Ohio Family Drug Court Statewide System Reform Program Implementation

OJJDP is seeking to infuse effective family drug court practices established at the local level and institutionalize them in the larger state-level child welfare, substance abuse treatment, and court systems. The purpose of this state systems improvement effort is to expand the scale of family drug courts and scope to serve all families in the child welfare system affected by parental substance abuse issues more effectively and improve child, parent, and family outcomes.

The Supreme Court of Ohio (SCO) seeks to expand the scale and scope of family dependency treatment courts (FDTC) and institutionalize best FDTC practices across the child welfare, treatment, and court systems at the local and state levels through the Statewide System Reform Program Implementation project. SCO will partner with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and Ohio Department of Medicaid. The work intends to improve family outcomes though targeted, intensive case management and responses. The goals of this project are to (1) implement a full-scale program of practice and policy changes that will promote substance use disorder screening and expand the number of family drug courts in Ohio, (2) develop an information-sharing system to measure the impact of the implementation plan in order to improve infrastructure, (3) improve family outcomes by improving reunification and treatment outcomes and decreasing days in out-of-home care, and (4) develop a marketing plan to disseminate information and lessons learned. CA/NCF