This letter is to help explain the concerns of Scioto County, Ohio’s Child Protective Services / Job and Family Services. Furthermore, this is written to hopefully get some form of change, get rid of the secrets that the agency has hidden from the public, and empower the agency’s clients to push back against the current and oppressive agency. This agency has not addressed these issues and is allowing children and the rules of law to be thrown to the wayside. I would request that you investigate this county and the issues that I address in this letter personally.
The first area that this letter plans to expose is that the Scioto County Job and Family Services is currently not working on and is allowing it to not be completed. The agency does not push for life books, and this is something that was brought to the Administrator of the Agency and the Job and Family Services Main Director; however, it has never been fixed. This is a direct violation of Ohio Administrative Code 5101:2-42-67 | Preparation of Lifebook, the rule states “When a child remains in substitute care for longer than six months, the public children services agency (PCSA) or private child placing agency (PCPA) shall begin to prepare a Lifebook. The Lifebook shall be updated every six months so long as the child remains in substitute care.” However, at this time, there has not been an agency-sanctioned plan for the Life Book, and the children are not getting their life books unless a foster parent chooses to create them. This does not seem like something major; however, this steals memories and time from a child and is an important part of the child’s life. The agency does not create these, nor do they monitor them to ensure they are complete, and there is staff at the agency that does not know what a Lifebook is and if audited at this time, there would not be any life books at the agency that the casework created or tracked and supervision is not pushing to address this either and sees this as not an issues.
The second item of the issue is that Scioto County does not ensure that children over the age of 14 are involved in their care or case plan, nor do they ensure that the children can attend their court hearings. This goes against the Ohio Administrative Code: Rule 5101:2-38-05 | PCSA family case plan for children in custody or under protective supervision. This rule states the following: “For substitute care cases in which the child is age fourteen and older, two individuals, at the option of and as selected by the child, pursuant to rule 5101:2-42-19 of the Administrative Code and in accordance with the JFS 01677 “Foster Youth Rights Handbook.”. The children are not involved in this at Scioto County, nor are there independent living services being offered or planned out for these children unless it is offered by a paid foster agency. The bigger concern is the children not coming to the court hearing or being ensured that they are available to attend. Multiple times, there have been permanent custody hearings that children over the age of 13 or older wished to attend however, they were not allowed, or transportation was not set up for these children. Again, this is in direct violation of these children’s rights, goes against the desires of the administrative code, and gets rid of the voice of the children the agency is meant to serve and work with.
The next item that will be examined and discussed is the issue of the agency and its reasonable efforts with the parents. This is covered by the following Ohio Administrative Code: Section 2151.419 | Court’s determination as to whether the agency made reasonable efforts to prevent removal or to return the child safely home.” This states the following: The agency shall have the burden of proving that it has made those reasonable efforts. If the agency removed the child from home during an emergency in which the child could not safely remain at home and the agency did not have prior contact with the child, the court is not prohibited, solely because the agency did not make reasonable efforts during the emergency to prevent the removal of the child, from determining that the agency made those reasonable efforts. In determining whether reasonable efforts were made, the child’s health and safety shall be paramount.” To break down what is expected, an agency is required to meet with parents on a monthly contract however, this does not happen, and they have tried to make this happen more, but parents get missed, and the agency is not ensuring that services are being put in place to help the children and the agency will still file for permanent custody and these reasonable efforts may not have been made and the parental rights severed.
This issue leads to another major issue that Scioto County Child Protective Services neglects, which goes against Ohio Administrative Code: Rule 5101:2-42-92 | Visitation for child in temporary custody” This states the following: Restrictions on the frequency, duration, location of visits, and supervision of visits shall be based on factors related to: (a) Potential harm to the child as a result of the parent’s, guardian’s or custodian’s behavior or pattern of conduct toward the child., (b) Special needs or problems of the child., (c) The parent’s, guardian’s, or custodian’s failure to be available for more frequent or longer visits.” The Scioto County Child Protective Services Agency does not ensure that visitation is a top priority when the children are out of the county. It is no secret that there is currently a foster parent shortage in Ohio and throughout the United States, which leads to children being placed further away from their homes. This has many outcomes but the biggest is that the agency does not push for visitation for the families as regularly as needed to maintain the bond and relationship. If a child is over an hour and a half away, then that child will not get visitations with siblings or parents. There are many times that parents would request to see their children, but the agency would say that they could not accommodate it, furthermore was a parent who was struggling to afford to come to visitation with their child however, after approving two gas cards for visitation the parent was denied any more assistance to get to these visits even though they lived an hour away at the time and were struggling to afford their bills the agency did not see this as a duty to ensure that parent and the child have visits due to the parent struggle to pay the bills. Many more parents missed their visitation due to transportation issues, however, this was not something that the agency worked to try and address or fix and is still an ongoing issue and parental rights are still being violated to this day.
