Children's advocates rally at capitol

State News

February 23, 2010

Prevention costs much less than intervention they say

By RONNIE ELLIS The McCreary County Record Tue Feb 23, 2010, 12:08 PM EST

FRANKFORT — Chelsey Loraditch made pretty good grades – she was an A and B student. Her parents were supportive – “We felt we were doing all the right things,” said her father, Mark Loraditch.

But it wasn’t enough. For Chelsey, 15, who suffers from colitis and by her own admission is painfully shy and has “very low self-esteem,” it was all she could do in the mornings just to get out of bed and go to school at Paul Blazer High School in Ashland. Her grades began to slip and she was becoming truant.

“She was at severe risk of being removed from the home,” said Kelly Adkins, program director for NECCO, a foster care agency which receives state funding to help keep troubled children in their homes.

“She just wouldn’t get out of bed and go to school,” said Mark Loraditch, 51. “We were doing the best we could, but we were just at our wit’s end.”

Chelsey isn’t unique. In 2008, 12,397 Kentucky children were removed from their homes for a variety of problems and reasons, ranging from truancy to abuse and neglect, according to the Kentucky Youth Advocates, a Louisville-based agency which advocates for children’s and low-income families’ issues. The average length of stay for those children was just over two years.

That’s traumatic for both the child and the family, said Bart Baldwin of the Children’s Alliance, another advocacy alliance. And it’s expensive to taxpayers, said Beau Necco, president and CEO of NECCO.

According to KYA, it costs the state more than $21,000 to place one child in foster care or residential care while it costs only about $4,560 to provide intervention services to keep the same child in the home.

Chelsey, for instance, met weekly with Adkins, the NECCO program director, for about three months on her confidence and self-esteem. Chelsey worried about being called on in class, having to speak before her classmates and suffered from extreme shyness. Her attendance improved and her grades returned to their previous levels.

Adkins said Chelsey was lucky to have the strong support and help of her father and her mother, Leigh-Ann Loraditch. But all three said they would not have been able to work on Chelsey’s problems without Adkins’ help.

Advocates fear, however, the tight state budget means such family preservation programs can’t expand if funding isn’t increased and perhaps even cut. About 600 of them gathered Thursday in the capitol rotunda to lobby the legislature not to turn to such programs when trying to plug more than a $1 billion budget shortfall.

Among the measures the groups support is raising the dropout age for school children, placing an interest cap on payday lending firms, adding physical activity to school days to reduce obesity and family preservation programs.

Necco, the CEO of the company of the same name, said he hopes lawmakers can find a way increase funding by $5 million to be used as seed money for programs to reduce out of home placements. He said the state presently spends about $19 million on family preservation programs, but only $2 million of that comes from the state’s general fund – the rest is made up of federal funding.

Since keeping children like Chelsey in their homes is less traumatic for the child and the family and because it saves the state as much as $17,000 per child, he said, it makes more sense to spend the money on prevention.

But the tendency is to cut prevention first and that leads to more expensive intervention later on,” Necco said. “It does damage to the child. It does damage to the family. But it also does damage to the taxpayers.”

In 2008, for instance, 357 children were taken out of their homes in Boyd County; 114 in Barren County; 99 in Carter County; 132 in Greenup County; 271 in Laurel County; 80 in McCreary County; 234 in Madison County; 164 in Pulaski County; 118 in Rowan County; and 129 in Whitley County, according to data compiled by the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services.

RONNIE ELLIS writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort. Reach him at rellis@cnhi.com. Follow CNHI News Service stories on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cnhifrankfort.

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