Last hope for kids in trouble
LEWISTON – Bruce Grimoldby walked through the Northwest Children’s Home education center and stopped to tend to a preteen boy sitting in a small, cement-block room with the door open. “If he runs out of here, I’ll grab him,” Grimoldby, the home’s director, said to a frazzled-looking teacher.
The teacher looked relieved and charged back to a classroom to deal with two other kids.
The boy, in a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I act this way just to annoy my parents,” bolted out of the room. Grimoldby put him in a secure hold, then dragged the boy kicking and screaming back into the isolation room – “safe room” as the staff call it.
“You need a five-minute break, OK?” Grimoldby said. “You could turn your day around.”
This place is also the last chance for scores of troubled children to turn their lives around. Since 1908, the private, nonprofit residential treatment center has catered to emotionally troubled, at-risk children. It’s where they go to heal from years of abuse or neglect, after they’ve fallen through other social safety nets.
The mission of the Northwest Children’s Home is to provide rehabilitative, therapeutic and educational services for children and families. The Lewiston campus has four residential treatment programs for up to 68 children ages 6 to 18. A second campus in Nampa, Idaho, has a residential treatment program for up to 12 girls ages 12 to 17.
Children who are removed from their homes because of abuse, abandonment or neglect are referred to the Children’s Home through state-run agencies, the judicial system and social service agencies. The program is funded mostly by state agencies in Idaho and Washington.
When rehabilitation centers, group homes and therapy sessions fail, kids end up here. The beds and classrooms are filled with children who are so emotionally disturbed from years of physical, sexual and mental abuse that addictions, broken relationships and often their own criminal acts have dominated their childhoods.”There is no place to send them from here,” Grimoldby said. “This is the end of the railroad line.”
The boy he counseled on a recent visit is one of about 40 boys and girls between 9 and 17 who don’t live at the home but who attend school there because they haven’t been able to function in a regular classroom setting.
Residents live on the home’s 22-acre campus under constant supervision. They attend school and one-on-one counseling and group therapy sessions. Most were referred by the Washington or Idaho state social services departments.
Kids whose outbursts become too dangerous for staff to control are placed in isolation rooms until they calm down.The staff can call the police if residents become too violent.
The home has stringent policies aimed at keeping relationships between residents and staff strictly professional. Although staffed round-the-clock, there is no live-in supervisor. Residents aren’t allowed to know where staff members live, or much else about their personal lives. And once children are discharged from the home, staff members are forbidden from contacting them.
“It’s on the shoulders of the kids who leave whether we ever see them again,” said Lori Skelton, director of marketing and development. “That’s the toughest part.”
The no-contact policy makes it difficult, if not impossible, to prove the long-term effectiveness of the children’s home, but staff members say the growth they see in kids every day, through therapy and counseling, social outings and school lessons, is evidence that they’re doing something right.
“I know we are helping kids,” Skelton said.
Different problems, different places
Though most children they treat have experienced extreme abuse and neglect by their families, “we also see kids who come from really good homes,” Skelton said. Those residents may suffer from severe mental disorders.
Emotional problems affect all 68 children living at the Lewiston home, but there’s no single cause of those problems. The home has different living facilities, and residents are grouped based on the problems they share.
There are four facilities in Lewiston: one for girls 12 to 17, one for boys 12 to 17, one for “sexually aggressive” boys 12 to 17, and one for boys ages 3 to 12, though the youngest resident is 9.
“Some of these kids are going to have chronic problems all into adulthood,” said Scott Mosher, clinical director. But by helping them learn to control themselves and understand their emotions, Mosher said, their lives can become easier. “We really focus on relationships.”
Each day is scheduled down to the hour, with all kids going to the home’s education center a couple miles away. Group therapy sessions are held in the afternoons after school gets out.
During one such session last month, about a dozen boys sat in a circle of couches, sharing stories.
The therapist, Shawn McDowell, presented words on flashcards that typically evoke negative connotations. “Did you ever have to use manipulation to get out of physical abuse?” he asked the boys. He looked at one of the boys, calling him by name. “When your parents would lock you in your room, you’d have to do some pretty manipulative things to get out, right? Like go out the window, or pry the door off its hinges?”
The boy nodded. Other boys talked about tactics they’d use to try to stop their parents from beating them. The group also talked about how the day had gone, and discussed confrontations the boys had with one another. They talked about how the abuse they experienced may have contributed to those conflicts, with McDowell declaring “problems aren’t the problems, coping is the problem, huh?”
How to cope with problems and handle emotions are focal points of the Northwest Children’s Home.
“They never learned how to control themselves,” said Dori Walden, a therapist in the program for boys 12 and under.
While some of the 68 residents are in the custody of their parents, many aren’t. Most are estranged from their parents, which is where their troubles started, Skelton said. When kids leave the home, most of them will live with adoptive families or foster families instead of with their biological parents.
“That can sometimes be the worst place to go,” Skelton said. “We have parents who really want to get here and see their kids, but really it’s best if they don’t because of the damage that’s been done.”
Trying to help
Residents typically stay at the home six to 12 months. The average stay used to be longer, about a year to 18 months, sometimes two years. But a decrease in funding changed that, Skelton said. Just one month at the home can cost $6,000 to $8,000 per person.
The home gets most of its funding through three state agencies – the Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections, the Idaho Health and Welfare Department and the Washington Department of Social and Health Services. The $8.1 million annual budget is supplemented by about $200,000 in fundraising each year.
Therapists and counselors staff every facility, making the student-to-staff ratio 4:1 at the home and education center. Heavy supervision and separate facilities for residents with different types of problems help ensure their safety, Skelton said, and keeps them from continuing the abuse cycle by abusing one another.
“We’re very careful how we mix groups of kids,” Skelton said.
Providing structure is a big step toward helping the children find normalcy because they’ve had none for most of their lives, Walden said.
Counseling and group therapy sessions are a big part of their days, but residents also have access to a woodshop and art center and can learn trades or draw pictures and paint.
“It’s a really big deal for the kids,” Mosher said as he looked at a stack of self-portraits. It’s another way for them to express themselves, and a way for therapists and other staffers to gauge what’s going on with a particular child.
Walden incorporates games into her therapy sessions, allowing the younger boys to play with toys while she observes. “That way it’s so less confrontational, because they’re just playing games,” Walden said.
The questions she asks the boys will range from the innocuous to the pointed. One might be “hum your favorite tune,” followed by “has someone ever left marks on your body?” Walden said.
“So much of it is character development,” Walden said. It’s about teaching the kids everything an abusive childhood robbed them of – listening skills, the ability to make eye contact, taking turns and expressing themselves through words, not violence, Walden said.
“That’s what so many of these guys have been robbed of before they came here,” she said.