So, the Opioid Epidemic (Which Mostly Affects White Families) Has Driven Sen. Sherrod Brown to Do Something About Ohio’s Child Welfare System
During my daily research on the child welfare system I came across more than a few articles related to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D.) and his new proposed child welfare legislation called Family First Transition and Support Act that will make more funds available for in-home and prevention services as well as kinship care — specially, for those relatives whom are caring for children affected by the opioid epidemic. The Toledo blade has extensively reported today that Sen. Brown has decided to hold a press conference, along with Lucas County Children Services director Robin Reese, at the LCCS agency in downtown Toledo to promote his new child welfare bill. You know I had to write a response.
“We’re trying to get the federal government and state government to step in to help these families not to raise the children but to help these families”. — Sen. Sherrod Brown.
For those who don't know me or my work, (racist) Toledo is my hometown and I have had horrible experiences with LCCS — including blatant racism and discrimination, being refused services, caseworker fraud, and worse of all having several of my children unjustly and permanently taken from me. And it was those traumatic experiences which lead me to become a child welfare reform activist and advocate. That said, because of LCCS’s troubling history of civil rights violations and corruption, and the fact that I have several family members who still live in the county, I maintain a close eye on the agency.
Though to be fair, LCCS’s latest director, Ms. Reese, who took control in 2016 only two years after my case was closed, seems to be more pro-family and family preservation than Dean Sparks ever was, the previous director who retired in scandal in 2015, although I am still waiting on her to publicly state that systemic racism and overrepresentation of Afro-American children and families within the system is a real and present problem — she did recently state that “You should not lose your children because you’re poor” which ironically is one of the main reasons I, and most parents, lost my children. Per Ms. Reese, in recent years children services has seen a record number of kids coming into foster care due to the opioid epidemic.
Such revelations is most likely the reason that Sen. Brown insisted on signaling out LCCS and Toledo to peddle his new child welfare legislation. But let me be clear, I am not convinced that his bill will do anything to address the real issues within Ohio’s child welfare system, namely the gross overrepresentation of Afro-American children in foster care and poor/negative outcomes of Afro-American families within the system due to systemic racism and anti-Black bias. According to LCCS, nearly half of the children in its custody are being taken care of by relatives, although I believe that most of the relatives allowed and/or approved to care for said children are not Afro-American — after all, it’s common knowledge by those familiar with CPS that on average it is (much) more difficult for willing Afro-American family members to prevent foster care placements and to get agency approval to care for their relative’s children within the child welfare system, my personal experience was consistent with this.
“This will allow us to put services in the homes of families rather than moving kids and then putting the services in the foster home”. — Robin Reese, Lucas County Children Services director.
I am especially skeptical of this Act because the legislation was prompted specifically in response to the opioid epidemic, an epidemic that almost exclusively affects white people and families especially in Ohio which is a state wherein doctors are notoriously reticent to prescribing opioids to Afro-Americans, this is also a fact for which I have firsthand experience. As a trained addictions specialist, I feel great compassion for those affected by the opioid crisis, but I am also somewhat jaded because I cannot help but think about the hypocrisy of our government, criminal justice system, healthcare professionals, and elected officials and their response to the crisis.
I mean, no one cared — especially the politicians who did nothing but write and pass racist child welfare criminal justice laws that devastated Afro-American communities, thanks Joe Biden and Bill Clinton — about keeping Afro-American families together and providing in-home services to parents and family members caring for their relative’s children when the crack cocaine epidemic was raging but that’s a story for another time. Anyhow, according to NBC24, the bill would expand funding for family members that are raising children and provide programs to help prevent kids from ending up in the system altogether. The Blade further reports that the bill would expand funding for “kinship support services” to help families cover basic needs like food, clothing, and daycare. And that the bill would also give Ohio an extra $10 million for family-focused child support services.
“These relatives face unique challenges,” “They don’t often qualify for the same support as foster parents. The foster care system works well in many cases … we’ve built the system around that. We haven’t built the system around relatives taking care of children the way we’re seeing more and more.” — Sen. Sherrod Brown during press conference today in Toledo.
Per the Blade article, advocates — although I am not sure to which advocates they’re referring — say the system is designed around foster care and should be updated to address the growing number of relatives caring for children as a result of the addiction crisis. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that the message that Sen. Brown, Ms. Reese, and said nameless advocates mentioned in the Blade article, is sending is clear and that message is this, “Too many white people are losing their children to foster care and the system, and we can’t have that, we have to do something to keep ‘these’ families together”. And because of the target beneficiaries, again mostly white children and families, I do not doubt that Sen. Brown’s Act will pass with bipartisan approval. As for me, I am going to sit back and watch and see if the numbers of Afro-American children in Ohio’s foster care system is reduced and if the percentage of Afro-American relatives caring for their relatives’ children, also known as kinship care, increases. That said, judging from Ohio’s child welfare system’s lackluster past in regards to preserving Afro-American families and providing needed services to said families, I am not going to hold my breath.
#NAFPAorg #BlackMothersForChildWelfareRefrom #WhitePrivilege #ChildWelfare #SocialJustice #AfricanAmericanChildWelfareAct #CasaSoWhite #CPS #FosterCare #ChildAbuse #FosterHBO #FosterDoc #TagiSays #Tagi’sWorld
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Latagia Copeland-Tyronce, MSW, CADAS, is a longtime parental rights and social justice advocate, child welfare reform activist, writer/blogger, and journalist whose work has been featured in BlackMattersUs and Rise Magazine. She is the founder, president, and executive director of the National African American Families First and Preservation Association (NAFPA) a groundbreaking 501c4 nonprofit origination, the first of its kind, devoted exclusively to the protection and preservation of the African American (Black) Family though policy and legislative advocacy.
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