FOR MANY KIDS, OREGON IS A STATE OF NEGLECT

Oregon Must Confront the Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Parental Failures
Driving More Children into Foster Care

There is no barometer that better measures the health and safety of
kids than the rise and fall in the number of children in foster care.
In Oregon, the numbers show that far too many of its kids are caught
in a tragic storm of alcohol, drugs, abuse and neglect.

The Oregonian's Bill Graves reports that the number of children
entering foster care in Oregon has ballooned by 25 percent in just the
past two years. For three years running now, more children have been
taken from homes of violence or neglect and put in foster care in
Oregon than went back to their families, turned 18 or otherwise left
the state-supervised care.

Oregon is losing ground on kids, in spite of the best intentions of
Oregon's top elected officials and all their rhetoric about putting
kids first. Thousands of children in Oregon are less safe and more
vulnerable to abuse today than they were even a few years ago. To
balance the state budget, the Legislature has hacked away at drug and
alcohol treatment, Healthy Start and other programs for children and
families.

The Legislature even decided in 2003 that maintaining one of the
nation's lowest beer taxes was a higher priority than finding more
money for alcohol treatment. That year Oregon cut its drug and alcohol
treatment programs by 18 percent to help balance the shrunken state
budget.

Now two years later, state officials report that drug and alcohol
abuse was a key factor in a sharp rise in child abuse and neglect
cases in Oregon. Drug and alcohol abuse was involved in nearly half of
the 11,255 substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect in fiscal
year 2005, they say. Moreover, alcohol and illegal drugs, mostly
methamphetamine, were factors in nearly every one of the 18 Oregon
child deaths from abuse or neglect last year.

All those people now chattering about whether the meth epidemic is
little more than media hype ought to visit with some of those abused
and neglected kids carrying their few belongings into Oregon foster
homes. In Jackson County, about six out of every 10 children placed in
foster care are taken from their parents because of meth abuse in the
family, according to Carin Niebuhr, director of the county's
Commission on Children and Families. Meanwhile, a national report next
week is expected to detail the strains that meth abuse has put on the
entire nation's foster care system.

It is frustrating that so many Oregon leaders -- and the voters who
put them in office -- still seem unable or unwilling to see the clear
connections between such things as cuts in drug and alcohol treatment
and increases in child abuse and neglect. When the Legislature debated
the beer tax increase, most of the talk was about protecting the
state's craft-brew industry and virtually none was about protecting
children by funding alcohol treatment for their drunk and abusive parents.

Even now, as this state prepares to send back more than $1 billion in
tax revenues to comply with its kicker law, and girds for a likely
vote on a new state spending limit, all the noise is about taxes and
schools and what's good or bad for business. While Oregonians holler
for their kicker, they all but ignore the cries of thousands of abused
children.