San Antonio advocates want continuity of mental health for foster children
When children enter the foster care system, there is trauma ingrained in their lives. This trauma can be dealt with in a number of ways, treatment being the most common, and in Texas, it is paid for by the state. But in addition to having to move anywhere from three to six times per year on average, advocates say, these kids also have to switch therapists.
This means they have to tell their story, which often includes abuse, over and over, said Angela White, president and CEO of Child Advocates San Antonio (CASA). “They’ve said that a lot to a lot of different people [the child] He says: I don’t do this anymore. ”
White said switching healers “doesn’t give them a chance to heal” and can bruise children again.
CASA is partnering with Jewish Family Service of San Antonio, a nonprofit focused on mental health, and Project THRU, a nonprofit serving youth aging outside of the adoption system, to fund therapists who commit themselves to adoptive children.
“If there’s one thing that young people and young adults lack in the foster care system, it’s consistency,” said Courtney Lafferty, CEO of the THRU Project.
The two-year pilot program, called Project Launch, is not fully funded, organizers told the San Antonio Report, but they hope it will begin in the coming months. CASA has applied for more than $400,000 in federal coronavirus relief funds from the city of San Antonio and the Jewish Family Service is seeking $550,000 from Bexar County.
“I definitely do fundraisers, and I’m trying to find the dollars to be able to do it,” said Jennifer Regner, executive director of the Jewish Family Service. “We’ll do it one way or another.”
Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai said he will look for funding in the county budget, which may include federal grants, for the pilot.
“The more proactively we intervene upstream, the more we can reduce the final cost along with the cost of incarceration, the cost of foster care, the cost of vagrancy and human trafficking,” said Sakai, as a Bexar County Associate Judge. The children’s court oversees cases involving foster children.
“If there is not enough intervention and rehabilitation to deal with the trauma they have experienced, they often fall into those systems,” he said.
Ultimately, the partnership wants to use Project Launch to prove to the Texas legislature that continuity of mental health care for foster children is worth state funding.
“It’s all about being able to completely unleash amazing people into the universe,” White said.
‘too complicated’ system
Every year, about 8,000 to 10,000 children They are in the Bexar County foster care system, which is operated by Child Protective Services of Texas.
Treatment costs are covered by the state, but a child can only have one therapist at a time.
White said the system wasn’t designed to have kids switch therapists when they moved on, but that’s the result. “There are several irons in the fire that make this difficult. … It is very complicated.”
When a child enters the system for the first time, it is often an emergency situation, said Allison Martinez, vice president of programs at CASA.
“If it’s in the middle of the night or a very dramatic removal, oftentimes their first stop will be to an emergency shelter,” Martinez said. “So the kids will start to see this wizard.”
Children in these shelters typically stay less than 60 days before being placed with a relative or a foster family – at which point a new therapist is assigned or assigned if necessary.
Then, perhaps, the situation will change for relatives or a foster family and the child will move again to a home that is far away from the therapist, for example, she said.
Children who need hospitalization or inpatient care often fall off the outpatient therapist’s schedule while receiving treatment.
Project Launch hopes to change that by hiring three Jewish family service therapists who will commit to their foster child patients, about 17-25 each, no matter where in Bexar County they are placed.
The partnership plans to seek agreements with residential facilities and emergency shelters such as Clarity Child Guidance Center and Roy Maas Youth Alternatives to allow project release therapists to see their patients if they are accepted, White said.
She added that she would regularly check in with therapists and patients to gauge the children’s progress. “That gives us more of a case then to go to the legislature [Child Protective Services] And say, “Look, this is the impact this is having,” and then ask them for funding at that point. “
Through their work with children and youth in the adoption system, Project CASA and THRU will refer clients to Project Launch therapists who need it most, said Ryan Curran, clinical director of the Jewish Family Service, who will oversee the project.
Not all children in foster care need ongoing treatment, Curran said, but the vast majority do.
“It’s a recurring trauma,” he said.
Healing broken relationships
Most children in foster care have a lot of “torn relationships,” Curran said, because not only have they lost, at least temporarily, their parents or family, they’re usually placed in multiple foster homes.
“Every time it happens — that there’s a relationship fractured — it really leads to some current and future struggles with relationships and trust,” he said.
“Our goal is to have the same provider follow that child through their foster care journey — even as they grow older and farther away from their parents. [foster system] —That person staying there stays constant,” he said. “That person’s permanent presence will benefit … every field you can imagine.”
And according to National Foster Youth Institute. Only half of them are gainfully employed by the age of 24 and a quarter experience symptoms of PTSD. Nearly 60% of legally emancipated men who are over the age of the bail system have been convicted of a crime, according to the institute.
Curran said measuring success in mental health can be difficult because it’s not just about managing symptoms.
“There will be some standardized clinical evaluations that we will use,” he said. But for this population, we don’t want to rely solely on reducing symptoms. It is more about maintaining the relationship, then trusting in [process] And to be vulnerable with us.”
It can take several sessions for a therapist to gain that confidence, Martinez said, and that’s where Project Launch can have an impact.
“A lot of times the therapists focus on making sure the situation goes well, but these kids really need deep trauma therapy so they can heal from the things that happened to them,” she said.