Article by Ruthie about FYI

Housing after Foster Care is Hard Enough Without Made-Up Barriers
Ruth White, The Imprint, Sept. 7, 2026.

I am a longtime sufferer of “Fear of Missing Out Syndrome,” or FOMO. Shucks, I’m having it as I write this. My neighbors are partying in Ocean City, MD, while I’m stuck in the office. What fun they must be having flitting from boat, to beach, to bar … without me.

But this somewhat frivolous emotion is held in check by the experiences of the many current and former foster youth I talk to every day who are trying to stabilize their housing situation so they can begin to build a life and a career. For far too many of them, there is no need for FOMO: they are definitely missing out. 

Imagine living in your car, or celebrating your 22nd birthday in a homeless shelter, or falling prey to traffickers to secure a couch to sleep on for the night. All the while knowing that there is something called the Melania Trump Foster Youth to Independence (FYI) initiative so agile that all your child welfare worker needed to do was ask your local public housing authority to order a Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) just for you. 

And yet, here you are, not knowing where you will park to sleep tonight or what public bathroom you will use to get ready for work in the morning. But you know FYI exists, you know foster youth designed it, you know it is fully funded, and it is codified in federal law through the Fostering Stable Housing Opportunities Act.

And now, sitting there all alone you realize that for some inexplicable reason, that option was forfeited on your behalf. That yields a special kind of exasperation far worse than FOMO.

The more curious you are, the worse it feels. A simple Google search reveals that FYI was established seven years ago by Dr. Ben Carson, former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in partnership with foster youth from ACTION Ohio and the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, which I lead. 

Scroll further and you find videos of Dr. Carson’s successor Scott Turner, who never misses an opportunity to promote FYI and visit with youth ambassadors for the initiative. The videos are widely circulated on social media. He is joined in his breathless enthusiasm by HUD Assistant Secretary Joe DeFelice and a powerful team of regional administrators like foster care alumnus, Chris Patterson. They are blanketing the country with promotion about FYI as a platform for self-sufficiency — leaving no question about their commitment.

So far more than 9,000 young adults have signed a lease for a home of their own where they can come and go as they please. They are no longer part of a system or worse, “the system.” They are neighbors who contribute to their communities as little league coaches, baristas, social workers, police officers, pastors, cashiers, nurses, teachers, entrepreneurs, homeowners, moms, dads, aunties and friends. And these success stories are out there, all over the internet for anyone to read. It is breathtaking.

Imagine reading about this on a computer at the public library where you go to wash up and find respite because you have no home. I’ll tell you what you’d think: Why am I missing out on this?

I know that what I’m describing happens every day because sometimes, their research leads them to my organization. They find me, or their caseworkers find me, and then we sprint. I may not be a former college track star like Secretary Turner, but when it comes to clearing bureaucratic hurdles, I’m a gold medalist. 

The most frustrating part of this is not that the barriers aren’t real; they are a vexing admixture of learned helplessness, paternalism and institutional parochialism among the professional class.

Here are some of the fictional roadblocks youth confront and we clear together.

“Our community doesn’t have FYI.” 

Nonsense. There are 2,174 public housing authorities eligible to administer FYI vouchers. This provides nationwide coverage. FYI is universal, it is available to every public housing authority that administers vouchers in the U.S.

“There’s not enough funding for FYI.”

Wrong. This one is particularly troubling because HUD announced on July 27, 2026, that they had so much money left over for FYI, that Congress allowed them to use $25 million to cover shortfalls in the another voucher program for homeless single, disabled adults. 

 “Our public housing authority is in a financial shortfall.”

This is a common misconception that has made its way across the country.  But read HUD’s December 2025 shortfall letter and find that FYI is exempt from HUD’s shortfall strategy. 

“We are out of vouchers.” 

This might have been a problem before, but HUD eliminated the 50 voucher per year cap for jurisdictions on July 27, 2026. That’s just from the housing side. As such, there is no need for waiting lists or bottlenecks.  

“Our child welfare agency can’t fund the services component of FYI.”

The list of services in FYI (like help with education, employment, financial management, housing, emotional support and assured connections to caring adults) is cut and pasted from the John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood. Obviously you can fund these services with Chafee because FYI was written by foster youth to complement Chafee. 

“Youth have to be homeless to be eligible.”

