Clermont County is joining a select group to try an innovative new approach to helping a very risky group of kids.
A new, specialized foster care program is being developed in the county that will put kids age 8-18 with emotional or behavioral issues into a home that is designed to meet their specific needs. The hope of the program, said Lisa Bushman with Clermont County juvenile court, is to address the child’s needs and do so in an effective way.
“It is a foster care program that is geared towards kids age 8-18,” said Bushman. “We are looking to put only one child in a foster home at a time, which is something that’s a little bit different. We want to very much surround the foster parents, and the natural family and child with supportive services, where they would have weekly support meetings, a 24-hour crisis line, ongoing education and training and that sort of stuff.”
There are a few unique aspects of the program, and perhaps the most radical one is the limitation of only one foster child per home. Finding foster parents can be hard enough by itself. Typically, this leads to foster homes with multiple foster children, but Bushman said that limiting it to only one foster child will help the program to put more effort into that child.