Summit County Juvenile Court FY2013-2015 Family Drug Court Implementation Project

The Family Drug Courts program builds the capacity of states, state and local courts, units of local government, and federally recognized tribal governments to either implement new drug courts or enhance pre-existing drug courts for individuals with substance abuse disorders or substance use and co-occurring mental health disorders, including histories of trauma, who are involved with the family dependency court as a result of child abuse, neglect, and other parenting issues. Category 1: Implementation grants are available to jurisdictions that have completed a substantial amount of planning and are ready to implement a family drug court. These are for jurisdictions where either no family drug court currently exists or a family drug court has been operational for less than 1 year.

The Summit County Family Drug Court (FDC) proposes to address patterns of substance abuse, poverty and incidents of child abuse and dependency/neglect. This is the result of substance availability, ease of access, and street value cost of crack cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine, powdered cocaine, prescription opioids, and other drugs being highly available in the Summit County and throughout the Akron-Canton Region. Child welfare involved parents with AOD service needs have engaged in services at a much lower rate than in other areas of service in spite of the region having a service-rich behavioral health system within the county. The Summit FDC program proposes to: 1) creatively and effectively partner with families to address substance abuse and other family challenges to create a healthy, stable home environment and permanently reunify the family; 2) significantly increase rate of reunification for program families over the rate identified above; and 3) significantly lower the percentage of program involved families who become re-involved with SCCS within twelve (12) months of reunification versus the current rate identified above. The Summit County FDC will refer at least 25 families per year to the FDC; provide intensive and comprehensive services; provide initial and ongoing specialized training and support to community partners; track, share and prepare de-identified data and other information to accurately report program services and outcomes to gauge program efficacy, and other program activities to accomplish goals.
CA/NCF