It is hard for me to dignify this one with a response but: just read the notice. It says “homeless or at risk of homelessness at age 16 or older.” To quote another First Lady: this concern is a nothingburger. You do not have to be homeless at the time of referral. You might be homeless or at risk, but you do not have to be in that state. The point of FYI is to prevent homelessness, not require it. 

“Youth have to pick extended foster care or an FYI voucher.” 

Quite the opposite. Youth can and in many cases should maximize their time in extended foster care, and then tap FYI. Combined, those two programs offer sustainable housing through and in many cases beyond age 25.

The list of nonsense and myths goes on. If I weren’t in constant contact with actual youth, scarred and bewildered in the wake of these unfounded crises, shooting the misconceptions down would be a satisfying hobby.

But there is real joy in witnessing agency leaders, and most especially, the child welfare caseworkers who are closest to the youth move so rapidly from grief to relief. They are empowered when they don’t have to remain on the sidelines. They are renewed in their love for the work when they see that the youth they care so deeply about can be a part of this beautiful story too and their appreciation is palpable. 

FOMO is one kind of sinking sensation. Knowing that you could have moved faster to embrace FYI, but you didn’t, is an equally crushing realization. Going forward, we can all feel a part of this youth-written solution to close the gaps through which foster youth might otherwise fall into homelessness. 

Now, if you’ll excuse me, the beach awaits.

~ Ruth White is the executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare.

Article about the Montgomery County CARE House

Dayton family donates $1M to Montgomery County CARE House
Ben Dannemiller, Dayton Daily News, August 6, 2026.

Montgomery County’s child advocacy center received its largest ever donation Wednesday, Aug. 5, according to a release by Dayton Children’s Hospital.

Patricia and Richard Glennon Jr. made a $1 million donation to the Montgomery County CARE House, with the aim of assisting a $5.3 million expansion project.

“Our son works for the Montgomery County prosecutor’s office, so we are acutely aware of the critical role CARE House plays in protecting children and supporting healing,” Patricia and Richard Glennon said.

CARE House helps children in abusive situations by bringing “together experts from medicine, law enforcement, child protective services, prosecution and victim advocacy to provide a coordinated, compassionate response,” according to its page on Dayton Children’s website

CARE House demand has increased in recent years, prompting the need for an expansion. The amount of children seeking care nearly doubled to 1,100 from 2016 to 2025.

“We’re seeing more children than ever before, and every one of them deserves access to the specialized care and support they need,” CARE House Director Amy Ferguson said via the press release.

The expansion is set to add additional therapy spaces, a soundproof forensic interview room, outdoor healing space and more.

Jesse's first article about the Legislative Committee

How Ohio lawmakers are looking into juvenile justice concerns

Jesse Bethea, NBC4, August 25, 2026.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — A new legislative study committee will examine serious concerns among lawmakers and child welfare experts about how the juvenile justice system treats youth who have been adjudicated delinquent.

The Study Committee to Evaluate the Placement of Delinquent Children in Residential Facilities held its first hearing Monday morning, co-chaired by Rep. Andrea White (R-Kettering). 

With little time left in the 136th General Assembly, White said her committee will “hit the ground running” and continue its work until the end of this year, ultimately producing a report and recommendations for the governor, legislature and the public. 

The idea for a study committee came out of legislation White and Rep. Phil Plummer (R-Dayton) worked on two years ago, trying to establish stronger accountability for the hundreds of juvenile group homes operating in Ohio. 

White said during that process they learned, “many times youth who had been adjudicated delinquent by the juvenile court system were being placed in the care of children’s services agencies instead of being placed in detention centers.” 

“The children’s services agencies are struggling to find proper places to care for these kids,” White said. “These children are being mixed in with kids in the foster care system in some of these group homes who’ve been traumatized and had violations against themselves.” 

Committee member Rep. Erika White (D-Springfield Twp.) said while she shares concerns about mixing adjudicated delinquents with youth who have been removed from dangerous or abusive homes, she also wants the committee to examine whether group home settings are even helpful to adjudicated youth. 

“They’re children; we have to remember that. Yes, they’re accountable for the crime they committed, but how do we help them become adults who are part of our community and our society?” Erika White said. “What does it look like to truly help a child to go from being a juvenile delinquent or in the juvenile justice system to being an adult?”

