No place to go
The city's only group home for teen moms and their babies is shutting down because it can't pay the bills

By Tali Woodward

Mount St. Joseph-St. Elizabeth has been an integral part of San Francisco's social service scene since it opened a home for pioneer children orphaned by the cholera epidemic in 1852. Through periods of enormous social change, the organization has always focused on the housing and health needs of disadvantaged families.

But after outlasting dozens of similar groups, Mount St. Joseph-St. Elizabeth is making a drastic change due to the government-funding crisis. On Feb. 2, the nonprofit will close its Adolescent Residential Treatment Center, which is the only group home for teen mothers in the Bay Area today.

The Masonic Avenue home serves 27 expecting or new mothers under the age of 18 who need shelter and therapy, and up to 22 babies. In addition to leaving some families in the lurch, the end of the program will likely exacerbate an already grim situation for troubled city teens. There has been a succession of psych service closures in San Francisco in the past few years, many of them involving programs that serve youths.

Residents of the home – who usually live there for two years – are assisted by an on-site team of psychologists, case managers, and social workers. They live in individual rooms with their babies and have daily focus groups, parenting classes, and art activities.

"Our focus at all times is on the mother-child bond," development director Jeff Schindler told the Bay Guardian. But mothers are also assisted in other aspects of their lives. Each one attends an on-site high school run by the San Francisco Unified School District, and she gets career and housing help when she's ready to move on.

Krea Gomez, who oversees policy at the Homeless Prenatal Program, said, "It's not just a shelter, but a program with comprehensive services. They take good care of the kids and the mothers. I know one [mother] who went on to Cal State Hayward" after finishing treatment.

The services are so extensive that the home rates a Residential Care Level of 12 out of 14 on California's scale. But the state reimbursement rate is much lower than the actual cost of running a facility that meets the complex needs of troubled teen mothers and their children.

Schindler said the organization, which hopes to get a city contract to provide services to teen moms in the future, has spent "three years trying to stop the inevitable." But after receiving money from the state government, the home was still $3,000 in the hole every month for each teen it served. Private support has also dried up: Schindler said it's decreased 50 percent since Sept. 11, 2001.

"We have employed many cost-saving methods to keep this program running, but we could not run any leaner without sacrificing the safety of our clients and staff," executive director Sister Eileen Kenny wrote in an annual Christmas letter.

Mount St. Joseph-St. Elizabeth is working to place residents and staffers with other programs, but it became the very last home for pregnant or mothering teens in the Bay Area a few years ago, when a teen home run by Florence Crittenton shut down. Several of the mothers are moving to a home in Visalia, which is more than 200 miles away in the Central Valley.

"That's going to be difficult for a San Francisco urban kid," Schindler acknowledged. As of Jan. 26, Mount St. Joseph-St. Elizabeth was still trying to find homes for three mothers and their kids.

Martha Ryan, the founder and director of the Homeless Prenatal Program, told us the closure will mean "there's nothing for teens who are pregnant." Most homeless shelters won't accept people under 18, and besides, teen moms often need more than a place to stay.

"Pregnancy is a time you can really catch someone, because she's pregnant and doesn't want to hurt the baby within her," Ryan added. She also emphasized that the closure is "penny-wise and pound-foolish," since the girls and their babies are likely to require more intensive support in the future. "Residential programs are expensive, but who's going to pick it up?"

If there's a silver lining to this, it's the fact that the closure would have been more devastating in the 1990s. That's because the teen birth rate in California has dropped significantly during the past decade. But those who work with teen mothers stress that they're still a very fragile population. They also point out that teen moms are really a subset of a larger neglected group: young people who find themselves in a rough situation and don't have family to turn to for help.

Schindler said that when you take a sober look at children's services in California, "we should be embarrassed by ourselves. Anyone who's providing services is losing their shirt."

E-mail Tali Woodward