BY MARTHA STODDARD
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
LINCOLN — Nearly one in five children enter Nebraska’s foster care system because they have mental or behavioral problems.
Other foster children need mental health care because of trauma caused by abuse or neglect at home, removal from their families and being moved from placement to placement within the foster care system.
Addressing the needs of those children requires improved access to mental health services, the Nebraska Foster Care Review Board said in its annual report.
The report, released today, calls for more funding for mental health care. It also recommends a single point of entry to services, more crisis services and better services for children with behavioral disorders rather than mental illnesses.
Many children with behavioral disorders, as opposed to mental illnesses, do not routinely get help because treatment is not deemed “medically necessary,” the report said.
Statistics from the report show that almost all of the children who wind up in foster care because of preexisting mental or behavioral problems are in the preteen or teenage years, as were most of the 36 children dropped off at hospitals under Nebraska’s former safe haven law
Before it was changed last month, the law allowed people to leave children of any age without fear of prosecution.
The report also called for better oversight of private contracts and fewer changes in case workers. It noted several positive trends as well during the past year:
- Fewer children were in out-of-home care. The number was 5,043 on Dec. 31, 2007, down from 6,204 on Dec. 31, 2005.
- Fewer children returned to out-of-home care after leaving it. The number returned was 1,701 during 2007, down from 1,877 during 2006.
- More foster children found permanent homes through adoption. The number adopted in 2007 was 462, up from 347 in 2006.
Omaha World Herald
