Cuyahoga Executive Ronayne’s flip-flop: From urgent child welfare crisis to media’s ‘terrible bias’

Chris Ronayne gives his acceptance speech at Masthead Brewing Company after being elected Cuyahoga County Executive on Tuesday, November 8, 2022. (David Petkiewicz, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne campaigned last year on a promise to fix problems in the Division of Children and Family Services, amid disturbing accusations of unsafe conditions for children and staff, often framing his calls for immediate action at events, debates and on Twitter around information reported by the media.

Now, though, he suggests those reports may have been unfair or “biased,” seemingly minimizing some of the concerns first raised by social workers at the Jane Edna Hunter Social Services Center, while simultaneously taking steps to correct them.

The change in attitude came to light during a DCFS Board meeting Wednesday night, where he spoke about the county’s plans to combat a national shortage of emergency and treatment beds that has left some youth in county custody to live at the office building for weeks to months at a time. He suggested that media reports on the problem might have been overblown as a ploy to increase profits. And he accused media of blaming DCFS employees – including its top leadership Director Jacqueline Fletcher and Health and Human Services Director David Merriman, who participated in the meeting – for circumstances that he believes were outside of their control.

“I quickly acknowledged on week one in this job the complexity of the Jane Edna Hunter problem and how that needs to be better communicated to media and others, despite any efforts that my team has already made,” Ronayne told the board during a 50-minute discussion. “There was a terrible bias last year that, frankly, sold newspapers, so to speak, or got clicks.”

The bias made it seem as if the staff at Jane Edna Hunter “were making some mistake to keep a child in the building,” he accused, when they had no choice after ambulances, parents and other agencies left the kids at the front door.

“That became a political football in the campaign, and it was just a terrible bias,” he said. “Our staff is working really hard.”

Change of opinion?

Those words are very different from how he described DCFS challenges – and the county’s lack of action to fix them – less than 12 months ago.

Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer began investigating conditions at DCFS last July, after two social workers reported children were sleeping at the office building for weeks to months at a time, assaulting staff and being sexually exploited. They said for years they’d been sounding alarms about the placement crisis and the dangers it was causing, but their concerns fell on deaf ears. The reporting led then-Executive Armond Budish to take new steps to address the placement crisis and prompted the state to send in a Rapid Response Team to evaluate the county office.

Fixing those problems also became a campaign promise for the two political candidates running to replace Budish: Democrat Ronayne and Republican Lee Weingart.

“We have a broken system right now, a situation that is completely unacceptable,” Ronayne said in a July 2022 press release, in which he announced five proposed solutions.

The “changes County govt can make to protect children and workers,” according to his July 11, 2022, Tweet, included faster hiring, staff bonuses, paying providers more money to hire staffing and increase bedspace, posting more law enforcement at DCFS headquarters “for the protection of workers and children,” and convening a “Child Placement Crisis Committee” to find better ways to house youth.

“The bottom line is this: DCFS is understaffed and under supported. Leaving positions unfilled and cutting experienced staff puts lives at risk,” Ronayne said in a tweet. “I’ll take every step possible to ensure that this doesn’t happen when I am County Executive.”

He repeated his urgent calls to reform DCFS in campaign forums, at the executives debate, and in at least two other tweets, linking to reporting by cleveland.com.

“Nothing should be off the table to fix this crisis,” he tweeted on July 8, 2022.

“The crisis at DCFS can not continue,” he tweeted Aug. 14, 2022.

Cleveland.com reached out to Ronayne directly and through his communications team with questions about whether his concerns about the DCFS crisis have changed and the intent behind his words to the board.

A county spokesperson asked the reporter whether she identified herself as a listener in the public DCFS board meeting, which was streamed online over Microsoft Teams.

Changes coming

Ronayne does appear to be following through on his campaign promises to make changes at DCFS.

At the beginning of the year, he toured 8 new suites opened at The Centers to house youth who are otherwise hard to place because of their behavioral or mental health conditions. He said he’s seen the success of the program to provide youth with proper care and would like to see it grow.

The Centers has housed 16 youth so far this year, for an average stay of 45 days, Fletcher later told the board in her report.

But Ronayne said he wants to do more to reframe the focus from “child welfare to child wellness.” He said the county plans to soon announce a new campus, apart from the Jane Edna building, where the county could be able to provide 24-hour mental health, behavioral and other support services in a “safe and enriching environment for children and staff.”

It would be a new front door for youth, meant to divert them away from the office building, or at least minimize the time they spend there.

“It’s going to take some money; it’s going to take some planning; and it’s going to take your partnership,” Ronayne told the board.

He also suggested that the county’s juvenile court needs to be more involved in identifying alternative housing for youth who commit crimes or assault DCFS staff but are not competent to stand trial or otherwise don’t fit the criteria to go to the juvenile detention center.

“It can’t be that the next stop on the train is Jane Edna,” Ronayne said.

“I don’t have all of the answers yet,” he told the board earnestly and asked for their guidance on identifying solutions.

The board asked for more data about which children linger in the county office the longest and why. It also pushed for more early interventions that might prevent youth from ever being removed from their homes or surrendered by their parents in the first place.

Recent data compiled by the DCFS board shows the average number of children spending more than five hours in the Jane Edna office has decreased significantly from a peak of nine in December, right before The Centers opened, to four today. But the average length of stay for those few children has slightly increased.

Children spent an average of two nights in the building in October of 2022, peaking at 2.5 nights in January. The stay dropped to one night after The Centers opened but, as of March, was back up to 2.5. Thirty-seven percent of children had stayed at the Jane Edna building more than one night in a year’s span, data show.

Other numbers, however, are showing greater improvement.

The county placed 33% of youth in homes with friends or family members in the first quarter of the year, more than the state average of 30%. Those kids spending more than 1,000 days in foster care also only had to be moved to new placements in 1.3% of cases, well below the state average of 4.4%.

“It’s slow progress,” Fletcher said, “but we’re getting there.”

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