I read with great interest the recent article in The Bulletin about the connection between drug addiction and foster care. This connection is something that we see every day at CASA of Central Oregon. CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocates and is a local nonprofit that recruits, trains and supports volunteers who advocate for the best interest of children and youth in foster care.

Sunday’s article focused on drug issues in Southern Oregon counties and stated that elsewhere in Oregon foster care rates have dropped. Unfortunately, this is not the case here in Central Oregon, where the number of children in foster care has steadily increased over the past several years. Over the past three years, the number of children in foster care in Crook, Jefferson and Deschutes counties has climbed from 401 children in 2013, to 529 children in 2016, to well over 600 children this year.

Central Oregon counties are the fastest-growing counties in the state, and as our population grows we have outpaced the available mental health services that can provide essential help for people to avoid drug addiction and the subsequent need for state intervention to protect children.

Due in part to the lack of sufficient local mental health and addiction resources, it is increasingly common in Central Oregon for many months to go by between when a parent is ordered by a judge to have a psychiatric assessment and start mental health and addiction treatment to when that assessment actually takes place and treatment begins — even after that parent has lost legal custody of a child to the state.

Sometimes at CASA we do get to see the system work, and just like in the article, a parent successfully battles addiction and regains custody of her or his child. But we cannot take this outcome for granted — it only happens when there are resources available to the parent, like the Crossroads facility mentioned in the article. We also cannot take CASA services for granted, for even though CASA is a state-mandated program, state funding for CASA programs is shrinking. For example, despite the increase in the number of local children in foster care, CASA of Central Oregon will receive 26 percent less state funding this fiscal year, due to the $1.4 billion budget deficit.

Currently, there is a long list of children waiting for a CASA volunteer, because the growth in need has simply outpaced CASA of Central Oregon’s budget to train and support a sufficient population of advocates to serve all of the children who will spend time in foster care this year. Children paired with a CASA volunteer tend to have better outcomes in all aspects of their life than children in the foster system who do not have CASA advocating for them. A CASA volunteer is often the only consistent adult in a child’s life during that child’s time in foster care, and the child’s CASA volunteer is the only person tasked with advocating for the child’s best interests and doing the follow-up to make sure all court-ordered services actually occur.

Right now, in Central Oregon, it sometimes feels like we are putting Band-Aids on wounds that require far more, and that by failing to address a host of underlying local issues like a lack of mental health and addiction treatment services, the lack of affordable housing, low wage jobs, and high rates of domestic violence that, when taken together, can put enormous stress on the family structure and put children at risk of abuse and neglect.

To learn more about how to help local children who have experienced abuse or neglect please visit www.casaofcentraloregon.org.

— Jenna App is the executive director 
of Court Appointed Special Advocates, 
a nonprofit based in Bend, Prineville 
and Madras.

Central Oregon counties are the fastest-growing counties in the state, and as our population grows we have outpaced the available mental health services that can provide essential help for people to avoid drug addiction and the subsequent need for state intervention to protect children.