Vinton County is the kind of place that can absorb a car wreck, a house fire, or a single neglected child without breaking its budget. It is not built for sixteen siblings arriving in one afternoon, several of them in serious or critical condition, many of them never enrolled in school, some unable to speak, and one eighteen-year-old who officials said could not write her own name. When the children were removed from the Ohmer Street house on June 30, South Central Ohio Job and Family Services and the Vinton County Public Children Services Agency took temporary custody. Seven children went to hospitals, two by air to trauma centers.

The rest needed placements, clothing, evaluations, speech and developmental ᴀssessments, and protection from the adults now sitting in jail. Within days the county’s caseload of children in temporary custody had more than doubled. Officials said they had never seen a caseload explode that fast.The numbers that followed were as blunt as the scene itself. State officials estimated foster-care and related placement costs at $150 to $250 per child per day, approaching $850,000 a year, more than three times the amount generated by the local levy that is split between children’s services and senior services. Therapy alone, one state official said, can exceed $300 a day per child. Ohio’s Department of Children and Youth asked the Controlling Board for emergency money.

On July 13 the board approved $1 million from contingency funds to cover foster care, clothing, transportation, court costs, and medical and mental-health services. Joel Potts of the department said the money would get the county through the next several months and that the state would try to draw every available federal child-protection dollar. Local lawmakers had already warned that without help the smallest-budget county in Ohio could be pushed toward insolvency by a single household.The work was not only financial. Juvenile and probate filings moved on a separate track from the criminal cases. No-contact orders were entered.

The state opposed release of the adults in ways that would put them near the children. Decisions about whether the siblings would stay together or be split, how to treat an eighteen-year-old with developmental disabilities who might sit at the edge of childhood and adult services, and how to build a school plan for children who had never sat in a classroom all landed on a rural system that suddenly had to act like a hospital, a school district, and a foster network at once. Attorney General Wilson said it would take a great deal of work to address the emotional harm and that the children needed to be surrounded by people who actually cared for them. That sentence sounded simple on camera. In Vinton County it became a logistics problem measured in beds, caseworkers, therapists, and a million-dollar emergency check that officials already knew would not last forever.

Source: AP News