At the age of 19, Reese Thompson knows quite a bit about the foster care system in Massachusetts and all of its pitfalls. He’s been in the system since the age of 4, living with various family members until getting a stable place to live at 14.
Now, he’s watching his baby sister and her foster family experience the same struggles he did during his journey through the system.
Speaking before the state Legislature earlier this month, Thompson said that his mother spent money intended to support his well-being. Many families, like his sisters, are unaware of the funds they’re eligible for or whether they’ve been approved or denied to receive them, he said.
Thompson was on Beacon Hill to speak in support of a bill that would require the state’s Department of Children & Families to be more transparent with that kind of information. To Thompson, foster families shouldn’t be left in the dark regarding their benefit status because of its direct correlation with the well being of system-involved youth.
“We need transparency, accountability, and respect for the children the system claims to serve and protect,” said Reese Thompson, who is now an advocate with the organization The Power is Yours.
On July 8, the Massachusetts Legislature held hearings on several acts pertaining to the well being of youth in foster care. Among them was a bill that would establish a bill of rights for children in foster care. It’s a bill that Thompson and others say would help DCF and the state do more than just the bare minimum for the children under their care.
“How are we supposed to guarantee the success of children in the system when there is no solid foundation in the first place?” Thompson told lawmakers at the hearing.
A crowd started to pool outside the hearing room about half an hour before the hearing, puddles of people from different organizations that work with the child-welfare system spilling out into the hallway. There were crocs and dress shoes, three-piece suits and t-shirts. The fact that the hearing started late, or that there was only one bench to sit at, didn’t seem to bother them. It seemed apparent that the fabric of people who’d shown up was tightly woven together with one stated goal in mind: improving foster care.
The act to establish a bill of rights for children in foster care includes basic civil liberties like safety and security, connection to family and community, health care and accessibility, education, employment, and social connections, as well as resources and supports specific to navigating the foster care system. Legislators behind the bill have said that it does not create any rights for youth in the system, only that it codifies them.
But there are big reasons why a bill of rights is needed, advocates say.
There are currently about 9,000 youth in state custody. In fiscal year 2022, the federal government found that Massachusetts had more substantiated reports of child maltreatment for system-involved children than all but three other states nationwide. This past fiscal year, the Office of the Child Advocate received almost 500 reports of abuse and neglect in out-of-home placements, involving nearly 700 children — a 50% increase from fiscal year 2022.
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There were several organizations that came out to support the bill, among them the Children’s League, Children’s Law Center, More Than Words, Hopewell, and the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
More Than Words is a youth-led nonprofit that focuses on career development and selling used books. Their advocacy branch, Power is Yours, had four employees with experience in the system give testimony in support of the bill, including Thompson.
More Than Words did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
At the hearing, Thompson said that he doesn’t trust DCF to support him if he took in his sister and that the bill of rights would hold the state agency accountable for addressing barriers that make it difficult for him to have custody of his sister. And rather than keeping her in a suitable foster family, he said that DCF is reunifying his sister — something he said will only lead to re-involvement with the state with his sister being more troubled than before.
“I’ve watched it happen in my life,” he said. “Watching it happen in hers — when I know how close she is to living in stable and safe conditions — is infuriating.”
If the bill were to pass, DCF would be required to present the bill of rights in document form to the child, the child’s lawyer, as well as their biological and foster parents. It would also mandate group homes to post the bill of rights in a place where youth can easily access it. The bill also gives youth autonomy to make sure that their rights are being met either through the DCF ombudsman, the state’s Office of the Child Advocate, or through the judge on the youth’s case.
Other states in New England, like Rhode Island and New Hampshire, passed the foster care bill of rights years ago. If the bill is enacted into law, Massachusetts would join over a dozen other states that have already done so nationwide.
Cristina and Debbie Freitas are both attorneys at the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which represents clients in Massachusetts who can’t afford a private attorney. They have represented system-involved children and families for the last 15 years and were involved in the creation of the bill.
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According to Cristina Freitas, the Office of the Child Advocate recently received the highest volume of reports of mistreatment ever. The state also has one of the highest rates of group home, or congregate care, placements in the country — particularly for adolescents — and one of the longest average lengths of stay in the system.
Less than half of system-involved youth were placed with relatives in Massachusetts in fiscal year 2023. Nearly 60% of youth aged 12 to 17 are placed in congregate-care facilities. Cristina Freitas said that because these young people aren’t in foster homes, the foster parent bill of rights has little impact on ensuring their safety or the understanding of their rights.
Lawmakers asked Cristina and Debbie Freitas several questions about the bill.
