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Foster care needs uniform management
The Dispatch outlined some much-needed upgrades to the foster care system in its Wednesday editorial “State foster care needs an upgrade.” These improvements will work best if all interested parties collaborate to address the administrative and funding inconsistencies in the county-administered child-welfare system, caused in part by a reliance on local funds for 44 percent of total funding.
State funding accounts for only 10 percent of the $850 million spent in this system each year; local and federal funding make up the rest. Forty-three counties are without a local levy to support child welfare, and others have wide variations in their levels of support. Funding disparities are magnified by programmatic differences among county child-welfare agencies.
There is no statewide standard for screening children into the system, so children with nearly identical needs can be placed into different levels of foster care depending on where they live. A common tool to appropriately screen children when they enter the foster-care system could increase consistency across the state and eventually lead to counties paying common rates for common services, rather than the current system where nearly every county has its own rate-negotiation process.
A cross-county collaboration effort in southwestern Ohio started when a group of counties realized they were each paying different rates for similar services; now they negotiate these rates as a group.
Efforts like these, as well as other inter- and intracounty collaborations, display innovation in shared services, which can lead to county savings in the long run. These efforts can enhance the recommendations made by Attorney General Mike DeWine.
Tara Dolansky
22 April 2013
