270 Colorado kids ran from foster care and treatment centers in one year. Now lawmakers are talking about a fence. 

Colorado is on track to make key changes to prevent children and teens from running away from residential treatment centers and foster care, and keeping track of them when they do. 

Part of the plan is to allow a state-run residential treatment center for young people with behavioral health problems to put up a fence — something currently prohibited under Colorado law. Legislation would allow a new youth treatment center set to open in Denver next year to build a secure perimeter fence. 

Current state law allows only facilities that keep kids who have been accused or convicted of crimes — juvenile detention centers — to put up secure fences. 

Another bill would require the state to have a “risk assessment tool” to try to predict which kids will try to run away, track data about runaways to get a better scope of the problem, and create a plan to find them. 

The legislation follows two years of study triggered by the deaths of two boys who ran away from different Denver-area residential treatment centers and were struck and killed by cars. The runaway problem is widespread, a Colorado Sun/9 News investigation found, and residential care centers struggle to contain children because of strict laws regarding fences, locked doors and physical restraint.

In 2022, about 270 children and teens ran away from foster care placements and residential treatment centers, according to state data. 

“I can’t tell you much about any of those children because our state doesn’t keep adequate data,” Colorado Child Protection Ombudsman Stephanie Villafuerte testified recently before a legislative committee. “I can’t tell you why they ran. I can’t tell you how long they were gone. I can’t tell you what they suffered while they were missing.”

She wants a coordinated response among state and local agencies to look for children who have run away from foster care or treatment, something that does not exist. “In other words, we never go looking for these children, ever,” Villafuerte said. 

Both bills, House Bill 1172 and Senate Bill 151, are sailing through committee hearings with support from Democrats and Republicans.

Elizabeth Montoya, whose 12-year-old son Timmy ran away from the Tennyson Center for Children in 2020 and was killed by a vehicle, said better regulations might have saved him. For starters, Montoya was not notified that her son had left campus multiple times on the same day, even though she had called the center that day to check on him. 

“Instead, I was notified after his third and final run,” she told lawmakers. “This began a long, 26-hour, agonizing wait where no one had seen or heard from him. The entire time, he lay battered and broken from his injuries at St. Anthony Hospital, listed only as Mike Alpha Doe.” 

A Facebook post about the unidentified boy in a Colorado hospital eventually led to Montoya. “I was able to spend the last 12 hours of his life by his bedside, although he was unresponsive,” she said at the state Capitol. 

Montoya was on a state task force that studied the runaway issue for two years and presented its recommendations to the legislature. Another parent on the panel, Kevin Lash, said his son ran away from nearly every one of his 13 placements in treatment centers, beginning at age 11.

“When a troubled child has run away and you know he’s dysregulated and unsafe, it’s the most terrifying thing a parent can imagine,” Lash said. 

His son with behavioral health problems ran away from church, sports practices, counseling sessions, among other places. “I was often surprised to find that many of the facilities in which he was placed were little more equipped to stop his running than we were as parents at home,” Lash said. His son would run away for weeks or months at a time, as far as California, and as he got older, became involved in criminal activities, Lash said.

The new regulations would require that residential centers notify parents within 24 hours of discovering that a child is missing, and that they make repeated attempts to reach parents or guardians. They also would require that centers have a written policy on how they prevent runaways or attempt to find kids who have run away, and they must provide a copy of the policy to parents.

State officials said changes — particularly a facility with a secure perimeter — are needed not only to protect children but to prevent them from being sent out of state to secure centers. 

Colorado is sending children to behavioral health treatment centers in Arkansas, Texas, Illinois and other states, said Robert Werthwein, senior advisor for behavioral health and access at the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing. Having a secure facility would “prevent unfortunate accidents or death to young people,” he said. 

The legislation regarding a fence pertains to only one facility — a state-run youth center funded by federal COVID relief dollars being built on the Fort Logan campus in southwestern Denver. The center is expected to open by the end of 2026. Privately run psychiatric residential facilities for young people still would be prohibited from building secure fences.

Perry May, deputy director of health facilities at the Colorado Department of Human Services, previously operated youth residential centers where employees are instructed to follow children and teens who run away but are not allowed to physically restrain them. With a fenced-in facility, kids could run out into a field to get away from staff, but would not be able to leave the premises, he said.

“I know what it is like to work in a facility when there is no fence and you are serving some of the toughest kids,” he said. “It’s much better to have a kid who is escalated and needs to get away from a situation and needs to calm themselves down to not have to run and have staff walking behind, trying to talk them into coming back, trying to prevent them from running into traffic.”