Minnesota’s Most Troubled Kids Have Nowhere to Go, and the Public Isn’t Being Told Why

“Less Is More” Has Gone Too Far

For decades, as a CASA volunteer guardian ad litem, I have watched the “less is more” philosophy grow in Minnesota child protection. It is reaching a crescendo today. These are public health issues, and they affect the safety and livability of every community in the state.

Closing facilities and ending programs that were making a difference has become part of who we are. Not long ago, four Minnesota counties were screening out 90% of child abuse reports. Hospitals around the state have closed their mental health services, mostly because of a level of trauma and violence they found beyond their capacity to handle.

What I Saw at St. Joe’s

For over 20 years, St. Joe’s Home for Children housed the most damaged children in Hennepin County. Many of my caseload children lived there. Most were on psychotropic medications, some as young as 7. At least one prostituted herself while she lived there. She was 14. Several were suicidal.

Trending

Childhood Trauma and Lifelong ACES Impact

None of this is a reflection on the people doing the work. I know how committed, hardworking, and caring the staff were. They never had the resources those children needed.

We Seek Data, Not Names

The public and the legislators who fund programs for Minnesota’s state ward children are mostly uninformed about what’s working and what isn’t. The lack of meaningful data is striking.

For 25 years I’ve wanted real data about the broken children I’ve worked with. Institutions either don’t track it or won’t release it, and HIPAA is repeatedly and falsely used as the excuse. We don’t seek names. We seek data. There is nothing HIPAA non-compliant about data.

While my caseload kids were 5, 10, and 15 years old, they were being arrested, having babies, and trying to kill themselves. None of that made the paper or showed up in any public report. And yes, it was traumatizing to work with my kids.

An uninformed public will not call its legislators and ask for policies that could slow the mayhem in our child protection systems. Even administrators making bad choices have reasons they think are defensible. The pressure to perform is enormous, bad results make an institution look bad, and media attention is something they avoid. It’s hard getting information out of a stone.

What Has Happened Since

The problem has only grown. Here is what recent reporting shows, in Minnesota and across the country.

1. Minnesota has lost more than a third of its youth treatment beds

Children’s residential facility capacity in Minnesota has dropped 36% since 2005, a loss of 888 beds. When no bed is available, children are usually sent out of state, and counties pay about $80 million a year for it. Others end up boarding in hospitals, detention centers, or county offices because there is simply nowhere else for them. (Minnesota House Session Daily)

2. One of Minnesota’s largest treatment centers cut to six kids

In 2026, state regulators found youth at Nexus Family Healing’s residential treatment center at imminent risk of harm. Under a settlement, the facility was allowed to stay open, but it is temporarily approved to house just six youth instead of the 40 it had been licensed for. Meanwhile, some young people are stuck in emergency departments long after they are cleared to leave, and a proposal for a 30-bed state-run facility did not pass the Legislature this year. (The Imprint, via Sahan Journal)

3. Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota is asking for the same thing we are: public data

Safe Passage’s latest report reviewed 44 child deaths from maltreatment between mid-2023 and the end of 2024, a 40% increase. They urged the Legislature to require the state to post its findings online instead of releasing them only on request. It’s the same wall I have hit for 25 years. (Safe Passage for Children of Minnesota)

4. The U.S. Senate called youth treatment centers “Warehouses of Neglect”

A two-year investigation by the Senate Finance and HELP Committees looked at four of the country’s largest residential treatment providers. The 2024 report, subtitled How Taxpayers Are Funding Systemic Abuse, concluded that the risk of harm to young people is built into how these facilities operate. A 2025 follow-up found LGBTQ youth are at even greater risk. (Senate Finance Committee)

5. Abuse at for-profit youth facilities in at least 18 states

A 2021 report by the National Disability Rights Network found abuse at for-profit youth programs in 18 states, including sexual abuse, overmedication, and cutting kids off from their families. In 2020, 16-year-old foster youth Cornelius Frederick was restrained by staff at a Michigan facility and died. The company that ran it got about 90% of its revenue from public programs. (The Imprint)

6. A pattern of sexual abuse in Massachusetts group homes

A Boston Globe review this spring found 20 cases of sexual mistreatment of children and young adults in Massachusetts group homes over three years, and experts fear many more go unreported. (Boston Globe)

My Own Kids

On multiple occasions, children on my caseload were sent to facilities that put them in dangerous, even life-threatening situations. One boy, let’s call him Al, was punished by a low-level staffer and forced to stand outside on a ten-degree night in a T-shirt and shorts. Al had mental health issues. He walked 35 miles back to Minneapolis and nearly froze to death. Another time, after he tried to kill himself, he was sent to a religious group home for suicide prevention. They spent the month trying to convert him instead of helping him.

The state forcibly closed a privately run group home in St. Cloud for repeated violations, including head banging that caused concussions and sex in front of staff. Two St. Paul boys’ group homes have also closed, and outstate Minnesota, like the rest of the country, has long been short of qualified foster homes.

Earlier KARA Reporting: Mesabi Academy

In 2016, APM Reports investigated Mesabi Academy, a privately run juvenile facility in Buhl. They found boys as young as 12 alleging sexual abuse by staff, abuse allegations that were never reported to the county, a facility that dragged its feet on investigators’ requests, and a company that threatened to sue St. Louis County when it tried to end its contract. Local officials pushed to keep it open to protect jobs.

Mesabi had far more complaints than any other large juvenile facility licensed by the Minnesota Department of Corrections:

Source: APM Reports, from Minnesota Departments of Human Services and Corrections data, 2009 to 2016.

After the stories ran, counties pulled their boys out and Mesabi closed in June 2016. In 2021, APM Reports revealed that 17 former residents had received $1.495 million in a legal settlement with the parent company, KidsPeace. (APM Reports)

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

Some programs get it right. Missouri closed its large youth prisons decades ago and replaced them with small facilities, usually 10 to 30 young people each, close to their families. Kids are supervised through relationships, not locks and isolation. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Missouri has not had a single youth suicide in its facilities since, and 85% of young people leave engaged in school or work. In Nebraska, Boys Town’s Family Home Program places five or six young people in a real home with a trained married couple. Boys Town has run the model for 50 years and says its research shows former residents, even those with the most severe problems, grow into adults who look much like everyone else in mental health, employment, and family life. Both have something in common: small, family-like, close to home, and willing to measure their results.

These are all pieces of the same puzzle. As the old saying goes, “What we do to our children, they will do to society.”

Do Something With This

If this makes you angry, do something with it this week.

Call or email your state representative and ask one question:

How many of Minnesota’s state ward children were:

arrested, became parents, self-harmed or

tried to kill themselves last year?

No names. Just the numbers.

If they can’t tell you, that is the answer.

Find your representative here: . Then share this post.

Every person who reads it is one more person who knows what the system won’t say.

Do you have a story about a children’s group home?

Contact us at info@invisiblechildren.org.

And if you want to help us keep asking, support KARA:

Written by Mike Tikkanen, longtime CASA guardian ad litem