FIRST OF TWO PARTS
`We need in this state to come to grips with standards,' said Arnold Tompkins, director of the Ohio Department of Human Services. `We have to rethink the way we do business. We have 88 counties and 88 different ways of doing things.'
Tompkins, lawmakers and other state and local officials said a Dayton Daily News foster care series in February pointed out major flaws in the system that must be addressed.
The series showed that seriously troubled kids are being sent to foster homes instead of detention or treatment, caseworkers are too overwhelmed to effectively monitor them, and kids are left unsupervised, neglected or abused.
It also found that nearly a third of the state's most troubled foster children are being placed by private foster care agencies, which operate with little oversight.
`We've got a system terribly out of kilter,' said Attorney General Betty Montgomery. `Between the community problems, the divided responsibilities and the tidal wave of children and cases, you end up with a piecemeal system.'
She and others call for legislation that imposes tougher standards and gives state Human Services officials more authority to hold both public and private foster care agencies accountable. Some state officials are already taking action:
* State Rep. Jeff Jacobson, R-Phillipsburg, said he will send letters this week to other legislators that explain the problem and will ask that the state auditor's office recommend ways to improve Human Services monitoring practices. "It's a story we're hearing all too often. Millions of dollars are being spent, but the government isn't monitoring what happens to it, so people in need don't end up getting much," Jacobson said.
* State Sen. Rhine McLin, D-Dayton, and State Rep. Jack Ford, D-Toledo, are researching bills that would step up the oversight of private agencies and limit how often a foster child could be moved. In some cases, they say, executives at private agencies may be collecting high salaries and other perks at the expense of children.
* The Republican and Democratic candidates for both governor and attorney general are calling for changes. Richard Cordray, the Democrat running for attorney general, said the state should take stronger action against agencies that operate improperly or spend most of their budgets on salaries and administration. The lack of oversight is outrageous, he said. `The system is so fragmented that everybody is making excuses for themselves and blaming someone else for the problem.'
* Human Services Director Tompkins said he is bringing together officials from his department, county children services boards and other child care groups to examine the entire child welfare system. Several in-house meetings have already been held, and a "blueprint committee" is expected to release a report recommending changes by mid-summer. Officials say it will likely take a year for recommendations to become law.
Currently, department officials say they have the power to make sure agencies don't violate health and safety regulations or the agency's own policies, but have little say beyond that. Individual counties, not the state, decide how many social workers to employ, how large caseloads should be, when children should be removed from homes and how long they stay in foster care.
About 17,000 children are in the state's custody, most in foster care, and the demand for foster homes is exploding. Caseloads have tripled in the last decade, and Tompson said overburdened counties need more state direction.
`In child welfare more than any other area, I have less authority to do things. We have to look at how we deal with the kids in custody,' he said.
Tompkins said part of the upcoming discussions should focus on how the system - instead of spending thousands of dollars to keep a child in foster care - can devote more resources to counseling parents and helping them learn healthy ways to deal with their children.
He said the so-called emphasis on family preservation in Ohio `has been a lie' because the funding isn't available to allow caseworkers to work with families one-on-one.
Citing a study that found 80 percent of inmates on death row in a New Jersey prison had been in foster care, Tompkins said social workers today have very difficult choices to make when trying to decide if a child should be removed from a home.
They must ask themselves, `What's worse, a dysfunctional family or a dysfunctional foster care system?'
He said the system doesn't work well, in part, because the state historically has not had a huge financial interest in child welfare. Most of the money spent on child protection comes from federal or county tax dollars, and the state has never developed a policy for treating unruly, delinquent and troubled youth.
In 1995, Ohio contributed only 9 percent to the total expenditure on child protection services in Ohio - a smaller percentage than any state except Mississippi. Child welfare in Ohio costs an estimated $500 million a year.
`Because the state is a local-control state, in some ways it has abdicated responsibility,' Tompkins said. `Giving local control to counties has left them with a responsibility that they aren't always equipped to handle.'
He said the Department of Human Services should have the ability to step in when counties don't properly run their foster care systems, and `perhaps even take it over if they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing.'
`The key right now is we have a problem and let's bring resources together to see if we can't remedy the problem,' Voinovich said. `Some (foster care agencies) are doing a good job, some are not. For those that aren't, we need to get on them.'
Ohio Secretary of State Bob Taft, the Republican candidate for governor, said the whole area of child welfare must be examined in depth. He said the newspaper's series showed Ohio has a `major, major problem that we are all going to have to really examine at the state level.'
