Nebraska’s Troubled Children

Nebraska has failed to provide adequate counseling and mental health services for troubled children and their families. State legislators were rightly shamed and vowed to change that last year, after desperate parents used a loophole in the law to surrender three dozen children as old as 17 to the state.

With the loophole closed and the controversy gone from the headlines, state lawmakers may be tempted to back away from their promise to swiftly develop programs to help troubled families. That would be a tragedy for Nebraska families that are struggling with troubled children.

Even the desperate move of making a child a ward of the state is no guarantee that the child will get needed help. Indeed, a startling case now unfolding in juvenile court in Omaha shows that Nebraska’s mental health apparatus, such as it is, is hobbled by bureaucratic ineptitude.

Judge Christopher Kelly has held the state’s Department of Health and Human Services in contempt for repeatedly ignoring court orders requiring the provision of specific services for a profoundly disturbed teenager who had been made a ward of the state.

As portrayed in the court record, the department is an administrative quagmire where court orders are dismissed out of hand and case workers meet obstacle upon obstacle when seeking timely treatment for clients who often have profound psychological problems.

The Legislature needs to straighten out this mess. But lawmakers must first act on a package of bills aimed at helping families like the ones that came to wit’s end last year and abandoned their children.

A pending bill that would create a hotline for families to call is all to the good. But it will be meaningless unless lawmakers put significant new money into community-based mental health treatment for children and counseling services for families that are having trouble coping. Another bill would add thousands of children to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, with the federal government paying more than 70 percent of the cost.

Some lawmakers will want to use the economic downturn as an excuse to backpedal on these crucial reforms. But by helping children living with their families now, the state will be able to avoid the much higher costs of institutionalization or imprisonment later on.