The mandate of Lucas County Children Services is to protect the county’s 96,000 children from abuse and neglect.
The sad reality is that by the end of this year 900 new cases of substantiated abuse or neglect will be added to ongoing cases, resulting in more than 11,400 children and 4,400 families receiving protective services.
The best practices of LCCS staff, along with community resources, result in the majority of those family’s retaining custody of their children while receiving in-home services.
However, for some of those children, protection means court-ordered temporary custody given to LCCS and placement out of their homes.
Today in Lucas County 920 children are in placements including foster homes, group homes, and residential treatment centers.
Across Ohio, 15,000 children are in placements. Locally and statewide, the number of children in need of placement has been increasing at an alarming rate, even where there is no history of abuse or neglect and therefore no need for mandated protection.
How can this be?
The answer is familiar: systems dedicated to the human condition are all overwhelmed.
More children are diagnosed with severe mental illness, are born with developmental disabilities, or are involved in significant criminal activity.
All systems cannot hire enough qualified staff, and capacity is stretched.
The mentalhealth and developmental disabilities systems are then limited to often serving the most straightforward cases.
Juvenile justice reform philosophy results in avoidance of detention for some criminal behaviors.
The answer is complicated because the human condition is complicated.
Too often children live with multiple problems: mental illness and developmental disability; developmental disability and criminal activity; or, all of the above and more.
When the capacity of systems cannot provide the necessary care either individually or collaboratively, the court often orders custody to LCCS, which has become the “system of last resort” for children with multiple and complex conditions.
LCCS is meeting the need, but the system has reached a capacity crisis point.
Treatment and placement options for children are severely overburdened locally, statewide, and nationally. The supply of foster homes and group homes is dwindling.
Residential centers can be selective with admissions when there is a long line of needy children.
Public policy has deemed secure facilities largely unwarranted, favoring community alternatives, which largely do not exist.
In the quest for appropriate placement, LCCS searches extend beyond county and state borders.
Placements for children needing protective care because of abuse or neglect are an on-going challenge for LCCS; placements for children with complex and multiple issues, however, absent of abuse or neglect, are extraordinarily difficult to find and costly in the end.
Placement costs are at an all-time high for LCCS. Children removed from their homes are further traumatized when they linger without a place to go for care.
Gov. Mike DeWine has pushed initiatives to expand foster care, adoption, and kinship care, and LCCS has leveraged of all of them.
As welcome and needed as they are, those initiatives are the “low-hanging fruit” relative to demand for intensive treatment and care.
Ohio is one of nine states where child welfare is administered by counties with state oversight.
As every county, urban and rural, is challenged, a statewide solution is needed.
It is well past time for the administration and the General Assembly to step up with leadership and meaningful policy for each system to achieve its specific purpose, to cross collaborate on complex placements, and end county children services as the option of last resort.
KATHY VASQUEZ
South Toledo
Chair, Lucas County Children Services Board
First Published December 21, 2023, 5:00 a.m.