Taft said, as governor, he would consider advocating for legislation that would give the state more authority and oversight, increase training requirements for foster agency staff and foster parents, give tax breaks to parents who adopt foster children, and reward or penalize counties depending on whether they place children in distant counties.
`It really concerns me when out-of-county placements are made and there is no follow-up,' Taft said.
As of last fall, 3,800 children in Ohio were in foster homes outside of their home counties and the vast majority of them were youths from urban counties now living in suburban or rural areas. Teachers, police and other community officials complain that the home counties frequently won't pay for counseling, tutoring or other services for these youths, and caseworker support drops off as well.
Montgomery and former Ohio Attorney General Lee Fisher, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, cite out-of-county foster care placements as one of the biggest problems in the system. They noted that such placements increased dramatically after the passage of Reclaim Ohio in 1995, which they called a well-intentioned but flawed budget initiative to reduce the number of youths in juvenile detention.
Some changes in system under considerationPublished: Sunday, April 26, 1998 Page: 18A State and county officials, including Arnold Tompkins, head of the Ohio Department of Human Resources, say Ohio's foster care system need to be overhauled. Among the changes being considered are: * Giving the state more authority to enact uniform standards and monitor public and private foster care agencies. Currently, for example, private agencies charge counties premium rates for placing foster children into `treatment homes,' but no statewide standards define how much training foster parents need to receive a `treatment home' designation. * Limiting to two the number of times an agency can move a foster child. Some foster children have lived in 10 or more foster homes while in a county's custody. * Enacting procedures to allow children who can never be returned home to be moved more quickly into adoptive homes. Children should not be growing up in foster care, Tompkins said. * Implementing a new statewide computer system for children services caseworkers and requiring private and public foster care agencies to submit data to the state. The data would include the number of times a child has been moved; the number of times a child has encountered problems with police, courts or schools, and the amount of counseling and other services provided to the child. * Increasing communication between agencies and researching which methods used to monitor Medicaid and nursing homes might also be used to monitor foster care. * Tracking how much money various agencies spend on children and what kinds of results they achieve, and surveying parents and others who deal with agencies. Data compiled should be made public, Tompkins said, and could be used by public agencies when deciding which private agencies to hire to place children. * Developing a list of `best practices' procedures for agencies to follow. Currently, Tompkins said, if a child dies while in a county's custody, the state just checks to see if the county followed its own procedures and policies. `We don't comment on whether the procedures are appropriate,' he said. * Setting up a statewide toll-free telephone number to accept complaints against public and private foster care agencies and making sure someone follows up on complaints. `I'm sure the way we handle complaints is sporadic,' Tompkins said.
|
`Ohio has no system for dealing with unruly, violent or delinquent children,' Fisher said. `I'm concerned juvenile courts are placing serious offenders in foster care without adequate determination of whether that's an appropriate choice.'
Fisher said he would push for new standards if elected governor, and said Voinovich should have been lobbying a long time ago for legislation to address the problems.
`This has not been a high enough priority for this administration,' Fisher said.
For example, Fisher said, a planned statewide computer system for children services workers has experienced numerous delays and Voinovich should have made sure it was on the fast track.
`I think it's outrageous that a management information system, which would help child workers spend more time with children and less time on paperwork, has been unnecessarily delayed,' Fisher said. `We need to be measuring how well a child is doing in foster care and basing reimbursements on the quality of that care.'
Jacqui Sensky, deputy chief of staff for Voinovich, said the governor does advocate increased oversight of the foster care system and better tracking of children in its care.
But she said the governor understands that in Ohio, counties have local control and are ultimately responsible for making sure the children in their custody are doing well.
`The primary responsibility, for these systems, like it or not, resides with the county,' Sensky said. `Counties are not taking strong ownership of children in their communities. The next overhaul has to be pushing communities like Cleveland to keep kids in Cleveland.'
But he said some counties have far less money than others to spend on children, and the state can't expect those counties to strengthen child protection services without financial help.
Schneider noted that federal money is available to pay for 60 percent of the cost of removing a child from a home. But little federal money is available to help counties pay for counseling and other services needed to keep the family together.
Counties have to "beg, borrow, steal and sometimes buy" such services from a patchwork of mental health boards and agencies across the state, he said. When services for families aren't available or are unaffordable, children end up staying too long in foster care.
"Seven out of 10 of all families with children in foster care have a substance-abuse problem. One out of four children lives in unsafe housing or is homeless. One out of six (family members) has a chronic or acute mental illness. It goes on and on," Schneider said. "The child protection system is trying to put its finger in the dike and keep it together as best it can ... but it's a struggle. You couldn't have created a more fragmented system if you tried."