EPIDEMIC OF NEGLECT

IT'S common now for Kentucky's child care workers to have to rush to
hospitals to rescue babies born addicted to drugs. And to be summoned
to filthy apartments where they find dirty, malnourished children who
regularly miss school because their substance-abusing parents have
lost all reason and are incapable of caring for them.

The same thing is happening in Indiana. Last year, Indiana's rate of
child abuse and neglect cases nearly doubled.

In both states, a major cause of these horrors is the soaring abuse of
methamphetamine, which is, as one Indiana police sergeant put it,
"scary simple" to make in homemade labs from ingredients readily
available on farms and in stores.

Five years ago, according to Mary Ellen Nold of the Kentucky Cabinet
for Health and Family Services, the state had 5,560 children in foster
care or awaiting adoption. Today, that number is 6,471 children. And
for those additional 900 children, only 360 additional foster homes
have become available. All this extra pressure has arrived at the same
time that Kentucky, along with about 30 other states, is under threat
of losing millions of dollars in federal funding if it fails to
demonstrate significant improvement in meeting tough, new federal
standards for protecting vulnerable children. So the heat is on for
Kentucky to recruit more foster and adoptive parents, especially
people willing to take in siblings and older kids. But even that is
not enough. After a year of intense analysis, the Pew Commission on
Children in Foster Care recently weighed in with recommendations about
how judges, system administrators and frontline workers might achieve
better outcomes for the children already in the system and for those
at risk of entering it.

Of course, some of the commission's recommendations would require
additional funding, but they also point the way toward better
oversight and redirection of existing funds.

Obviously, the shortcomings in foster care didn't just materialize.
They've been on the horizon for years, but they've gotten short shrift
because of the refusal to believe that such family disintegration
could happen here, or at least to this degree. But now it is happening.

Substance abuse is also imposing heavy tolls on other public
institutions, including schools, prisons and hospitals. Many of them
are also limping along, overwhelmed by demands and underfunded by
taxpayers. Kentucky's children are being poorly served by politicians
who cling to the same old rhetoric despite the tragic new reality of
so many youngsters in such desperate need.