Where do damaged kids go when their last chance is gone?
They are our lost children. Not cute, cuddly babies with sad eyes, but hard-to-handle, at-risk teenagers, the kids too mentally ill, too self-destructive, too neurologically compromised to live in regular foster care or group homes.
For these teens, Bosco Homes provided a last chance. A chance to recover from addictions. A chance to get treatment for depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. A chance to get therapy and training to cope with fetal alcohol syndrome and other brain damage. A chance to recover from the psychological trauma of physical or sexual abuse. The ranch, run by Bosco Homes near Ardrossan in Strathcona County, was never a secure facility for young offenders. It was a residential treatment centre, providing care and counselling for youth with psychiatric conditions, neurological damage or severe behavioural and emotional problems.
For 22 years, Bosco's dedicated staff offered refuge and treatment for our province's most damaged, desperate children. But now, Bosco ranch is shutting down. So, it seems, are seven other Bosco homes across north-central Alberta, displacing between 85 and 100 at-risk youth, and imperilling Bosco's four private schools for the children.
In early June, a 14-year-old boy, who had just been placed at the ranch by Children's Services, was charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of Barry Boenke, 68, and Susan Trudel, 59, who lived on an acreage in Strathcona County. Another 14-year-old was charged as an accessory after the fact. The murders occurred after the boys allegedly fled the ranch.
Alberta Children's Services imposed an immediate moratorium on new placements to the facility. Despite the fact there had never been a serious incident of violence before, despite the fact that Children's Services insisted Bosco had done nothing wrong, the neighbours demanded new security measures. In a letter to Children's Services and Bosco, the residents association insisted the entire 48-hectare ranch property be surrounded by an eight-to-12 foot fence, either electrified or topped with razor wire, the type used by U. S. maximum-security prisons.
Bosco and the province countered by offering to put up a 10-foot fence around the facilities' core buildings made of so-called "no-climb" mesh. When negotiations broke down and the residents group walked away from discussions, Alberta Children's Services told Bosco no more patients would be sent to the ranch.
Trevor Coulombe, who speaks for Children's Services, says it wasn't safe for youth to be left there. "It's not a positive environment out there right now. I'm not in a position to comment on whether what the neighbours want is reasonable or not reasonable. That's not for us to judge. I don't want to say that their concerns aren't valid concerns. But we can't have our kids living in an environment that isn't positive for them. We have to move them, for their own safety and well-being, if a solution can't be arrived at."
Since Alberta child-welfare placements provide about 90 per cent of Bosco's clients, the board felt it had no choice but to close the facility.
Senior Bosco staff say they were told this week that Alberta's childwelfare authorities would no longer be allowed to place children at any of Bosco's group homes. For the record, Coulombe insists no such order went out. But meantime, it has been months since the province placed children in Bosco homes. And with no clients, the homes simply aren't viable.
The deaths of Boenke and Trudel were a tragedy. But so too is the loss of vitally needed psychiatric treatment facilities for sick children.
It's easy to empathize with those Strathcona County residents worried about their safety. But our community won't get any safer if mentally ill teens don't get treatment, or worse, end up on the street because there aren't safe and appropriate placements for them. This province already has a dire shortage of treatment options for children with psychiatric disorders. And how much does the province's decision to starve Bosco of clients have to do with the murders and how much to do with money?
Referring children to Bosco facilities was far more expensive than keeping them in foster care:$260 to $430 a day per child, depending on the degree of treatment required. It's surely no coincidence that this month, group-home operators were told the province would be cutting back on fee-for-service payments to group homes, across the board.
Where possible, says Coulombe, the province will be moving children and youth from larger facilities to "family-based care." Such placements, he says, normalize care and yield better outcomes. Yet how realistic is that model, in a province chronically short of foster homes, a province that's simultaneously slashing funding to front-line child-welfare agencies such as the Boys and Girls Club of Edmonton, which laid off about 100 of its own staff this Friday, and cancelled its 24/7 crisis intervention program?
Family-based care sounds all cosy and friendly, but it's not necessarily the best option for kids with severe emotional and behavioural problems, such as Bosco's clients.
So what's worse? To think that the province forced a respected childwelfare agency to close because of the irrational fears and demands of the neighbours?Or to think that the province is squeezing child-welfare agencies to balance its budget? Either way, it looks as though the mental health and physical safety of sick and vulnerable children has been put at risk to serve political ends.
And in the end, that puts our whole community at risk.
If we fail to address the psychiatric needs of these most troubled teens now, we may all need a lot more razor-wire fences in our futures.
Paula Simons
12 September 2009
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/Bosco+Homes+Closure/1987397/story.html
