More counties help kids hurt by drug use

Four more southern Ohio counties are joining an effort to provide specialized services to families whose children have been abused or neglected because of their parents’ drug use.

Adams, Brown, Lawrence and Scioto counties are to receive money to bring the pilot program — called Ohio START (Sobriety, Treatment and Reducing Trauma) — to their communities, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said Tuesday. That makes 18 counties, all of them hard-hit by the state’s heroin and opioid-medication crisis, participating in the program.

“The goal of this program is to stabilize families harmed by parental drug use so that both kids and parents can recover and move forward with abuse-free and addiction-free lives,” DeWine said in a news release.

DeWine announced the creation of the program last month and allotted $3.5 million in Victims of Crime Act grants to fund it. His office then added another $1 million from that fund to support the additional counties, for a total of nearly $4.6 million.

The Public Children Services Association of Ohio is administering the grants on behalf of each county. The four that joined this week had sat out the initial process because they weren’t sure they could get the resources in place to manage the requirements, said Scott Britton of the public association.

“The initial turnaround time was short, and some agencies weren’t able to get it through the proper channels,” Britton said. “All of those ducks had to get in a row.”

The program requires county 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. Family peer mentoring, counseling for children and addiction treatment for adult family members are hallmarks of the program, which is modeled after a similar effort in Kentucky.

Throughout Ohio, at least 50 percent of children placed in foster care in 2015 were there because of abuse or neglect connected to parental drug use.