Grants target kids affected by crisis

Public child- welfare agencies in more than a dozen southern Ohio counties overwhelmed by the state’s drug crisis are set to try a new intervention program that combines treatment for parents and specialized victim services for their children.

The pilot effort announced Wednesday is being funded with a $ 3.5 million Victims of Crime Act grant from the Ohio attorney general’s office and $75,000 from the national child- advocacy organization Casey Family

Programs. Each of the 14 counties involved — most of them are relatively small and rural — is to receive a little more than $ 212,000 during the next two and a half years.

“This investment comes at an absolutely critical time,” said Russ Moore, executive director of Gallia County Children Services. “We are facing an epidemic and we are desperate for any lifelines we can acquire.”

Across the state, at least 50 percent of children placed in foster care in 2015 were there because of abuse or neglect connected to parental drug use. In some counties, the rates exceed 75 percent.

“Children are staying in care longer, because their parents do not recover quickly from their opiate addiction,” said Angela Sausser, who heads the Public Children Services Association of Ohio. “This grant creates an opportunity for a new bestpractices model.”

The Sobriety, Treatment and Reducing Trauma program is modeled after a similar effort in Kentucky that saw significant reductions in the number of kids returning to foster care and far higher parental sobriety rates, officials said.

The Ohio program requires the public children services agencies, local behavioral- health agencies and family courts to work together on a coordinated response in cases where children have been victimized by family drug use.

Child welfare caseworkers are to work with a certified peer mentor to meet with families once a week, either in the home or elsewhere if the children have been removed from their home. The children are to receive any needed counseling; parental drug treatment would be billed to Medicaid or private insurance.

“It’s just a lot more people — people who are focused on the parent and the child,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said of the pilot program. He said the funding is “creative,” and not a traditional approach for crime- victim programming.

But, DeWine said, “These kids are victims.”

And many live in counties with insufficient resources. Ohio’s county-run system of child protective services is marked by great disparity, with property- rich counties such as Franklin able to generate millions of dollars in tax revenue to provide support services. Others, including rural Gallia, where property values are low and propertytax levies are a tough sell, struggle under the local- funding model.

Making matters worse, state funding for child protective services declined as the heroin and opioid epidemic surged in Ohio, which already spends less than any other state.

Moore, whose Gallia County agency was featured in the Dispatch last year, has seen his budget plunge from nearly $ 1.3 million in 2008 to less than $ 700,000 last year.

Speaking during the program announcement, Moore said too many children are being “traumatized and victimized by this scourge.” He said 18 of his county’s children are in foster care right now.

“Seventeen of them came into care because of parental opiate abuse,” Moore said. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s just shy of 100 percent.”