Rep. Alyson Sullivan-Almeida, R- Abington, asked the pair whether or not the proposed foster youth bill of rights would conflict with the foster parents bill of rights, especially in a case where a child may go against their best interest.
The attorneys said that in cases when the youth’s wishes go against their own safety, there are multiple actors involved in the case and that it’s ultimately the decision of the judge. To the attorneys, the rights of foster youth and foster families are complimentary, not conflicting.
In response to the testimony from those with lived experience in the child welfare system, Sullivan-Almeida asked the attorneys if the bill would strengthen youth voices through requiring someone involved in the child’s case to believe them. Many youth in foster care are labeled as liars and runaways, she said.
“Most certainly,” Christina Freitas said. “[The bill] moves situations from happening in the dark to a place where we know about them, in the light. Telling kids about what rights they have in a way that they will understand, which is what this bill requires, ensures that we learn about these situations much sooner. We’re not waiting years to hear about the abuse that they suffer.”
One testifier, who The Shoestring could not identify, is an alumni of More Than Words and another member of The Power is Yours. She said that she had dealt with numerous issues involving DCF, which she described as neglectful.
The testifier said that she had difficulty understanding how DCF was helpful, especially when she felt that she struggled more because of her involvement with the system. She faced racial discrimination, physical abuse, and lack of medical care as a young person in the system, and said she was mischaracterized by service providers who called her problematic, a liar, and a runaway when she reported abuse and neglect. So she ran away to find safer housing.
“The same foster homes that once had put their hands on me, shaved my hair while I was sleeping, and used me as servitude were keeping pictures of me in their wallet and posting me online,” she told lawmakers.
She said that wasn’t the end of the system’s impact on her life. When she was re-introduced to her biological family, she realized the disconnection from them and her culture of origin. She also had significant mental health struggles while navigating trauma. Rather than being supported, she said that she was “overmedicated and neutralized,” which led to the deterioration of her mental health, breakdowns, and multiple hospitalizations.
During this time, she said that DCF never consulted her during their meetings about her future. Instead, when she was 16, she said they began to “push her out” of system involvement, leading to her homelessness and missing out on education with no tools to navigate adulthood.
The foster care bill of rights would address all of these aspects of her experience, she said, from ensuring cultural and familial connection to explicitly prohibiting discrimination.
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Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, is one of the bill’s petitioners. She said in her written testimony that the bill for foster parents codified various protections for all foster parents, including their right to respect and dignity, as well as the critical information necessary to parent the children in their care. Now, Comerford said, it’s time to extend that codification to system-involved youth.
“Every child in foster care is endowed with the rights inherently belonging to all children,” she wrote. “In addition, because of temporary or permanent separation from birth parents and other family members, a foster child requires special safeguards, resources, and care.”
State Rep. Michael Finn, D-West Springfield, sponsored the bill in the House. Finn has been a state representative for over a decade and was a former chair of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities, which oversees DCF.
According to Finn, the committee became acutely aware of deficiencies within DCF after 5-year-old Harmony Montgomery was murdered by her father in 2019. Then, the following year, 14-year-old David Almond died while in the custody of his father and his father’s girlfriend. His father later pleaded guilty to murder based on allegations they had abused and starved him. Both children were involved with the agency at the time of their deaths.
Finn said that he and his team went over the issues and weaknesses of DCF’s current system, and among them was a lack of a codified bill of rights. Finn said that he and his team refined the parameters of the bill to what they felt specifically addressed the system failures that caused Almond’s death.
The memory of Montgomery and Almond’s premature deaths is ever-present in the minds of legislators and advocates alike, and it invokes a sense of urgency — and better accountability, they said.
Khrystian King and Marianne Walles, both from the union representing social workers, SEIU Local 509, came out in support of the bill, though with some concerns. Walles was a social worker with DCF for over 25 years at the Cambridge-Burlington office. According to her, the department has been under crisis and overburdened, which would make upholding the rights of youth difficult.
“We cannot address any of the rights that children have without actually addressing the infrastructure within the department and not funding it,” she said. “Without the commitment and investment by the Commonwealth to invest in the child welfare system, the department will continue to be stressed.”
King, who’s been working at DCF for nearly 30 years, said that the bill creates a roadmap for the assurance of foster youth’s civil rights. However, without increasing overall funding and the amount of staff — and decreasing their caseloads — King said that the rights of system-involved youth will continue to be unmet. This past fiscal year, the state cut funding for residential care and family stabilization.
