Hamilton Co. criminal background check system a model for other Ohio counties

Opinion: Ongoing foster care checks
Toledo Blade, March 13, 2007, pg. A8.

FOSTER children need all the protection authorities can provide them, considering the serious problems that have come to light in Ohio in recent months.

Now, as Hamilton County foster agency officials have learned, it's not enough to only conduct initial background checks on foster parents. These days, ongoing checks are necessary, and if parents refuse to consent to the checks, the children should be removed from the home.

The Hamilton County agency, which includes Cincinnati, has come under scrutiny because it didn't know about six of 27 arrests uncovered in background checks.

The reason for the failure: the agency only looked for convictions, not arrests. The six cases did not result in convictions. Hamilton County court officials discovered the arrests as they were setting up a system to provide immediate notification when arrests do occur.

It's true that an arrest does not always mean guilt, and innocence must be presumed. But when the care of children is involved, the agency ultimately responsible for their safety should be informed.

Not surprisingly, the Hamilton County agency has been criticized. Especially worrisome is that one parent was arrested on child endangering charges. That should have been enough to alert the foster care system that the children in that home might no longer be safe and prompt an immediate investigation. Hamilton officials now plan to make periodic background checks and remove children from homes where foster parents refuse to consent to the checks.

Terrible things can happen to foster children, as northwest Ohioans learned recently when children were forced to sleep in cages by Huron County foster parents who were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. Another tragedy involved a Clermont County woman who left a developmentally disabled preschooler bound in a blanket in a closet while she went to a weekend family reunion last summer. The child died.

The Hamilton County criminal background check system that alerts authorities when foster parents are arrested is believed to be the first of its kind in Ohio. If that's so, other counties should follow their lead - for the children's sake.