A state grant awarded this week to Bellewood Presbyterian Homes for Children will enable the Bowling Green office to expand its services to households threatened with losing their children to foster care.
The state Department of Community Based Services awarded a $350,000 Intensive In-Home Program grant to the Bowling Green and Paducah offices of Bellewood.
The grant will be used to fund a program in which a therapist and case manager will work intensively with troubled families, offering counseling and other services so that families can prevent having their children removed from their homes.
Kristy Watt, director of western Kentucky operations for Bellewood, said the grant will enable the Bowling Green office to hire five case managers and one therapist, who will spend four months working with up to 10 families altogether in Warren and Barren counties.
“The cases we’ll be working on are cases involving neglect, environmental issues, maybe a lack of parenting skills, occasionally there might be suspicion of alcohol or drug use or domestic violence,” Watt said.
Case managers would spend up to 10 hours each week with families.
This program is far more intensive and allows case managers to spend much more time with the families in their homes.
“We pretty much provide full care to the child. We communicate with therapists and psychiatrists,” said Lada Odobasic, program director for foster care at Bellewood. “What we’re doing is trying to correct anything we see maybe wrong with the picture to reunify the child with the family.
“We want as many kids as possible to return to their biological parents, and we provide anything from individual therapy to family therapy, any counseling, if things go wrong at school, we’ll figure out how to do better … support is a big thing, so we try to provide the best support possible.”
Watt said that whereas case managers in the past have spent about four to six weeks with families, this program will allow them to offer four months of assistance.
“I would compare it very much to sort of a teaching role, retraining, where the case manager will look at whatever issues have been identified and try to find resources that are appropriate for the family, and go in and teach those things, whether that means training the family on household cleanliness, budgeting or age-appropriate discipline techniques,” Watt said.
The first case manager was hired this week for the grant-funded program, and more are soon to follow, according to Watt.
Depending on the success of the program, Bellewood could receive additional funding to keep the in-home program operating for two additional years.
“There’s an initial period during the first 10 days where we will have an assessment of needs and goals individualized for each family,” Watt said. “We want to meet at least 75 percent of those goals, and there are milestones to reach throughout four-month period, which holds us and the family accountable for reaching those milestones.”
Watt said that families struggling to care for their children and prevent them from being removed from the home face more difficulties in the current economic climate.
The intensive in-home program is meant to break the cycle of abuse and neglect in homes and if effective, could save money spent in the future to reverse the outcomes of living in a turbulent household.
“I think this service is huge because it’s a proactive approach to working with families; so many services we provide statewide are just reactive approaches where kids have already been removed,” Watt said. “This could be a huge cost-saver in terms of keeping a family together versus paying to have a kid housed in foster care.”
Bowling Green Daily News
Friday, January 15, 2010
By Justin Story
