The Supreme Court of Ohio (Court) has entered into a collaborative relationship with the Ohio Departments of Mental Health and Addiction Services, Job and Family Services, and Medicaid to establish Ohio's Family Drug Court Statewide System Improvement Program (SSIP), funded by a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The purpose of the SSIP grant is to establish a comprehensive strategy for statewide multisystem reform that improves outcomes for children and families in the child welfare system with substance abuse and mental health challenges by expanding the scale and scope of existing Family Dependency Treatment Courts and expanding the use of evidence-based practices within those courts.
To support the SSIP grant, the Court has engaged GRC to design and test a rigorous evaluation strategy that can be applied by the Court to routinely evaluate Family Dependency Treatment Courts in the future. GRC will use administrative data from the Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS), Medicaid claims, and the Ohio Behavioral Health system to evaluate the impact of Dependency Treatment Courts on performance measures related to foster care placement, the occurrence of child maltreatment, substance abuse treatment use, employment, and criminal justice involvement.
