In Lucas County, home to the city of Toledo, the cost to place children in foster care is soaring.
The county pays upwards of $21 million a year to place kids in the system. That’s $9 million more than just a few years ago, said Randy Muth, executive director of Lucas County Children Services.
“Two things drive placement costs: the number of kids you have in care and the amount you pay per day,” he said. “The number of kids that we have in congregate care facilities has gone up 5%. But costs have gone up 77%.”
The spike is largely the result of a piece of federal legislation passed in 2018 called the Family First Prevention Services Act. The legislation, meant to improve the foster care system, had the unintended impact of making that system more expensive for Ohio children’s services agencies to run.
The Family First Prevention Services Act
“The Family First Act had the best of intentions,” said Scott Britton, assistant director for the Public Children Services Association of Ohio.
The law shifted the focus toward prevention. It made it possible to use federal funds to prevent kids from entering the foster care system, rather than solely paying foster care costs after a child had been separated from their family.
“We were excited because that's not what we want to do unless it's absolutely necessary to protect a child from abuse or neglect,” Britton said. “We would much prefer to keep the child safely at home and provide services to the family so that they can stabilize and raise their own children.”
At the same time, the legislation also made it more difficult to use federal funds to place children in residential facilities.
“We know that kids do better when they grow up in families rather than in institutions and the act's aim was really to disincentivize the placement of kids in these congregate care facilities,” Britton said.
“But the devil is always in the details.”
Why are placement costs rising?
Setting up evidence-based prevention services is expensive, and it takes time for those services to work.
“So [children’s services] have not drawn down as much funding from the feds on the prevention side as what was maybe envisioned,” Britton explained.
Meanwhile, since the pandemic, more kids have come into the care of children’s services with serious mental health conditions and developmental disabilities like autism.
Foster families aren’t always equipped to care for these children. They often require residential care for a higher level of care and treatment, Britton said. But the Family First Prevention Services Act made placement there more difficult
“It created a lot of hurdles to place kids in residential facilities, from special assessments to judicial engagement,” he said, “as well as making these facilities really improve the level of services that they provide."
Without fewer federal reimbursements to offset that cost, counties increasingly bear the brunt of it. Some are struggling to do so.
The impact on Ohio kids
In Lucas County, foster care placement costs rose so quickly, Muth worried about how the agency would continue meeting the local need.
“We started our budget process and I realized we're not going to make it. We're not going to make it to our next levy,” he said. “We actually cut spending in every other area. It was just that these placement costs went up so fast and so hard that we couldn't even get to the end of our normal levy cycle.”
The county put a new levy on the ballot. It passed, but other Ohio counties haven’t been as lucky. Britton said Coshocton and Adams counties both had levies fail recently.
“Ohio relies more heavily on local dollars to pay for children's services funding than just about every other state in the nation, and that's why local levies are very important,” he said. “We know that property tax reform is on the horizon and we're a little concerned about what that might mean for our counties to be able to keep pace with these rising costs.”
Lucas County will have another levy on the ballot later this year. Muth is hopeful it too will pass.
If it doesn’t, some kids likely won’t get the help they deserve, Muth said.
“If this levy doesn’t pass…there's no question that we won't be funded for 100% of the need.”
