Residential Facility Oversight Moving Forward

The Idaho Legislature’s Joint Legislative Oversight Committee received a progress report Friday from the Office of Performance Evaluations on the state’s oversight of children’s residential care facilities — finding significant headway on a slate of 2025 recommendations while flagging several items still requiring legislative action.

Of 19 recommendations issued in the 2025 OPE review, 13 have been completed and two are currently underway. The remaining four cannot be resolved without further action by the Legislature itself.

Among this year’s accomplishments, lawmakers passed House Bill 723, which established a youth bill of rights for children in residential facilities, required annual unannounced inspections, set up a formal process for interviewing children and staff, and mandated reporting of restraint and seclusion incidents.

Four Recommendations Still Awaiting Legislative Action

The unfinished items cover a range of oversight concerns: extending the state’s licensing authority to include treatment oversight, requiring public reporting of facility data, adding confirmed abuse perpetrators to the Child Protection Central Registry, and designating a specific entity responsible for investigating abuse at residential facilities.

Rep. Jordan Redman, a Republican from Coeur d’Alene, signaled those four items will be a priority when the Legislature reconvenes in January. “Because I think at the heart of it, it’s protecting kids,” Redman told the committee, as reported by the Bonner County Daily Bee. “And I think there’s some excellent recommendations.”

The committee also voted to direct the OPE to conduct a separate evaluation of hospital Medicaid billing practices, including a review of so-called “upcoding” — a practice in which services are billed at a higher rate than the care actually provided. Idaho lawmakers have recently shown heightened attention to healthcare payment issues, including a task force launched after a coverage network dispute in eastern Idaho.

CTE Programs Facing Instructor Shortage

The committee also received data on Career and Technical Education in Idaho’s public schools, revealing a system under strain despite broad enrollment.

More than 1,000 CTE programs were offered during the 2026 school year, with over 151,000 public school and public charter school students participating. However, underlying trends point to growing gaps in program availability.

Roughly 40 percent of surveyed schools said they had paused or cancelled at least one CTE program since 2022. Of those schools, 76 percent attributed the cuts to a shortage of qualified instructors — a pipeline problem that spans multiple disciplines.

The data also identified where demand is going unmet. More than half of surveyed schools — 54 percent — cited health professions and public safety programs as areas of unmet need. Fourteen percent of schools reported being unable to satisfy student demand for agriculture-related CTE offerings, a notable figure in a state where agricultural industries remain economically central.

What Comes Next

With the 2026 legislative session concluded, the four unresolved children’s residential facility recommendations are expected to anchor early committee work when lawmakers return to Boise in January 2027. Redman’s public framing of those items as a “focus” suggests the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee intends to bring legislative proposals forward rather than wait on administrative action.

The OPE’s new assignment — evaluating Medicaid billing and upcoding at hospitals — adds another item to the interim workload, and results could feed into healthcare-related legislation next session.

On CTE, the instructor shortage data is likely to prompt further discussion about how Idaho recruits and retains qualified technical educators. Whether the Legislature addresses that through incentive programs, credentialing reform, or targeted funding remains to be seen as committees begin their interim work ahead of the January session.

The breadth of issues before the oversight committee — from child welfare to healthcare billing to workforce education — reflects the wide-ranging responsibilities Idaho lawmakers are tracking between sessions as state agencies implement prior directives and surface new needs.