Cottonwood employees fear for their child patients

If funding is not found to keep Cottonwood Residential Treatment Center open, the biggest loss will be for the children, say officials with the local mental-health facility.

Counselor Amy Edwards has been helping children at the center in Cape Girardeau for 15 years. She said closing Cottonwood and transferring children to a state-operated facility in St. Louis would be like splitting up a family.

"The staff care about these kids like they're their own," said Edwards. "That's the first concern: What's going to happen to these kids?"

Staff at Cottonwood received news it would close by early next year after Gov. Jay Nixon announced Tuesday his decision to freeze or veto more than $1.1 billion of the state's general revenue. Nearly $500,000 for Cottonwood was restricted as part of his actions, and the facility is no longer accepting new patients.

"We had three admissions ready to go, coming in our doors, and we had to call and tell those families 'You can't bring you're child now,'" Edwards said. "These children are not children that have been successful with outpatient services. These are children that have had multiple different services, at least what they can get in the area they live in."

Keith Schafer, director of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, previously said some of the children at the Cape Girardeau facility might be transferred to Hawthorn Children's Psychiatric Hospital in St. Louis. It has a residential and hospital component that equal a combined total of 44 beds. Of the 16 residential beds at that facility, 12 are occupied.

But for many Southeast Missouri families, driving to a St. Louis facility to visit their child would be too expensive, said Alexis Lorenz, a psychiatric technician at Cottonwood. Hawthorne said it would probably be the closest mental health facility for such children in this part of the state.

Not all of the children would go to Hawthorne. Some would return home for their families, possibly before they've completed treatment. Lorenz and Edwards said this move poses a risk for the children, their families and possibly the community.

"You keep hearing more and more about school shootings. What are we doing to prevent that?" said Edwards. "In Missouri, do we want to be the state saying that to prevent that we're going to cut children's mental health? Do we want to be the state that does that? ... I wouldn't want to have to look parents in the eye when there's a school shooting, knowing they could have received help, but I closed the facility that they were going to be able to get help from."

Jill Eldridge, a nurse at Cottonwood, said there's no facility nearby that could provide the same kind of care as Cottonwood. The center serves children between the ages of 6 and 17 with serious psychiatric disorders. It offers intensive care at an early age, which she said can help children eventually become productive members of society.

"It's a real window of opportunity to be able to treat these children when they're young and still growing and forming in a lot of ways," she said. "If we miss this window, we might not get another one until it's too late. Or if we miss it, we might not get another one at all."

Lorenz also pointed out how detrimental it could be to transfer the children to a more hospital-based facility. At Cottonwood, the goal is to work with the children to make them feel comfortable returning back to their families and their communities.

"We're not just warehousing these children," she said. "They are learning every day. They're learning skills and how to succeed in life when they leave Cottonwood and how to treat others and themselves whenever they leave."

Cottonwood, a 32-bed treatment center, has about 95 full- and part-time employees that perform a number of duties, from therapy to education. The children in the facility receive their education in the center, are given vouchers to buy clothes, go through counseling with their families, and -- if counselors and staff believe they're ready -- can be transported to home from the facility every other weekend.

Employees don't plan to let the residential center close without a fight. An online petition urging the governor not to close the facility was started at change.org, and Edwards said they plan to reach out to city leaders and area legislators to encourage them to join the charge. Eventually, they hope to arrange a meeting with Missouri Department of Mental Health officials and the governor himself.

"I would like to see the people that made this decision come down and see what we do here," she said. "Come down and put your eyes on the faces of these kids that we serve."

srinehart@semissourian.com

388-3641

Pertinent address:

1025 N. Sprigg St., Cape Girardeau, Mo.