CARING COMMUNITIES: PROGRAM TARGETS AT-RISK CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES

Gloria Miller a therapist with the Community Counseling Center used puppets for play therapy with her clients at May Greene Elementary School.

Members of the Caring Communities hold a staff meeting to discuss cases. The group is made up of representatives of several organizations and works closely with teachers and administrators.

Its organizers used to call it the Caring Communities Project -- a program to help children and their families become self-sufficient, productive members of the community.

They dropped the word "project" this year. It is not a project anymore, they say. It is a successful program with life-changing effects.

It started with a grant from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The communities receiving grants were challenged to pool resources and help at-risk children and their families.

Caring Communities Executive Coordinator Jo Boyer and her staff took over an empty classroom at May Greene Elementary. After their first year of work, child abuse and neglect hotline calls from the May Greene area dropped from 28 calls in five months to three calls in the same period.

"Teachers see these children are bringing problems to school because it affects the way they learn," Boyer said. "We're able to catch these problems before they become crises."

Now Boyer and her team are ready to prevent crisis situations in other neighborhoods. During the last state legislative session, five departments -- DESE, Department of Health, Department of Mental Health, Department of Social Services and the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations -- banded together to aid seven Caring Communities groups in the state.

Cape Girardeau's was chosen to receive help from these five departments, which provide both personnel and money. Thanks to the partnership, Caring Communities groups soon will be in Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington elementary schools and Schultz Middle School.

The next step is to form advisory groups in each neighborhood. The groups will assess the needs.

Caring Communities also needs office space, which is a problem at crowded schools. At one school, the program may be run out of an unheated storage closet.

But Boyer said she would run the program anywhere, because she knows what it can do for a child and his family.

Marie Walker, a Division of Family Services social worker with Caring Communities, recalled a family that was helped.

An unemployed, drug-abusing mother and her 11-year-old son moved to Cape Girardeau from another city. The son had behavioral problems and was referred to Caring Communities.

Walker and other professionals helped draw up a psychological treatment program for the boy and talked to his mother about her drug use.

Today, she is enrolled in programs to help her stop using drugs and has two part-time jobs. While the mother may still use drugs on occasion, Walker said the family situation is healthier.

"There were changes in the child's perception of his mother and changes in her ability to parent," she said. "Our goal for parents is to become self-sufficient and not welfare dependent."

Other children only need some new clothes and shoes or the parents may need help finding a safer home. Caring Communities helps brighten the complete family picture through several services.

"The idea is not to do for, but to do with," Boyer said.

She said families in the other chosen neighborhoods should begin to see implementation of Caring Communities programs within the next school year.