Boost funding of children services
The Ohio House stepped up for abused and neglected children. Its state budget plan includes an additional $15 million annually for county children services agencies. The resources are desperately needed, Ohio at the bottom in its support for child protection.
Now the state Senate must match the commitment, or better yet, devote more funding to the cause. Even a doubling of the current $45 million per year would leave the state last in the nation for its support.
State support declined from $57 million a year in 2008 to its current level. That decrease has coincided with the wreckage of the opioid epidemic. What easily can be overlooked is the fallout for children, “the invisible victims,” according to the Factbook prepared by the Public Children Services Association of Ohio.
More Ohio children today are in protective custody. Agencies have experienced a 17 percent increase in placement costs the past three years, translating to $56 million annually. In 2015, half of all incidents of children removed from homes involved parental drug use, and in more than half of those episodes, the parents were using heroin or other opioids.
The House rightly responded to the opioid crisis, the resources for children services part of an appropriately comprehensive $170 million proposal. What senators should not miss is the detail in the Factbook.
Consider that addicts often relapse. Thus, many children face a longer time under protective care. This launches a “snowball effect,” as the report puts it. The availability of foster care narrows. Many kinship families struggle with the prolonged custody. Children born with addictions require extended care and treatment in residential facilities.
The agencies feel the strain, relying on limited local dollars, turnover in staff increasing with the lack of progress, the relentless trauma and long hours.
Ohio provides 10 cents of every dollar spent on children services. The typical state puts up 40 cents. It’s time to do much better for vulnerable children.
Cybercrooks stole tool from US government
The particularly nasty computer program dubbed WannaCry that attacked hospitals, businesses and government agencies around the world this past weekend was like a cybercrime highlight reel, a compilation of by-now familiar elements that played out on an epic scale.
What’s different this time is that the conscience-free hackers used a stolen tool reportedly developed by the National Security Agency to exploit a hidden weakness in the Windows operating system and spread their “ransomware.”
It’s tempting to howl at the NSA for not alerting companies like Microsoft when its researchers find vulnerabilities in their products. The reality, though, is that doing so would reduce the effectiveness of cybertools that have become an integral part of modern efforts by agencies like the NSA to fight terrorism, international criminal organizations and rogue states. What’s needed is a better effort to determine if and when a vulnerability discovered by the feds represents too great a threat to keep it secret.
WannaCry should not have reached disastrous proportions — Microsoft released a patch that could close the vulnerability in March, well before the NSA’s tool was released in usable form. Yet tens of thousands of computers weren’t updated, allowing the malware to spread.