The next issue is that Scioto County Child Protective Services is not currently being addressed, and this is the length of time that children are kept in care. The Ohio Administrative Code Section 2151.414 | Hearing on a motion requesting permanent custody which states that the following, “The child is not abandoned or orphaned, has not been in the temporary custody of one or more public children services agencies or private child placing agencies for twelve or more months of a consecutive twenty-two-month period, or has not been in the temporary custody of one or more public children services agencies or private child placing agencies for twelve or more months of a consecutive twenty-two-month period if, as described in division (D)(1) of section 2151.413 of the Revised Code, the child was previously in the temporary custody of an equivalent agency in another state, and the child cannot be placed with either of the child’s parents within a reasonable time or should not be placed with the child’s parents.” Furthermore, the federal government states the following: “a state must generally file a petition to terminate parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months,”. The federal government states that there can be an extra three months to give the parents to get their children and return them to them. However, in Scioto County Child Protective Services, multiple kids in care still do not have a permanency status. When we are looking at this, some kids have been in care for 20 months to six years and still have not received a long-term permanency goal and are just waiting for care to be found. This is to say that there have been attempts to get the children to a place of permanency; however, whether it is the court hearing or the agency, these pushes are not fast enough because there are so many kids in care and will not have long term plans for their living or their statues as a foster youth. This goal is talked about but has yet to be acted on at the time, and children are still floundering in care.
The next concern that I would like to address in this open letter to all those who have taken the time to read this is the agency’s failures and further Scioto County Child Protective Services allowing children to be legally stolen, which the agency helps or does not intervene in the foster parent’s using current power dynamic to affect the outcome of a case so that the child can be in legal or permanent custody. The foster parent can then take a child and adopt them or have legal custody of the child. I would like to delve into a case in which this happened recently at Scioto County Job and Family Services. There was a client who had lost temporary custody of their children, and it was an open fact that the court at the time and the CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) were against the parent. During this, the hearing would be rescheduled and rescheduled and more and more barriers were put in place to stop the parent from getting the child. There was a time during my time at the agency when the children were supposed to have a visit, and the agency was to transport them from their school the school did not want to release the children as the foster provider told them that the parent was dangerous and that even the agency could not be trusted with the child, this got to the point were legal and law enforcement had to be contacted to address this issue. Another major issue with this case was that the foster provider was making up doctors’ appointments and then informing the court that the parent was not engaging with the appointments. This was verified by contacting the insurance and appointments, and over 40 appointments were made up and told to the court by this foster parent. This was explained to agency supervision and legal counsel; however, the only thing that was done with this was extra training for the foster parent. However, this allowed for the parent to be painted in a negative light. This parent was beaten down to the point of feeling like they had failed even though they completed 90% of their case plan but the agency did not advocate for this parent. During this case, the parent was Developmentally Delayed, but the accommodations were never put in place to ensure the parent had a fair shot. To close this case, the foster parent filed for and was granted legal custody of the child, and the agency did not advocate and allowed this to happen because they saw it as the children having a better life.
The final item I want to discuss is that Scioto County Child Protective Services does cover-ups and has when things are done incorrectly. This has been seen in many ways one of the biggest has been that the agency has covered up when caseworkers leave the agency without competing documentation the supervisors just cover it up, and this has affected parents in so many ways, such as parents’ visitations being canceled and not reinstated for months, or months of documentation not being completed and parents victories or case plan services being completed not being tracked, and this can lead to permanent custody being filed on a child that was not needed. However, the worst offense of this was when a caseworker was found to have forged documentation in cases and went to the point of lying about other caseworkers seeing their children. This was taken to the administrator at the time but never went further than that due to the caseworker leaving and to ensure that the agency was not seen in a negative light which allowed this terrible act to never be addressed.
This letter has discussed and examined many different things and concerns that were seen during my time at Scioto County Job and Family Services. There are many other issues. However, this was just to capture a snapshot of these concerns that are directly affecting the clients serviced. Again, this may just be a way to alleviate the guilt I feel about watching these issues and not fighting back. This also may be seen as a disgruntled employee trying to fight back against the agency; however, this is an open letter, and all that is asked is just to examine these concerns and help move to change the county and truly help with them. If there are questions that you wish to ask, the email will be set up to discuss these, which is hopeforchange2025@protonmail.