Foster youth living in Sacramento County-run houses while awaiting a permanent home are vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and the staff that runs them is undertrained, a new grand jury report found.
The report, released this week, found that the county should stop moving youths at risk of sexual exploitation into the three “welcome homes,” where foster youth live temporarily while awaiting placement in permanent homes. Since the grand jury’s last examination in 2023, the county has achieved state licensing for the homes and started providing the public and Board of Supervisors data on the hundreds of unauthorized absences per quarter, the report found. However, the county still needs to hire a specialized contractor to run the homes, release additional data on unauthorized absences, and start including sexual exploitation history in their missing person reports to deputies, the report said.
From April to June 2025, the most recent data available, 240 kids left the three “welcome homes” without authorization, the report found. Some were just gone for an hour or two, but any unauthorized absence raises “alarm bells,” the report said…