Stitt’s task force aims to boost support for children
Gov. Kevin Stitt has formed a special child welfare task force to study ways to reduce the number of Oklahoma children in foster care.
The governor said about 7 of every 1,000 children in the state are in an outof-home placement, slightly higher than the national average of 6 per 1,000.
“We need to decrease this to 4 per 1,000 to achieve Top 10 status,” he said.
Stitt named eight people to the board on Wednesday, including a member of his Cabinet, Secretary of Human Services Justin Brown. Four others will be named later, one each by the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, and two picked by Deborah Shropshire, director of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services.
In his executive order setting up the new task force, Stitt mentioned the Pinnacle Plan, established in 2012 to settle a federal class action lawsuit against the state alleging the abuse and neglect of children in its care.
The settlement agreement called for commitments by the state to make major improvements in child care and gave a team of three outside experts formal authority to monitor progress. In 2017, the examiners determined the state had not made sufficient progress, and the monitoring period was extended indefinitely. In a 2022 report, the examiners said the state had made “good faith efforts to achieve substantial and sustained progress.”
The governor said the best way to improve the state’s child welfare system was “to ensure children never end up in the system in the first place.”
He added: “The best environment for a child is having their two, biological parents living in the same household.”
Stitt said the task force’s challenge was partly to improve the child welfare system, but “reducing the amount of children in the system is even more critical.”
He said that will require “proper resources to ensure that all our citizens can provide a safe, healthy and happy home for their children.”