The Plain Dealer

By Diane Suchetka, The Plain Dealer

Posted February 24th 2010

Ohio has it wrong when it comes to dealing with child abuse and other kinds of family violence, says a statewide study by the nonprofit Health Policy Institute of Ohio

The state is spending too little money — and effort — on prevention.

That’s a key concern in Cuyahoga County right now!

In the past four months, two young children have died horrific deaths: Arshon Baker, 5, was beaten; Alexandria Hamilton, 2, was scalded.

Both mothers took parenting classes to prevent abuse, but their children still died. And the two mothers are now accused of murder.

The goal of the Health Policy Institute’s study — on child abuse, domestic violence and elder abuse — was to explain the scope of the problem and suggest ways to prevent it.

Now — two full years after the report was released — little progress has been made.

Ohio has funded dozens of small projects to prevent child abuse, but no new state laws have been passed, experts say. The state hasn’t launched any sweeping initiatives to prevent the battering of children, either.

Even worse, millions of dollars have been cut from Help Me Grow, Ohio’s home-visitation program that teaches new moms to be good parents. Such programs, some experts say, are one way to help prevent abuse.

“I’m not aware of any dramatic increases in the programs [that work],” said Dr. Frank Putnam, director of the Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children, a child abuse center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Mario Tinto, president of Beech Brook, a private, nonprofit agency based in Pepper Pike that, among other things, serves children with behavior problems, says the same thing.

“We’re in a time of continuing budget cuts across the board,” Tinto said. Instead of increasing child abuse prevention programs, we’re decreasing them, he said.

He points to Help Me Grow as an example.

Last year, lawmakers cut the budget for the statewide program by 40 percent, in large part because federal welfare money that was paying for it was needed for unemployment, food stamps and other benefits, says Melissa Manos, who oversees Help Me Grow in Cuyahoga County.

Legislators tried to replace all the lost federal money with state funds, but there wasn’t enough in the budget to do that.

As a result, Cuyahoga County’s Help Me Grow budget went from $10.5 million to $6 million, Manos said. That was the primary reason the number of Cuyahoga County families served dropped from 8,000 to 3,000.

The county stepped in with some additional funding, Manos said, but only enough to enroll about 500 more at-risk families.

Child abuse, the study points out, causes a slew of problems — physical, psychological, social and academic — that come at great cost. In Ohio, it totals more than $3.3 billion a year, according to the report.

Since that report was issued, dozens of smaller programs throughout the state have been studied and funded by the Ohio Children’s Trust Fund, says Candace Novak, executive director.

For the past two years, the fund has been working with child advocates and local agencies in all 88 Ohio counties to identify prevention programs that work and provide them with money.

But its budget is only about $5 million.

“Most of these programs serve maybe a couple of dozen families, maybe 50 families a year,” Novak says. “There’s so much more we could be doing.”

The fund’s goal now, she says, is to find the best prevention programs in Ohio and replicate them statewide. To do that, she says, the organization must find ways to bring in more state and federal money.

How long will that take?

“Years,” she says.