A call to the community to help fund a critical piece of the response to help fix the crisis in placement and emergency services for children with the highest needs who come into the custody of Cuyahoga County.
“For Cuyahoga County, our goal is to provide a better space for our kids who need us most,” said Chris Ronayne, Cuyahoga County Executive.
The placement crisis has been years in the making and extends beyond Cleveland.
RELATED: Cuyahoga County partners with The Centers for new Child Wellness Campus
In Cuyahoga County alone, there’s been a loss of 300 residential treatment beds over the past decade.
While it will take time to build back, they said they’re making progress and believe the Child Wellness Campus is an innovative approach other cities and states are watching.
“This is that middle step,” said Ronayne. “This is that place where we get kids well and on a ready path for their future.”
Ronayne announced the Child Wellness Campus in December of 2023.
“What I’m trying to do with our team over at health and human services is provide a new front door; a campus of care,” Ronayne said at the time.
The county partnered with The Centers, which operates the Cleveland Christian Home, to open the project on the CCH campus.
The two entities partnered a year before to tackle the urgent placement crisis with the most vulnerable kids sleeping at a county office building.
At the start of 2023, T-Suites opened in a renovated wing of the Cleveland Christian Home, providing eight emergency beds for 12- to 18-year-olds in all levels of county custody.
T-Suites just recently welcomed their 100th child.
They said they’ve learned a lot about the necessary duration of stay and treatment for the complex needs of the children, which has helped lay the blueprint for the Child Wellness Campus and all the unique services it’ll provide, including a unit dedicated to trafficking survivors.
“Even if it isn’t identified as a trafficking need there are children who have been impacted by exploitation that we want to be able to provide the safety and protection for,” said
Dawnya Underwood is the executive director of Cleveland Christian Home, a program at The Centers.
Ronayne said the county, The Centers, The Cleveland Christian Home, and the Division of Children and Family Services for Cuyahoga County, along with other community partners, have formed a committee that meets regularly to discuss how best to meet the needs of the children and families they serve.
“What we are creating is a safety net and haven for children,” said Underwood.
“We’ve made extraordinary progress over the last year,” said Ronayne.
Much like T-Suites, Ronayne said the Child Wellness Campus will be a dignified and safe place for children with emotional or behavioral needs to heal. Not extended stays at the Jane Edna Hunter Social Services building. Ronayne said more than 400 children have been dropped off at government buildings in Cuyahoga County over the last few years.
“Enough is enough, and that’s why we set on this course for an entirely new model with The Centers,” he said.
Construction delays on the 125-year-old building on Cleveland’s west side have pushed back the opening a few months. They now anticipate welcoming 24 kids in February, with the goal of housing a total of 50.
“It cannot get built fast enough,” said Jacqueline Fletcher, director of the Division of Children and Family Services for Cuyahoga County.
Fletcher says her department currently has about 2,200 kids in their care. She says most never step foot in Jane Edna, and they’ve reduced the number of children who, unfortunately, do experience more than one night there. However, Fletcher says 15 children in county care are currently in a setting out of state because of the placement shortage.
“We want to bring those kids back home and so this partnership is critical in bringing these kids back home,” she said.
She said her team has been working hard within their partnerships to continue efforts to build out additional capacity for kids who need treatment.
She said they’re also working to meet law enforcement who are dispatched to a parent-teen conflict in the district. She says the goal is to help better strategize safe options.
“So, we’re trying to be more mobile with our responses,” she said.
Fletcher said they’re also doing a better job at moving kids out of the short-term emergency beds at T-Suites.
“The average length of stay was around 47 days which we’ve reduced to about 17 days now,” said Fletcher. “So, we’re moving kids out to create space for other kids who would typically need that.”
She said they’ve done that through those strategic partnerships and with a dedicated team at Jane Edna that provides one person who sticks with each child in need of the highest help and works with the placement team.
Staff safety has been a serious concern amid the extended stays at the office building.
Fletcher said they’re making that a priority and said she just had one of her biggest new-worker classes. Twenty-two people started in August, which she said was the biggest in more than two years.
Fletcher said they’re slowly making progress filling vacancies and reducing caseload, which varies from 10-12 cases per social worker, down from around 18 at one point.
While the Child Wellness Campus will house children in county custody, advocates say it will also be for caregivers and families who still have custody of their children but who need services.
Fletcher said any family dealing with parental stress or mental or behavioral health needs for their child can come and get support.
“We want to help before harm happens, and so that will be a space where collectively that caregiver, that family, can gain access to resources and services and supports. Again, preventing deeper system involvement, and that’s a critical piece of this journey of child wellness,” said Fletcher.
President and CEO of The Centers, Eric Morse, stressed the importance of collaboration with the county and the large steering committee in driving innovation and change. He said it is not just The Centers and the Cleveland Christian Home.
“All of the other nonprofits that are serving kids, the government entities, juvenile justice, the Developmental Disabilities Board, the ADAMHS board, the hospital systems are all getting together monthly to talk through these issues and really build out a system because if we don’t do something new, if we don’t fix the system, we’ll just get full and we’ll have the same problem. So, we’re working as a collective to fix the problem, so we don’t run into that into the future.”
The Child Wellness Campus is a $14 million effort.
Ronayne said they’ve raised nearly $10 million, including $1.5 million secured in Ohio’s capital budget thanks to bipartisan support from local lawmakers, and they’re now turning to the community to help fund the gap.
“This is one of those campaigns that we’re appealing to the hearts of everyone,” said Ronayne. “This is about what do you do for those who need you most, particularly our kids.”
They said it’s about providing a dignified continuum of care and giving all kids the opportunity for a future.
“They’re all our kids,” said Morse. “We live in a community together. If we don’t make the investments now to help those kids, it’s just going to continue to get worse with each generation. It’s just going to grow and become more and more of a problem for us as a society.”