“For too long, reform without revenue at this agency has resulted in us, the department, as social workers and clinicians … failing to meet its mission,” King said. “The chapter of Local 509, as social workers, we welcome the opportunity to disrupt the trauma, the school-to-prison pipeline that too often becomes a reality in this work.”
King thanked key stakeholders of the bill and said that he agreed that accountability is important. He also wants a department that is accountable, transparent, effective, and respectful — one that allows social workers to meaningfully raise issues to the ombudsman and have them addressed.
King said the culture at DCF doesn’t allow for that, and that he’d like the bill to expand language to protect social workers who do so.
Reflecting on the investigation into Almond’s death, Walles said that although there’s been policy to address some concerns around that case, what hasn’t been addressed is DCF’s culture of fear, where social workers “don’t say much” and “keep moving along.”
“There’s so many young workers now — they just don’t speak up,” she said. “They see something that’s not right, they will tell their supervisor, they will report it. But then they’re told, ‘That’s it.’ So until we address that level of fear, we will never accomplish children in foster care being heard.”
Neither King nor Wallace responded to requests for comment.
For some experts and advocates in the child welfare space, the work to assure the civil liberties of system-involved youth needs to go beyond a bill of rights. For them, it’s a question of meaningful enforcement and addressing what they consider to be the root cause of involvement: poverty and racism.
Jamie Sabino is a lawyer who specializes in family- and child-welfare law, and has been working as an attorney for nearly 50 years. For the past 11 years, she has been working with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, which was part of the coalition behind the bill of rights.
Before starting her work at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, Sabino spent 20 years working in family court. She said that the most concerning and shocking takeaway that she had was that the majority of the people involved in the child welfare system are poor, are people of color, and are struggling with housing as well as domestic violence, mental health, incarceration, and substance abuse issues.
“These are all things that the state should be helping people with as opposed to essentially punishing them and their children,” she told The Shoestring.
For Sabino, the question of the bill of right’s enforcement is intrinsically tied to the resources available to families and communities. She said that while the bill addresses the needs of youth after they become involved in the system, the fact that they end up involved in the system in the first place is a failure.
“There’s been a failure to provide that child in that family the resources they need. It’s not a failure that is predestined. It’s not a permanent failure,” she said. “Things can happen that will rectify the situation, or at a minimum, will make that child’s stay and journey in foster care less traumatic [and] less harmful to them in the long term.”
Sabino said that Massachusetts has a high rate of children who enter, stay, and “age out” of foster care — meaning they do not receive a permanent or stable family or placement — and that system-involved youth struggle much more than their non-involved peers in education, employment, and substance abuse when they transition out of state custody.
According to state data, youth in the foster care system are over three times as likely to drop out of high school and 38 times more likely to be detained than their non-involved peers. On a national scale, research shows that nearly 80% of system-involved youth “have significant mental health issues,” with a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder over four times higher than the general population.
Debbie Freitas said that if the state removes children from their families, then it should improve outcomes for those same children. To Sabino and Debbie Freitas, the bill of rights takes important steps in improving the poor outcomes experienced by system-involved youth.
“This bill can hopefully address some of those things the children are struggling with while they’re in foster care to make their stay there less harmful and will better support them in the future,” she said.
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In a political landscape in which poor people are particularly at risk of losing services and resources, Sabino said that it’s more important now than ever to pass the bill this year.
However, the bill doesn’t explicitly codify the rights and process for immigrants, asylum seekers, or refugee youth in the state’s custody. The state also doesn’t provide data counts for children in these categories. Immigrant youth are entitled to special juvenile immigrant status that puts them on a path for citizenship, though it’s unclear how many eligible youth in DCF custody are given the opportunity to start this process.
Though there have not been any recorded instances of immigrant foster youth being detained by or reported to Customs and Border Patrol or Immigration Customs Enforcements agents in Massachusetts, such cases have happened in other states like Florida.
However, there have been several reports of immigrants being detained outside of immigration court in various areas of the state. With the current administration’s emphasis on villainizing and arresting immigrants of color, combined with the disproportionate amount of Hispanic families who are DCF-involved, immigrant families and are at increased risk of contact with the system.
“The right to safety and security, to be treated with dignity, to a nurturing placement free of abuse or neglect, to sufficient healthy food, clothing, and personal care products that preserve and promote the child’s family’s culture, to maintain their language and religion — these are rights every child needs to grow into a healthy and successful adult,” Debbie Freitas said. “Going into foster care should not strip children of these rights.”
divina cordeiro is a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They are a summer 2025 intern at The Shoestring with support from the Nonprofit Newsroom Internship Program created by The Scripps Howard Fund and the Institute for Nonprofit News.