Troubled youth come home

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A new facility has opened up in the old residential school on the Muskowekwan First Nation, designed to address behavioural problems of troubled kids and get them back on track.

The Four Directions Child and Family Services Inc. Stabilization and Assessment Centre had its grand opening Dec. 21, although the first two children were placed at the centre the first week of November.

Milton McKay is general manager of the Stabilization and Assessment Centre.

"The development of this facility was primarily by the four agencies that are involved in the Treaty Four area, that are operational in the Treaty Four area - Qu'Appelle Child and Family Services, File Hill Child and Family Services Inc., Yorkton Tribal Council Child and Family Services, and Touchwood Family Services," McKay said.

The purpose of the facility, McKay explained is, as its name suggests, assessing children and stabilizing their behavior.

"The function is to stabilize their behaviors and get them functioning normally again. I suppose, in terms of all their physical needs - their rest and nutrition, things like that - and then going through the process of assessing the complexity of problems they may have, or the particular issues that are causing them to be in the circumstances that they're in," McKay said.

As part of the assessment process, centre staff gather any information they can about the child - where they've been, any previous assessments that have been done, summaries from workers - and then work in conjunction with the referring agencies to develop a treatment plan for the child.

During the assessment process, staff first deal with medical or physical-related issues to ensure behavioral problems aren't being caused by health problems or allergies," McKay said.

"Once we kind of rule those sorts of things out, then we start working on, I guess, the more personal or developmental issues with the child, trying to determine what it is that has been causing them to result in the places where they've ended up," McKay said.

Many of the children referred to the centre are currently in trouble with the law, or have been in the past, while others are referred because their behavioral problems make it difficult to place them in foster care.

"It's a process of getting at some of the key issues, stabilizing their behavior so they can function more normally in the regular school systems and everywhere else, and giving the people that take the child from this point on the tools or the information that they're going to need to make sure that things are more successful down the road," McKay said.

Children coming to the centre stay for between four to six months, or longer if necessary. Generally children referred to the centre are categorized as high risk care children.

The centre currently can accommodate up to 18 children between the ages of 12 and 16. According to McKay, consideration is being given to expanding the centre in the next few months to accommodate children aged eight to 12.

"There's a high demand for that." McKay said. "We've been getting a lot of referrals for children under the age of 12, and we simply don't have the capacity right now to handle that. But we're looking at the possibility of developing that capacity, which is really just a matter of increasing our staff load and adjusting our programming for younger children."

McKay said he eventually would like to see the centre expand even further, adding some addictions abuse treatment for youth to its mandate.

"To some degree it would be great to have that as a subsidiary service to what we do here, because a lot of our kids come in with that problem to begin with, compounding with all their other problems that they have. There's also the reality of a lot of drug usage and a lot of alcoholism. You see it in kids, they go through a process of readjustment when they come here, and you do get some detoxification and those sorts of things happening with them. And it would be nice to have te capacity to provide detox and solvent and alcohol abuse and drug abuse programming at the same time," he said.

The centre currently employs 24 full time staff and four casual staff, including eight full time and four casual child care workers, two child care supervisors, a program director, engineering staff, security staff, cleaning and maintenance personnel and two full-time cooks.

The centre's board of directors is made up of executive directors from the four child and family services agencies involved, along with the chairpersons of each of their board. An Elder from the Treaty 4 area, and one representative of Treaty 4 itself also sit on the board.