The Ohio Controlling Board approved $1 million in emergency funds to help the 16 children from Vinton County who were recently found by law enforcement authorities in terrible conditions.
The children range in age from 18 months to 18 years and were allegedly found in a roughly 12-foot by 12-foot room inside a Hamden house when law enforcement conducted a search warrant for a parallel investigation on June 30.
The $1 million is going into a special fund that is being set up for Vinton County for the 16 children, said Joel Potts, the chief government and external affairs officer at the Ohio Department of Children and Youth.
“These resources are specifically for this emergent need,” he said during a recent Controlling Board meeting.
“We know that many of them will be needing therapeutic foster care for quite some time to come. That is $150 a day to $250 a day on average per child. So those costs alone would bankrupt the county when you see them doubling the number of cases.”
Potts said he has never seen anything like this before in his 40 year career.
“A child off the radar is terrible enough,” he said.
“Sixteen kids in one family in one household to be off the radar is something that I’ve just not seen.”
Livestock was kept in better conditions than the children, Vinton County Sheriff Ryan Cain said during a press conference earlier this month.
“Extremely high presence, I’m sure, of bacterial and human feces,” he said. “It was just a disgusting scene.”
Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson said it’s something we’re not used to seeing in America.
“It really looked third-world,” he said. “I think if they would have waited another 24 hours, there was a very high probability that we’d be dealing with a death or multiple deaths of these children.”
The children were not enrolled in school, authorities said, adding that some of the children can’t speak and that the 18-year-old can’t spell their name.
“It was terrible,” Wilson said. “They really looked almost like feral animals … so when we’re talking reading and writing and education, we’re talking a whole ‘nother level of expectations here.”
Ohio state Sen. Kyle Koehler, R-Springfield, asked if $1 million is enough money to help the 16 children.
“What happens when the youngest of the children are in their teens and things start coming forth that we didn’t expect?”
Potts stressed the $1 million is for the children’s immediate needs.
“Over the next several months we are going to have a much better sense of what these particular children are dealing with, and what their long-term needs are going to be,” he said.
Ongoing costs will be necessary, Potts said.
“This is unprecedented,” he said. “We’ve seen a county agency literally double the number of kids in temporary custody overnight.”
Vinton County is Ohio’s least populated county with about 12,600 people.
All of the children are currently in foster care and the hope is the children will get adopted, Potts said.
“As horrendous as these types of cases are, it does give us that opportunity to ask those hard questions, and it’s time for us to ask those hard questions,” he said.
“You can’t look at something like this and not think that we need to do more.”
During the state budget process last year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine originally proposed an additional $83 million to Ohio counties for child protective services, but lawmakers did not fully fund the request in the last year’s budget, said Ohio state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, D-Westlake.
“I do know that this was a very large discussion in our state budget that we heard from county officials across the state about the dire needs of protective services and not having enough money,” Sweeney said.
Ohio state Sen. George Lang, R-Butler County, said he spent his early years in foster care.
“I do believe this is one of those rare exceptions where we need to err on the side of helping rather than err on the side of fiscal prudence,” he said.
Ohio state Rep. Mark Johnson, R-Chillicothe, was in Hamden over the weekend and saw the house is on a dead-end road with only one other house at the end of the road.
“No neighbor, the hardware store guy, the fire department had never visibly seen a child here,” he said. “It’s rather bizarre, to say the least.”
Making sure the children are taken care of is the top priority, Wilson said.
“We’ve got to ensure the kids are safe,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure they’re placed in good, solid therapeutic placements. And we have to hold accountable the people who are looking to do this to their own family.”
Gary Siders Sr., 73, Catherine Siders, 67, Gary Siders Jr., 36, and Elizabeth Siders, 33, are each facing 16 counts of felony endangering children in Vinton County Common Pleas Court. They have all pleaded not guilty.
A Vinton County judge signed a gag order on July 14 after Gary Siders Jr.’s attorney filed a motion for the order.
855-BCI-OHIO (855-224-6446) is the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation tip line.
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This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
