Dewine’s budget invests in future of Ohio’s children

Gov. Mike Dewine has proposed doubling the state’s investment in Ohio’s children services and foster care system in the next state budget. This is unprecedented in state history and will literally help save children’s lives.

Here is what his investments will mean:

• $30 million to the State Child Protection Allocation will give agencies flexible funding to pay the rising costs of serving children with high-quality foster care and behavioral health services.

• $25 million for multisystem youth will prevent parents from having to relinquish custody of children with developmental disabilities or severe mental illness so that they can get the treatment they need.

• $8.5 million to support struggling grandparents and other kin care providers who unexpectedly find themselves caring for children, and to invest in recruiting and serving much-needed foster parents.

• $5.5 million to expand the Bridges program for foster youth who emancipate from our system without achieving permanency.

• $4.5 million to expand evidence-based programs like Ohio START and 30 Days to Family to prevent children from coming into foster care.

• $2.6 million to help caseworkers be more efficient and productive in the field.

From his sponsorship of the Adoption and Safe Families Act in Congress to his funding of innovative foster care prevention programs as Ohio attorney general, Dewine has been committed throughout his career to child permanency and family stability. That’s why when he was elected governor in November, county children services agency leaders knew that for the first time we would have a passionate champion for improving outcomes in our beleaguered system. As governor, he is delivering.

As attorney general, Dewine was the first Ohio leader not only to recognize the opiate epidemic’s toll on children, but to do something about it — by channeling federal funding to create an evidence-based program called Ohio START (Sobriety, Treatment and Reducing Trauma) that the Public Children Services Association of Ohio is pleased to administer.

Now in 32 counties across the state, Ohio START works with families addicted to substances by providing them with intense traumainformed case management services and a dedicated peer mentor. The program aims to reduce the number of children being removed from their families and, if they do need to be removed, helps them to safely return home sooner.

Ohio START was one of many much-needed programs Mike Dewine helped create for children and families. Our system has suffered from a lack of state leadership, vision and resources. Ohio’s children services system is in crisis — a crisis long in the making.

Throughout 2018, more than 26,700 children spent time in foster care because it was not safe for them to live at home. On any given day, nearly 16,000 Ohio children are living away from their homes. Either way we count it, over 3,000 more Ohio kids are living away from their homes compared with five years ago. Not only are more children coming into foster care, they are coming with more complex needs, they are staying longer and county agencies are struggling to meet these challenging needs, find available foster homes for them and maintain an adequate workforce.

This is not good for children and their families. This is not good for communities. This is not good for agency caseworkers, half of whom meet the threshold for PTSD. And this is not good for the future of our great state.

Gov. Dewine has charged his talented and experienced Cabinet in the departments of Job and Family Services, Medicaid, Mental Health and Addiction Services, all in coordination with his own Office of Children’s Initiatives, with bringing his promises to fruition. Through these investments, the governor will literally change the trajectory of families. He is proposing an investment that will help families and young people as they grow up to become more resilient, more stable and more productive.

We could not be more grateful and we urge the Ohio legislature to enact this funding in Ohio’s budget.

Washington Post columnist Mary Mcgrory wrote of first-term U.S. Sen. Dewine in 1997: “A lot of people in Washington profess to be champions of children. Senator Mike Dewine, an earnest, unpretentious, conservative first-timer, is the real thing.”

We in Ohio knew that even before he went to the U.S. Senate. Mike Dewine has always stood up for vulnerable children and continues to do so today.