Incentives For Diversion

Judges in Ohio have broad sentencing discretion, and juvenile judges are incentivized to divert adjudicated youth away from detention facilities operated by the Department of Youth Services (DYS). Since the 1990s, Ohio’s RECLAIM program has granted money for local, community-based juvenile corrections programs, with amounts determined by the number of children diverted out of the justice system. 

The more children a judge diverts from DYS detention, the more funds are available for their community. RECLAIM says its program has reduced overcrowding in the state’s youth institutions and allowed DYS to focus treatment and rehabilitation efforts on more serious, repeat youth offenders. 

It’s also resulted in youth who are diverted away from the juvenile justice system ending up in the child protective services system instead, as Angela Sausser, executive director of the Public Children Services Association of Ohio (PCSAO), explained to lawmakers Monday. 

On any given day in 2025, according to Sausser, three percent of the youth entering children services custody did so due to delinquency or unruliness, eight percent entered due to mental health or substance abuse disorders, and eight percent entered as “dependent,” a term sometimes used by juvenile courts to refer to youth adjudicated for serious offenses. In 2021, more than nine percent of all youth who entered children services custody were diverted from juvenile justice. More than a quarter of those were accused or convicted of a felony offense. 

“The purpose of the children services system is to protect children from abuse and neglect by their parents or caregivers,” Sausser said. “Increasingly, however, Ohio’s child protective services are expected to serve children whose needs and reasons for coming into PCSA custody fall primarily within other systems, including behavioral health (mental health and substance use), developmental disabilities, and juvenile justice, particularly when those systems lack sufficient treatment services, placement options, or funding.” 

Besides funding incentives, there are practical reasons why juvenile judges prefer to divert youth away from detention. As Paul Pfeifer, former state Supreme Court justice and executive director of the Ohio Judicial Conference, testified in 2024, juvenile judges are often unaware of specialized residential facilities that can accept and properly treat delinquent children.

Nor is separating children with criminal histories from other children in foster care necessarily the best choice. Kate Rossman, policy manager for the Ohio Children’s Alliance, told lawmakers in 2024 that such an approach actually “contradicts therapeutic best practices.” 

There is also the fact that, as Pfeifer pointed out, “many children involved with the juvenile court system have dual status as both an adjudicated delinquent and a foster child.” 

Erika White echoed that point, saying there are plenty of examples of youth in the juvenile justice system who have also experienced the sort of mistreatment or abuse that would require attention from child protective services. In other cases, said Erika White, adults influence children to commit crimes, knowing the consequences will be lighter. 

“We have to realize these are children where the adults or the village that’s around that child has failed,” she said. 

Finally, the alternative — institutionalizing more adjudicated children — is also undesirable. Sausser told the committee that PCSAO strongly supports reforms that reduce the reliance on placing kids in restrictive institutional settings. 

“However, the responsibility and cost of serving these children have shifted to the children services system, which must comply with court orders and cannot decline service or placement of a child,” Sausser said. 

“There Is Money To Be Had” 

Making the placement of adjudicated youth an additional responsibility of child protective services adds strain to a system already at the breaking point.

The number of Ohio children in foster care has declined in recent years, but the cost of placing those children in appropriate settings has gone up. The Ohio Department of Children and Youth (DCY) has struggled to establish standard rates for foster placements, in part because providers have not voluntarily shared useful data with the state. 

Child welfare professionals like Tammy Moore Morton, director of Scioto County Job and Family Services, have seen firsthand how and why foster placement costs can deplete a county’s resources. She described how one child in her agency’s custody ended up in at least a dozen different placements around the state because they exhibited “extreme behaviors.” 

“The facilities can decide to increase our daily rate to any amount they want without necessarily increasing the level of care,” Morton said. “They know this child is hard to place, so they take advantage of the situation and charge the county unreasonably or threaten discharge or return the child to the lobby of the agency.”

Numbers published by PCSAO bear this out; in 2021, about six percent of youth who came into care had to spend at least one night sleeping at their county children services agency because there were no available providers willing to accept that child’s level of care.

Testimony on the first day of hearings circled at times around the implication that many group home providers see foster care first and foremost as a business, which DCY director Kara Wente tied to the dramatic increase in placement costs. 

