Today I was sitting in court talking with one of the pro-bono attorneys on one of my cases. We started talking about parent child visits, and how there must be some better way to facilitate those visits. Right now it works like this:
Parents whose children are in the care and custody (c/c) of the Children's Division (CD), or under CD supervision, are usually ordered to have supervised or unsupervised visitation. When visitation is supervised, it can be supervised by CD staff, a parent aid, relatives, family members, custodians, or residential treatment staff, etc. However, the safest and happiest way to supervise visits (at least for the professionals involved) are for parent aids to supervise visits. Parent aids can transport kids to visits, and help in parenting instruction as well. They are required to submit reports to the CD and to court as to how the visits are going. Sounds like a good system in theory, right?
Sometimes it does work. Sometimes visits happen flawlessly. But the majority of the time, things get screwed up. There are several reasons why this occurs.
1. Parents are not able to get to the visit, parents do not show up, their house is not suitable to hold visitation, they show up under the influence, etc.
2. There are too many kids for the parent aid/worker/ etc to pick up.
3. There is no where to hold the visit.
4. To sum it up: TRANSPORTATION ISSUES
5. Foster parents are not told that a visit was to occur.
6. Kids act out during visits and they have to be ended early.
7. Sometimes the visits have to be therapeutically supervised, and there are no therapists able to supervise visits.
8. Parents cancel visits.
9. Kids cancel visits.
10. Supervisor cancels visits.
11. the parent aid and the parent or kid do not get along, so the visits are not reported as going well.
12. The supervisor of visits does not do an adequate job supervising/reporting visits.
I could go on and on and on... and I mainly deal with the kids!
So this is what the attorney and I came up with while sitting in the court lobby.
I would start an independently run Parent/Child visitation center, that was a completely 501C3 (charitable for those of you who don't speak Missouri non-profit) organization.
I would enlist the help of the universities in the area to allow various helping professions to intern there (nurses, counselors, social workers, lawyers, etc), employ fully qualified interdisciplinary staff (social workers, nurses, counselors, therapists, parent aids, police officers/security, etc) who are able to supervise visitation, intervene when necessary, and help provide resources to parents.
I would have a strict sign in and sign out policy, the facility would be secure access, and all doors would be video monitored. This would ensure safety for not only the children, staff, and parents who are visiting their children, but also hold the parents accountable for showing up to their visits consistently.
I would have the facility be open on evenings and weekends, as well as during normal business hours. However, It would not be open past 8:30pm due to bedtimes for children.
I would provide transportation for both kids and parents, possibly have multiple locations throughout the metro area, and they all would be located ON THE BUS LINE.
The facility would have outdoor and indoor play areas, private rooms for visitation, and offer healthy snacks to children.
I would allow community organizations to post job listings in a certain area and set up booths advertising their services.
This would take all of the excuses out of parent/child visitation. There would always be a safe, accessible place for visits to be held, regardless of weather, transportation, acts of God, etc.
It would also help keep parents accountable for visits. While we would offer every opportunity to be able to get to visits, from being accessible and possibly close to home (if I was able to expand to a downtown/midtown, east, and south location), and on the bus line, I would offer to come pick the parents up if they had no other way to get there. However, it would be up to them to arrange the pick up- whether on a week to week basis, or an ongoing schedule.
NOT to mention, how much money it would save the state on visitation/parent aid/overtime/mileage services.
There are a lot of kinks to work out, and I have a lot of learning left to do before I would be at all capable of taking on this huge of a task, but I have some excellent friends who can no doubt help me out on this endeavor to save my little part of the world.
Look guys, I'm actually putting my degree and my classification as an LMSW to work :)
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