A successful Lucas County Children Services program that helps families achieve sobriety, safety, and stability is expanding to help more families escape addiction.

Ohio START stands for Sobriety, Treatment and Reducing Trauma. It brings together LCCS caseworkers, behavioral health and treatment providers, and court personnel to help parents achieve sobriety, and help children heal from any trauma that family dysfunction may have caused. Parents are linked with “peer mentors” who have had lived experience with dependency and recovery, and who personalize the program to meet each family’s needs.

Should parents struggle along the way,  Ohio START provides supportive services if child(ren) must be removed for safety reasons.

After a three-year pilot, LCCS adopted Ohio START in 2020. Since then, the agency has developed one of the State of Ohio’s most successful programs, achieving national certification, and making Lucas County only the sixth Ohio county and first among the State’s metro counties to earn this distinction. Ohio START is now  in 56 Ohio counties and is administered through the Public Children Services Association of Ohio (PCSAO).

The program’s impact in  Lucas County is expected to continue to grow; in 2026, LCCS is expanding to include a third caseworker-peer mentor team to assist more families. Since its inception, LCCS has served 68 families and 126 children through Ohio START, including 22 families and 38 children just in the last year. Ohio START has supported more than 3,000 children statewide.

According to PCSAO research, mothers who participate in START achieve sobriety at nearly twice the rate of mothers treated without START, and that children in families served by START were half as likely to be placed in the custody of children services.

What makes Ohio START different than a normal child protection case?

• Caseworkers receive specialized training on handling families in recovery;
• Peer mentors lend lived experience of their own to provide support, wise counsel, and a sympathetic ear;
• Caseworkers and peer mentors work as a team on each case; and
• The program philosophy is to actively involve the family in every forward-looking decision that directly affects their future.

According to a recent parent survey, 45 percent of parents see Ohio START as a much more supportive approach to child protection compared to the general child protective services model. The biggest difference is that Ohio START is seen as encouraging family unity.