“If the placement’s between $236 and $400 per day, there is money to be had there,” Wente said. “And I would hope that they want to serve the mission of actually helping kids.” 

A uniquely high concentration of group homes has appeared in the Dayton area in recent years, especially in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods. Montgomery County Juvenile Judge Helen Wallace said that also appears to be part of the business model. 

“We have heard that business developers are buying up cheap real estate and staffing them with young, inexperienced staff who have not gone through extensive training that might be available to higher-level group homes for the high per diem, per child rates,” Wallace said. 

Treating foster group homes as a business model also means, according to Wente, “they actually have to take kids from out of town to meet the numbers and make it lucrative.” 

Counties all over the state end up sending kids to Dayton, far from their families and friends and making reunification even harder. When group homes are concentrated in impoverished areas and supervised by untrained and inattentive staff members, delinquent youth are also at increased risk of reoffending, sometimes against other kids in the home. 

In 2024, Dayton Police Chief Eric Henderson told lawmakers his officers had seen a notable increase in calls for service involving youth group homes. 

He described one case in which a child had absconded from a group home and was hesitant to return, eventually telling officers he had been touched inappropriately by another youth resident. In another incident, a 14-year-old was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries after other kids in the same group home beat him up for stealing a video game console. 

According to Henderson, no adults or group home employees were aware of the assault.

100 youth are entrusted to Fox Run, with residents as young as 5 years old

Ohio teen treatment center CEO accused of unlawful sexual contact with minor in police sting
Brittany Hailer, The Marshall Project, Sept.1, 2026.

The chief executive of one of Ohio’s largest residential treatment centers for youth is accused of driving nearly three hours to meet someone for sex whom he believed was a 14-year-old girl. Instead, he met a police officer, according to police and court documents.

Randall J. Mackendrick, CEO of Fox Run Center for Children and Adolescents, was arrested on Aug. 29 by North Ridgeville police in Lorain County after having driven about 175 miles from St. Clairsville, where the facility is located and where he lives, police said.

Mackendrick, 59, was released from custody on Monday after posting a $125,000 bond. He is charged with unlawful sexual contact with a minor, importuning, disseminating matter harmful to a juvenile and possessing criminal tools.

He does not currently have an attorney listed in court records, and did not respond to calls and requests for comment on his personal cellphone.

Mackendrick first made contact with the person he believed was a teenager on June 2, according to police. He was scheduled to appear for a preliminary hearing on Sept. 2, but it has been moved to Sept. 9, according to court records.

Universal Health Services, which owns Fox Run, said Mackendrick no longer works for the organization and does not have access to the residential treatment facility.

“To our present knowledge, this is a personal matter arising from conduct alleged to have occurred outside the facility, not connected to any current or former patients,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. UHS said it is reviewing the “circumstances surrounding this matter and, as appropriate, will evaluate relevant policies and practices at the facility.”

The Ohio Department of Behavioral Health, the state agency responsible for licensing the facility, is aware of Mackendrick’s arrest, a spokesman said, and declined to comment any further, citing an open criminal investigation.

Fox Run is a 100-bed residential treatment facility that accepts children as young as 5 — many of whom are victims of sexual assault and are placed at the facility for mental health treatment due to the trauma they endured.

In July, a Marshall Project investigation found that children at the facility were subjected to unsafe restraints and experienced physical and sexual assaults and medical neglect. Dozens of emergency responses, including youth hospitalizations and arrests, were documented in local police records but were absent from Ohio’s database of reportable incidents.

The investigation sparked a community conversation online, with former Fox Run patients and workers sharing their experiences, and residents of St. Clairsville and elsewhere noting their surprise at what was going on at the facility and expressing their sympathy. Over the weekend, the conversation continued, as news spread of Mackendrick's arrest.

“Randy Mackendrick may have a legal case to answer to, but Fox Run survivors have been carrying out their own stories for years. We want answers, too,” said Paitin Pahoundis, who spent three years at the facility in her teens during the pandemic.

Addison Torrence, who was housed at a now-shuttered troubled youth facility and serves on a state committee investigating the placement of children in residential facilities, said he was “alarmed and sickened” by the charges against Mackendrick.

Torrence said he intends to ask the state licensing agency about how it is responding to the arrest and what measures it is taking to ensure the safety of the children at the facility given the issues surfaced in the Marshall Project investigation.