Sacramento’s troubled foster care system is getting better, but not fast enough for a local civil grand jury that says teens are still being left in the line of fire. In a June follow-up report, jurors praised gains in kin placements and the rollout of smaller, licensed welcome homes, yet warned that weak licensing practices, spotty data sharing and uneven safety protocols keep leaving holes for vulnerable youth to slip through. County leaders now face a tight deadline to show how they plan to turn quick fixes into real, long-term protections.
What the grand jury found
The 2025–26 panel concluded that the Department of Child, Family and Adult Services has made “significant progress” on several earlier mandates while still falling short in key areas. According to the Sacramento County Civil Grand Jury, jurors want the Board of Supervisors to require DCFAS to share information about youths’ at-risk or exploited status with law enforcement and to publish clearer quarterly statistics so trouble spots cannot be buried in the fine print.
The report also recommends applying a Reasonable and Prudent Parent approach to technology, pushing the county to tighten but not overreach on phones and social media. County agencies have 90 days to file formal responses detailing how they will meet the new expectations.
How local reporting shaped the review
Intense local coverage helped drive the scrutiny by showing what happened to at-risk teens shuffled from one temporary stopgap to another. As reported by KCRA, the county first cleared youth out of a downtown office building that the fire department had flagged, then began using the Warren E. Thornton facility before eventually pivoting to smaller, home-style welcome centers as interim housing options.
WET center and safety concerns
Outside watchdogs documented why critics argued those earlier placements were never acceptable for kids in care. Disability Rights California described the Warren E. Thornton site as featuring jail-style cells, metal toilets and heavy security, conditions that felt closer to detention than to foster care.
On top of that, The Sacramento Bee reported that state officials told the county the WET facility was inappropriate for unlicensed foster placements. Those findings helped shape the grand jury’s call for tighter placement rules and faster transfers into therapeutic care whenever exploitation is suspected.
Legal fallout and licensing troubles
The follow-up report notes the 2023 Youth Law Center settlement and resulting court oversight that forced the county to remove youth from the WET center and set clearer conditions for therapeutic care, as detailed in the grand jury’s own summary. State regulators also imposed penalties after the county placed two teens in the facility despite earlier warnings, with local reporting citing a $3,600 fine connected to those placements.
At the same time, jurors flagged persistent gaps in data sharing, staff training and long-term strategy. Some welcome homes, they noted, sit close to high-traffic “blade” corridors where exploiters are known to operate, leaving youth more exposed when safeguards and supervision are not airtight.
What comes next
The grand jury did not just critique, it put timelines on the table. The report urges the county to tighten technology-access rules using the Reasonable and Prudent Parent Standard, publish quarterly data on incidents and youth who go AWOL, expand training to spot and prevent sexual exploitation, and move at-risk youth into therapeutic STRTP placements more quickly.
State and national coverage of foster care outcomes has underscored why these details matter. Without stable, licensed placements and sustained funding, former foster youth face far steeper odds in school and the workforce, as the Los Angeles Times has reported. With the Board of Supervisors now on the clock, advocates say the real test will be whether the county turns the report’s recommendations into durable, fully funded programs that keep teens safe instead of scrambling for the next temporary fix.
