It’s a well known journalistic truth: people stop reading when they see numbers. Would they still stop if they realized that each statistic represents a teenager’s daily life?
That’s the question Kellijo Jeffries asks herself every day. She’s executive director of Portage County Job and Family Services, tasked with ensuring a bewildering array of children receive quality foster, residential or kinship care.
Now: the numbers. In Ohio, the state tallies 6,982 licensed foster homes and 2,459 kinship caregivers for 13,653 Ohio kids. Portage County JFS bears custodial responsibility for 77 children, nine of whom reside in residential treatment centers, and is involved in a noncustodial capacity with dozens more youths.
Thirty-two of the youths in JFS’s custodial care — meaning they've been removed from their homes — are aged 13 or older. But only three of Portage County’s 22 licensed foster families are willing and able to take kids in that age group.
Limited local foster or group home options means some kids land out of county. To keep kids local, JFS has operated an eight-bed group home on Brady Lake Road since December 2019. Jeffries said it’s housed 66 teens in that time. Now, JFS is set to transfer operations to a Wooster-based behavioral health organization.
The good news
Local numbers for foster care have plummeted since 2018, when Jeffies said heroin, methamphetamines and a general substance abuse epidemic sharply increased the number of children entering foster care. Then, 239 children were in JFS custody, including 25 youths in residential treatment facilities.
“We have been successful in Portage County with connecting more youths to kinship providers, some family, that those kids are intimately connected to: relatives or familiar people in their environments,” Jeffries said.
Also reducing the number of kids in permanent custody were more than 30 adoptions in the past three years, she said.
“I think the courts under [Portage County Juvenile/Probate Court] Judge [Patricia] Smith and some of her new programs have helped child welfare systems to reunify families quicker than we had historically,” she said.
And the bad
Even so, too many Portage County youths still land in group homes in neighboring counties. Visitation instantly becomes complicated, and sometimes impossible, for families working toward reunification. JFS, and by extension, the children, lose local relationships with area therapeutic, job and transition programs, Jeffries said.
Out-of-county placement can even affect how long youths spend in foster care. Even families that are willing to work on their case plans may find it difficult to meet the child’s therapeutic goals, especially if that means group counseling, she added.
It gets worse. Residential treatment facilities are meant to provide clinical interventions for kids who need to stabilize, but "there's far too often no viable step-down options, meaning a home to step into, a home that welcomes them,” Jeffries said. “I believe there are kids that stay in residential facilities and group homes longer than what they need to be because of the lack of foster homes throughout the country, not just in Portage County.”
Change is coming
Effective Aug. 1, JFS is transferring operations of the Brady Lake Road facility to The Village Network, a Wooster-based nonprofit behavioral health organization.
It actually marks improvement, Jeffries said. Since the 2018 high-water mark, JFS is unable to justify financing and filling the Brady Lake Road facility. The youth head count just isn’t there.
Transferring operations to The Village Network allows JFS to continue offering a housing opportunity for local youths, while allowing The Village Network to open the space to youths across the state, she said.
Christine Boyd, The Village Network’s executive vice president of communications and public relations, said her agency is in the process of obtaining licensure for the facility. If the licensure process plays out as the agency envisions, the Brady Lake Road group home will serve up to six boys and men aged 10-21, with placements made based on age and “appropriate clinical considerations,” she said.
Knowing The Village Network would be taking over operations, but not knowing if its facility licensure will be for boys or girls, or for what ages, JFS stopped placing teens at the Brady Lake Road group home a few months ago. Only one female teen remains there, and she’ll move to a local foster home in the near future, Jeffries said.
“We were not going to bring on any new kids, to have to turn around and tell them, ‘I’m sorry, there’s a potential that you’ll have to move.’ It’s very traumatic for kids to go into a placement and then have to leave again. Kids deserve to find a home environment,” Jeffries said.
How to help
To become a local foster parent, contact JFS’s Child and Adult Protective Services Division at 330-297-3690. Candidates must be at least 21 years old, pass criminal background and child welfare history checks, have sufficient and verifiable sources of income, meet physical home requirements and have available bed space.
Foster parents receive paid training, competitive per diem rates, free child care, seasonal clothing vouchers, one-on-one case management services and 24-hour on-call support. There’s also an annual appreciation banquet, an annual holiday bowling party, quarterly in-person table talks, foster parent cafes and a Facebook support page.
Wendy DiAlesandro
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.