Opinion: Children in foster care need quick access to mental health care

By Jake Cornett

Cornett is executive director of Disability Rights Oregon

A recent OPB report about Oregon’s foster care system shed light on the extraordinary actions of child welfare officials within the Oregon Department of Human Services. The state agency not only sent hundreds of children in our foster care system to out-of-state facilities run by a private, for-profit company, but it also ceded any responsibility for them as well. Oregon child welfare officials’ lack of oversight, lack of scrutiny, and lack of even basic tracking of the children placed in those facilities and their well-being are astonishing.

But we should recognize this failure for what it truly is: a symptom of the state’s larger failure to meet the developmental, behavioral and mental health needs of children in its care.

By moving children to facilities outside of Oregon, the state shielded itself, for a time, from its inability to provide these children the services and supports they need to thrive. The state paid these companies, primarily one named Sequel, tens of thousands of dollars per child per month, handing over the keys to these children’s futures with little or no assurance that these companies were capable of caring for them.

But long before these children were moved out of Oregon, the state was failing to meet their basic needs – which set them up for unsuccessful foster-family living situations to begin with. One of the biggest barriers children in foster care face is the lack of timely access to mental healthcare evaluations and services. According to DHS’ 2017 Annual Progress & Service Report, only 44 percent of children in foster care received an evaluation for emotional and behavioral health needs within 60 days, and 37 percent of the children never had their needs assessed at all.

When children in foster care do not receive timely mental health evaluations to identify their needs, it snowballs into children not receiving services quickly enough. Children not receiving the mental health services they need are more likely to be shuttled from family to family, which creates additional trauma. A report from June of this year found that “more high-needs children are being placed in out-of-state facilities and repurposed juvenile detention facilities than in previous years,” a result of “declining residential treatment options in Oregon for children with high needs.”

Children are resilient and they can heal. But children who have experienced trauma need services and treatment from the day they enter the foster care system to begin to heal. That's why we filed a lawsuit against the state to help thousands of children in the foster system get the care they need right from the start. The recent revelations about children placed in out-of-state facilities with virtually no oversight is another reminder of why state leaders should focus on making sure children in foster care can quickly access quality mental health care.

Right now, there are still 30 children in Oregon’s foster care system who are living in out-of-state facilities as far away as Illinois. Youth and their families should get the supports and services they need to stay together. And we need to invest in services across our child welfare system.

These children deserve and are entitled to an equal opportunity to live in a stable, family-like foster care placement. By delaying or not providing mental health care, the state is denying them that opportunity.