falsely showing up in the database as being compliant, the audit found.

Most startlingly, the agency’s own data showed that as many as 38% of foster care children might not even be attending school, even as it publicly claimed stellar outcomes.

“While [the database] reflected that virtually all 1,400 school-aged children attended school during fiscal year 2024, our test of 40 of these children disclosed that there was no evidence of attendance (such as a report card) recorded” for 15, the audit said.

Maryland did not ensure that federal eligibility determinations were properly performed, “resulting in the potential loss of up to $23 million” in federal money. Of the federal money that did flow to Maryland, a portion of the money is supposed to be kept in a trust fund for the child’s use when he is older, but this often didn’t occur.

Many of the problems identified in the devastating audit had been raised to the agency in previous years, and the agency pledged reforms but did not follow through.

In 2019, the federal government said Maryland was out of compliance in seven metrics, including “children are safe from abuse and neglect” and “children receive services to meet their educational needs.” The state submitted a “corrective action plan” that allowed it to “continue to receive federal funding and temporarily avoid penalties for noncompliance.” But in September 2024, the federal government said it had not fixed the problems, leading to a $700,000 fine.

In response to the audit, Maryland’s Social Services Administration said, “Our regulations for privately-certified foster parents lacked a ‘crimes of violence’ prohibition required by Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, and we are updating this regulation.”

It said after the cases of children living with sex offenders were identified, “we took action. In one case, we contacted law enforcement who conducted a safety check and confirmed the children were safe. In another case, we contacted the Office of Parole and Probation and found that while an identified individual was on the registry, there were no restrictions prohibiting their presence around children. For the remaining cases, law enforcement and probation officers determined there was insufficient information to warrant a welfare check.”