From the Director

June is the month we hold our agency’s signature event – Celebration of Dreams – which is our biggest event of the year. On June 8 2017, we will recognize nearly 50 wonderful foster children who have overcome great challenges …

In our work, we experience a lot of things that break your heart. One of the most recent for me was hearing of our need for guardians for the people we serve who are in different stages of life.

Young adults we serve who live with disabilities are often unable to make life and medical decisions for themselves when they age out of our child welfare system at 21. The same is true of senior citizens (over age 60) in our Adult Protective Services program who suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. If there are no family members to help, these individuals require legal guardians.

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. This year, it comes with an extra sense of urgency in Hamilton County.
Our numbers are skyrocketing. We screened in 732 allegations of child abuse in the month of January, the largest monthly total in at least a decade. We screened in 699 reports during February. This followed a very busy last half of 2016, when we screened in 3,794 reports, 1,101 more than during the first half of the year.

The expanded Medicaid program is a frequent topic of discussion as our nation and state look toward the future on health care.

Whatever is decided, it will be our responsibility to implement it.

As a point of reference, we currently have more than 231,000 county residents in the Medicaid program and we spent $1,760,215,299 last year on delivering health care to Medicaid recipients.

We currently have more than 1,100 children in certified foster care. This might be the highest number in JFS history, certainly within the past 20 years.

On any given day, we have more than 2,100 children in custody. In addition to the 1,100 children in certified foster homes, the remaining 1,000 are children living with relatives or family friends, teenagers living on their own and preparing for life after foster care, or children living in residential centers, group homes or medical facilities.

 Some long-time food assistance recipients are driving themselves right out of the program through a new partnership between Hamilton County Job and Family Services, the state of Ohio and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. This partnership, …

I could never thank all of the people who help us during the holidays and throughout the rest of the year. Please know that what you do for our children always results in smiles and a little bit of normalcy and hope in what are often turbulent times in a child’s life.

 We are a week away from a county-wide vote on the Children’s Services Levy (Issue 53). I am asked nearly every day what the levy is and how the money is used. The levy raises funding for services to abused …

  We are asked a lot about the opiate crisis gripping our community. How does it play out in child welfare? Heroin has hit our “business” hard. Abuse of opiate-based painkillers such as Vicodin and OxyContin is also a problem. …

I had the pleasure of hosting a group of the nation’s top child welfare officials in Cincinnati this past week and it was interesting to see our stories are so similar. We all struggle with worker retention. We all are …