What States Publish About Youth Residential Programs, and What They Don’t
We checked every state and DC for online inspection reports on youth residential programs. 13 states and DC publish none; 652 of the open programs we track are in them. Where reports are online, they are often partial, and some states take them down.
Contents
Most residential programs that hold young people (residential treatment centers, group homes, therapeutic boarding schools, wilderness programs) are licensed by a state agency, and the agency inspects them. Whether anyone outside the agency can read what the inspectors found depends on the state. We checked every state and the District of Columbia.
What we found #
- 13 states and the District of Columbia publish no licensing, inspection or complaint reports on youth residential programs online. 652 of the open programs in our records, 17% of them, are in those states, among them 99 in New York, 95 in Tennessee and 92 in Illinois.
- 9 more states publish something short of reports: a list of names, a score with no findings, education reviews, or reports for one kind of licence and not the one most programs hold.
- 28 states publish reports. We collect them: 80,489 so far. Even there, a state often publishes for one agency’s licence and not another’s.
- Some states take reports down. New Hampshire shows three years, Oklahoma 36 months, Colorado three years. Wyoming removes a program’s documents from its page when the program leaves its list.
- 736 serious findings (abuse by staff, sexual abuse, injurious restraints, 33 deaths) are on our serious findings page, each checked against the report by a person. All of them come from the 18 states where the reports are online.
We checked each state’s licensing agencies for reports published online between September 30 and October 1, 2026, and re-checked Oregon and Colorado on October 5. Program counts are the open programs in our directory as of October 12, 2026. A state that publishes nothing still inspects; its reports can be requested under its public records law.
States that publish nothing #
In these states we found no licensing, inspection or complaint reports on youth residential programs on any state website. The only route to them is a public records request.
| State | Open programs in our records |
|---|---|
| New York | 99 |
| Tennessee | 95 |
| Illinois | 92 |
| Indiana | 83 |
| Kentucky | 76 |
| Louisiana | 63 |
| New Jersey | 33 |
| Alaska | 31 |
| Mississippi | 31 |
| Kansas | 17 |
| New Mexico | 14 |
| Delaware | 9 |
| Vermont | 8 |
| District of Columbia | 1 |
| Total | 652 |
Two of them may change. New Mexico moved its licensing unit to the Health Care Authority on July 1, 2026; the Authority’s Division of Health Improvement already posts survey reports for other kinds of programs. Vermont writes licensing reports on its residential treatment programs, and one has reached the legislature as testimony, but the reports are not posted.
Several of these states do publish lists of licensed facilities: Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, Alaska, New York (mental health programs), Tennessee (mental health licences), and Kansas and Mississippi (psychiatric residential treatment facilities). A list says a program is licensed. It says nothing about what inspectors found there.
States that publish something short of reports #
| State | What is online | What is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Missouri | A registry of licence-exempt residential programs, a one-page PDF updated monthly | Any report on what happens inside them |
| Alabama | Mental health department site visit scores, a percentage per site | The findings behind the score |
| Massachusetts | Education department reviews of approved special education residential schools | Anything from the residential licence. New regulations take effect November 17, 2026 and may change this |
| Colorado | Health department inspections and citations for health-licensed facilities (psychiatric residential treatment facilities, psychiatric hospitals), last three years, in a dashboard that gives up its text one citation at a time | Anything from the child welfare licence, which most programs hold |
| South Carolina | Monthly health department enforcement actions | Youth programs almost never appear in them |
| Wisconsin | Health department surveys for youth crisis stabilisation and a few similar programs | Anything for group homes and residential care centers |
| North Dakota | Three federal survey reports for psychiatric residential facilities | Everything else |
| Nebraska | A licence lookup with inspection tables, behind a CAPTCHA | The tables were empty for residential licences |
| Rhode Island | Two Child Advocate investigation reports on named facilities | Licensing reports |
Where reports are online, it is often only part of them #
A program can hold a child welfare licence, a behavioral health licence or a health facility licence, from different agencies, and each agency decides for itself what to publish. In the 28 states with reports online, the gaps follow those lines:
- Ohio publishes compliance reviews of residential agencies from its children and youth department, starting July 2025. Its behavioral health licence publishes nothing.
- Maine and West Virginia publish behavioral health surveys. Their child welfare licences publish nothing.
- Oregon publishes site visits for residential care and therapeutic boarding schools, and the abuse reports its human services department substantiated. Complaint investigations and licensing actions are not published.
- Oklahoma publishes monitoring visits and complaints, but only substantiated complaints that did not rise to abuse or neglect. A program with no complaints listed may still have had them.
- Maryland publishes inspection summaries, one line per citation.
States also count different things. Texas marks each citation with a risk level. California, Michigan, Minnesota and Oklahoma say whether a complaint was substantiated. Utah gives a number of findings. A count of “violations” in one state is not the same measure as a count in the next, so comparisons between states compare unlike things. Comparing one state with itself over time does not have that problem.
Reports that disappear #
Some states publish a window, not a history:
- New Hampshire shows the previous three years. When a program loses its licence, its history goes with it.
- Oklahoma shows a rolling 36 months on each program’s page.
- Colorado’s dashboard keeps three years.
- Wyoming lists only current providers. When a provider leaves the list, its documents go with it: Normative Services Academy‘s are gone.
- Maine’s licence lookup has no permanent address for a licence or a document.
We keep a copy of each report we collect, and every report on our state pages links both to the state’s copy and to ours, so a report the state takes down can still be read.
Using these records #
- Inspection reports: the 28 states we collect, one page per state, searchable by program.
- Each program’s own page in the directory lists the inspection reports filed under every name it has used.
- Serious findings: deaths, abuse, injurious restraints and medical neglect, in the agency’s own words.
- If they’re licensed, does that mean they’re safe? What a licence does and does not mean.
- In the states with nothing online, the reports exist and can be requested. If you get them, send them to us and we will publish them with the rest.