2019 Data Fellow Cynthia Dizikes of the San Francisco Chronicle teamed with a Chronicle colleague, Joaquin Palomino, and Sara Tiano, a reporter for The Imprint (formerly The Chronicle of Social Change), to investigate conditions at residential treatment programs outside of California operated by Sequel Youth & Family Services, a for-profit company. The reporters found that in the last six years, California officials had spent $102 million to send more than 1,240 youth to eight Sequel-run facilities to receive help for mental health and behavioral issues, despite state laws that forbid sending youth to for-profit residential programs. Sequel skirted the California laws by legally organizing each treatment program as a nonprofit, but collecting 83% of their revenues to “manage and operate” the campuses. The reporters reviewed thousands of pages of police records, financial filings, lawsuits and incident reports from licensing officials in five states and also interviewed dozens of former residents, staff members and youth advocates, documenting multiple instances of abuse. The investigation produced results even before it was published. On December 9, three weeks after the reporters alerted the California Department of Social Services about their findings, Director Kim Johnson said the state would bring all of its children home from both Sequel's programs and eight others operated by other companies because they had violated the state’s licensing standards, including rules on when staff can place hands on children. After reviewing some of the same records compiled by reporters, the California Department of Social Services declared the programs “lacking,” and ordered 116 youth be returned to California within 45 days. State officials found that s"taff members intimidated and demeaned residents, failed to get children prompt medical attention and used “excessive force” during hands-on restraints that caused bruises or injuries, according to the letters," the reporters wrote. In addition, they found that " employees in some programs failed to provide children with enough food and water, and prohibited residents from using the bathroom, speaking to peers of the opposite sex and attending religious services." California's use of Sequel and other out-of-state facilities laid bare its failure to make good on its promise to implement its reforms meant to phase out group homes, including out-of-state facilities, the article noted. With many fewer in-state group homes available, juvenile probation and child welfare officials in many counties are now scrambling to place the returning youth in foster homes and treatment programs that can provide the help they need.
Ida Mojadad, a reporter for the SF Examiner and SF Weekly, focused her Fellowship project on Healthy SF, a health care program that the city and county of San Franciso set up in 2007 to ensure health care for the city's then-73,000 uninsured -- and, in many cases, uninsurable -- residents. Ida wondered whether the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and the subsequent expansion of Medicaid to cover low-income, childliess adults, had eliminated the need for Healthy SF. Besides giving her a reporting grant, the Center provided Ida with an engagement grant to help her connect with Spanish-speaking residents, many of them undocumented, who were most likely to enroll in Healthy SF. She teamed up with a Spanish-speaking reporter for El Tecolate to gather feedback from scores of San Francisco residents -- including people who had enrolled in Healthy SF and those who had never heard of it. Among her engagement techniques was publishing a callout in both SF Weekly and in Spanish in El Tecolate. For her first story, published on October 4, she looked into why Healthy SF, part of the Department of Public Health, had reneged on a previous pledge to San Francisco workers with a city medical reimbursement account, called City Option MRA, to allow them to cash out their accounts to pay for COVID-19 related expenses. Instead, the city offered a one-time $500 bonus to account holders who have been affected by coronavirus-related expenses. (City Option MRA, which is run by Healthy SF, is an employee-specific account that employers can pay into in lieu of providing health insurance.) In a she reported that legal issues had kept Healthy SF from following through on its initial promise. Critics of Healthy SF told her that the change in plans served as a reminder that the system isn’t fully functional or transparent. In her second story, published on November 29, she reported that $409 million deposited in City Option MRA to help workers with co-pays and non-reimbursable medical expenses remains untapped in part because workers haven't been told about the funds. Healthy SF deactivates accounts that haven’t been touched in two or more years --about 83,000 accounts worth nearly $60 million as of February -- though they can be re-activated if an employees know to ask. Healthy SF is using the money taken from the deactivated accounts to pay for the $500 bonuses to account holders, Some critics of the program fault employers for failing to informer their employees of their rights, Ida reported. Ida plans additional stories examining whether Healthy SF has outlived its usefulness. Enrollment in Healthy SF peaked at 54,348, but dropped down to 13,615 by the end of FY2016-2017, the most recent data available.