OKLAHOMA STATE SENATE / From the desk of Sen. Jessica Garvin
One of our greatest responsibilities as legislators is to protect our most vulnerable citizens, including our children. Ten years ago, Oklahoma implemented the Pinnacle Plan to reform our child welfare system as part of a class action lawsuit settlement. This March, it was announced that Oklahoma Human Services had achieved substantial and sustained progress and didn’t require further monitoring, but the agency remained committed to achieving positive momentum.
Therefore, Governor Stitt formed the 12-member Child Welfare Task Force, which I proudly served on, to further improve conditions and outcomes for our state’s foster children. For six months, we focused on how to continue reducing the time to permanency in the system; reducing the number of re-entries after discharge to permanency; identifying risk factors leading to children’s removal from their biological parents’ home; and identifying and proposing areas of support for biological parents. We visited with hundreds of experts statewide, including both public and private foster care and adoption specialists, Child Protective Services employees, and others.
We identified five main goals, along with recommendations of how to achieve them, including expanding resources and services to prevent families from entering the child welfare system; evaluating and implementing strategies for supporting and enhancing family engagement; and improving the effectiveness of our juvenile court system. Other recommendations included increasing support and strengthening foster parents’ role to reduce closure rates and placement disruptions, along with expanding the capacity of professionals supporting families in the system.
We believe this can be accomplished by developing systems allowing agencies to share information more efficiently; expand school-based service workers for at-risk communities; expand and fund Medicaid benefits to 205% of the federal poverty level for biological parents with children in care or at-risk of being in care; and also increase the Medicaid reimbursement rate for outpatient behavioral health services for foster kids, or those at risk of entering the system.
Other policy initiatives should include modernizing the state’s approach to individualized service plans; developing a plan to implement parent, peer, and partner programs in at-risk communities; executing the Family Representation and Advocacy Program statewide; increasing foster family financial support; and extending paid time off for foster parent state employees when they get a new child. Finally, we recommended developing and providing specialized training for childcare providers for trauma and other youth-related needs; creating better training for foster mentors; and increasing support staff, case aides, and child welfare assistants.
Our child welfare workers are doing an incredible job with the limited resources and staffing available to them. We must invest more resources into these services, along with the children and families depending on them, if we want to see continued positive outcomes. I want to thank Human Services Secretary Dr. Deb Shropshire and former Secretary Justin Brown for their dedication to Oklahoma’s children. Their insight and leadership were instrumental to this process. I’m looking forward to helping introduce some of these policy recommendations in the coming session.
If you have any questions or concerns on this or other legislative matters, you can contact me by writing to Senator Jessica Garvin, State Capitol, 2300 N. Lincoln Blvd. Room 237, Oklahoma City, OK, 73105, emailing me at [email protected], or calling me at 405 5215522.
