ProtectOhio helps keep Richland County children safe

By

June 17, 2010

Fewer Richland County children enter the child welfare system, spend less time away from home and are safely reunited quicker with their own families thanks to ProtectOhio.

Children taken from their homes are also more likely to be placed with relatives, rather than foster families. Those ultimately adopted have a shorter wait for a permanent home.

These positive outcomes are just part of the remarkable accomplishments during the last 12 years of ProtectOhio, the federal, budget neutral Title IV-E waiver demonstration project that has changed the nature of child welfare work in participating counties such as Richland.

The current waiver expires July 31, 2010, and children and families in Ohio desperately need to see it extended again. ProtectOhio is used in 18 counties in the Buckeye state, covering one-third of the children and youth involved child welfare cases.

The waiver has made a huge difference for Richland County Children Services in terms of keeping children in their own homes or with relatives. In 2002, the agency had 250 children in custody. That number was down to 46 at the end of 2009.

In October through December 2002, the agency had 13,568 "paid placement days," i.e. children in foster homes or residential settings while in agency custody. That number has steadily declined and was at 3,742 in the first quarter of 2010, a 45 percent decline in eight years.

Traditional child welfare funding in the United States offers old-fashioned funding formulas tied directly to removing children with deprivation factors from their homes and families. Experts recognize taking children away from even dysfunctional homes is a traumatic experience for the youth.

Unshackled by artificial restrictions, ProtectOhio’s flexible funding has allowed local child protective service agencies to invest in a wide array of services to keep children safe by helping and strengthening families in need.

It has allowed child welfare experts in each county to customize efforts for the individual family, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach found in the traditional funding that often limits an agency’s ability to produce successful outcomes.

In short, it has allowed ProtectOhio participants to better meet guidelines and requirements found in the federal government’s own Child and Family Services Reviews. -- Keep children safe at home where possible. When not possible, find the least restrictive environment possible, especially with other relatives. When a child has to be placed into foster care, work should be done to return him to his own home as quickly as possible.

A comprehensive evaluation report on ProtectOhio, prepared by the Human Services Research Institute in Oregon, accompanies this package and spells out in empirical fashion the program’s accomplishments and challenges.

ProtectOhio counties have fewer paid foster care placement days and at a lower average daily cost. Since 2002, for example, demonstration counties have reduced the number of days of paid care by almost 40 percent. At the same time, they have increased investment to safely maintain children in their own homes.

The ProtectOhio demonstration and evaluation also shows safety is not compromised when counties are allowed to invest federal funds in a full continuum of prevention and diversion services, along with placement and adoption services. Children in ProtectOhio counties had 10 percent shorter case episodes and were less likely to have their case re-opened within one year of it being closed.

The flexible funding found in ProtectOhio has allowed a sea change in the way child welfare is practiced. It could not have arrived at a more opportune time.

As the economy worsened, traditional counties have been forced to reduce in-home services to families even as ProtectOhio counties increased their efforts in areas such as school-based social workers, family team meetings, mental health assistance, drug/alcohol screening and assistance, court-liaison teams and kinship navigator programs.

Ohio is one of only five states in the nation taking advantage of the Title IV-E waiver demonstration project. All have differing success stories.

But as Congress and other national leaders consider comprehensive child welfare financial reform, these five states offer a wonderful ongoing “Petri dish” of new thinking and ideas that could continue to “test market” new techniques and strategies before they are rolled out on a national basis.

The HSRI report said, “Some of the current waiver strategies have shown good effects; it is important to allow the most promising of these to further mature and reveal the full impact on child-serving systems and on child-level outcomes.”

Now is not the time to revert back to the “old school” days of child welfare funding. Current economic conditions require government agencies, including child protective agencies, to find new and innovative ways to work effectively and efficiently.

The ProtectOhio waiver counties have a proven track record of success and are ready and willing to continue looking for additional techniques and strategies that will keep children safe at a cost the American taxpayer can afford to pay.

(Carl Hunnell is the communications supervisor for Richland County Children Services. For more information on ProtectOhio, call him at 419-774-4104.)

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