New tool helps find extended families of foster kids
Nov. 30—COLUMBUS — Ohio is employing a new technology tool to help children's services staff locate and contact extended family members of children in foster care who may not know they are in the system.
The state is the first to make the mobile application available to all counties, but the family connections system is also being made available free of charge across the nation.
Jelani Freeman, a Connect Our Kids adviser and court-appointed special advocate from Washington, entered the foster-care system at the age of 8 and a decade later became one of 20,000 a year nationally who age out of the system without being adopted.
After leaving the system, he said, he went in search of family members who told him they would have stepped in had they known he was in foster care.
"I had known my mother's family," he said during a Statehouse news conference on Tuesday. "I didn't know my paternal side of the family. I searched and searched. I believe, during that time, if I had found them I would have been taken in by them."
The Ohio-based software tool can essentially create a digital family tree for children coming into a foster-care system that has been overwhelmed in recent years by the opioid crisis. It scours public information from more than 300 sources and can provide contact information for family members identified.
"It results almost always in additional connections, and a lot of times that is the important piece to start with as the (Wendy's Wonderful Kids) recruiter and family specialist learns more about those connections," said Jennifer Jacobs, Connect Our Kids CEO and co-founder.
She said the tool frees children's services agencies and others from the often tedious and time-consuming work of searching multiple websites.
"Technology can do that," she said. "We should take that off their plate."
There are more than 3,100 children in Ohio currently awaiting adoption.
"When a child goes into the system, they lose connection to everyone," Mr. Freeman said. "They can literally become lost in the files of bureaucracy. It's a very traumatic experience."
Lt. Gov. Jon Husted was adopted out of the foster-care system as an infant and raised in Montpelier.
"They just need somebody who's going to be there to provide them unconditional love, who is there every day," he said. "Life is difficult to navigate, and it's much harder to navigate when you don't have parents or adults in your life to help you. We're trying to fix that one child at a time."
Gov. Mike DeWine has focused heavily on Ohio's foster-care system that cares for roughly 16,000 youths, creating a task force consisting of people involved in the system that recommended a series of reforms. His budgets have invested more in funding county children's service agencies, expanding kinship care in which family members can essentially serve as foster parents, and recruiting more foster parents.
