Michelle is scared of a certain knock at the door.
“I just keep picturing somebody walking up to my door and having to tell our kids, ‘Okay, bye. It was nice knowing you,’” she said.
She and her husband began taking in unaccompanied refugee children through a foster family agency (FFA) after watching the crisis in Syria unfold on the news.
KPBS is only using her first name to protect her children.
“We kept having the thought, if there was no place else for them to go, they could come to our house,” she said.
Her face lit up as she spoke about the children they’ve taken in — currently, four of them.
In many ways, they’re regular kids.
They’ve joined schools and sports teams and made friends.
But they’ve also seen trauma most haven’t.
She said she cares for children who’ve been trafficked and tortured, escaped war or recruitment as child soldiers. Some went home one day to find their families, or entire villages, murdered.
It takes time to build new stability and earn trust.
“We tell them, 'Hey, we will never be able to replace your biological parents, but we will do the best that we can. You don't have to love us back, but we'll do the best that we can to love you,'" she said. "And the expectation is that they'll get to stay here until they grow up, that they'll get to decide when they're ready to leave."
Her house is filled with children’s books and colored pencils. In the backyard, a playground sits near a long, dirt rectangle.
When her FFA’s insurance agency announced this summer they were drastically reducing coverage for homes with pools, she demolished hers.
It might not matter.
Most of California’s FFAs are losing their insurance. The children they care for could be taken from their homes as early as Sept. 30, as current contracts begin to expire.
FFAs care for children considered high-risk, like those who are older, medically fragile or have unique needs. They offer foster families support with things like transportation, medical care and respite.
They care for almost 10,000 of the roughly 45,000 children in California’s foster system.
In California, 90% of FFAs are backed by the same insurer — Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California (NIAC).
And NIAC announced in August they won’t be renewing contracts for their current FFAs, or insuring new ones.
In 2019, state law expanded the ability to sue over childhood sexual assault. It expanded the definition, and temporarily increased the time limit for legal action to age 40, or within five years of discovering psychological injury or illness caused by sexual assault. It also provided for up to three times the payout from certain defendants.
FFAs faced increasing lawsuits that were difficult to fight. They were pressured to settle without having time to verify even basic information, NIAC CEO Pamela Davis said.
"We continued over the course of probably two years to adjust policy limits, adjust terms, increase premiums, trying to do whatever we could to continue to do what we were doing and to insure the FFAs," Davis said.
But the payouts were too unpredictable. She said they were settling for large amounts of money even in cases where they didn’t believe the foster family agency was negligent.
They could no longer tell which agencies were a good risk or bad risk to insure because they were all being held accountable for the same claims, regardless of how "perfect" of a job they were doing. It became impossible to calculate premiums, she said.
"We finally realized that that would not be sustainable," she said. "We have, for 35 years, insured these foster family agencies for their own negligence. But this is a twist. They're being held accountable no matter whether they're wrong or not."
The original wording of a bill currently sitting on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk would have helped ease liability for FFAs, NIAC said. But changes to the language during assembly amendments made it "worse than if the state had done nothing," they wrote in a September statement.
They claim the current wording would provide a "field day" for plaintiff attorneys.
FFAs can’t legally operate without insurance. Their children would have to be placed in the county system. But many counties don’t have enough homes or caseworkers to take them, according to child welfare professionals.
"This is a crisis for our children and young people,” said Sue Evans, Chief Operating Officer of the FFA Walden Family Services. "If we have to close our foster family agencies, it will leave a huge gap. There is nowhere else for these young people to go."
Walden Family Services also provides transitional care for youth that age out of the foster system. Evans fears they will become homeless if her agency can’t obtain new insurance before their NIAC contract expires.
She said county systems aren’t yet prepared for the kinds of high-needs children FFAs serve.
There are more than a dozen FFAs in San Diego County, serving roughly 125 children.
Kimberly Giardina, the county’s director of child and family wellbeing, said they’re trying to get elected officials to step in.
She said they need the state to provide at least a year of stop gap insurance to give them time to recertify FFA homes with the county and avoid displacing children.
She said they’re also looking to speed up the recertification process by identifying pieces they could waive or delay. It currently takes three-to-four months.
The county also needs time to prepare to provide what they call "treatment-level foster homes" like FFAs do. The county doesn’t currently have the clinical staff that FFAs offer, she said.
She said the county is in a better position to take on the additional caseload than places like Los Angeles. That’s because San Diego’s system relies less on FFAs. But they’re not yet prepared to serve the kinds of children FFAs do.
Evans said her agency is hunting for replacement insurance, but options are double the cost of NIAC, she said, with much higher deductibles and less coverage.
Foster youth have the right to bring lawsuits, she said. But the system may not be able to afford them.
“The concern is that the lawsuits have gone back so far that agencies do not have to keep records beyond about 10 or 15 years, so there's no records available,” she said. “I think we will see agencies close their doors, which is very sad for the community.”
The state's highest needs foster children could end up paying the unintended price of a well-meaning law.
While foster agencies ask elected officials to intervene, Michelle asks God.
She and her husband have been praying a lot these days.
She said they’re not up against any one person’s bad intentions, but a system that isn’t nuanced enough.
If she could, she’d exit that system and just live with her children outside of it.
“I would sign up for that any day. My kids know that. My social worker knows that. But we're dealing with the law here. And laws are clunky,” she said.
Too clunky, she said, to account for the needs and feelings of all the real, individual children involved in this situation. All 9,000 of them.
“You can't just stick them in any available slot,” she said. “It's not a hotel. It's not an orphanage. It's not just a place for a kid to sleep for a little while until they grow up. But it's an attempt to give them the closest thing to what they've lost that we can.”
She wants her foster children to know the stability of always having a home to go to, like she offered her biological children, and like her parents offered her.
“It made it safe for me to have dreams,” she said. “I could go out into the world and try things because I knew that if things didn't go right, there was going to be somebody there for me. I want my kids to have that.”
While agencies hunt for insurance they can afford and plead with elected officials, while Michelle and her husband pray, while their foster children go to school and play in the yard, and while thousands more like them fill dinner table seats that could soon be empty, the calendar counts down to September 30.
