By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — When police in Charleston, W.Va., respond to domestic disturbance calls, they write down the names of any children in the household and where they go to school.

They do the same thing when they arrest someone for manufacturing methamphetamine.

Before the officers leave the scene, they forward the children’s names to a supervisor, who then makes sure the information is passed on to the principal at the children’s school before the start of the next school day.

The principal then shares the information – only the child’s name and the date of arrest – with the child’s teacher and the school counselor.
“If you’re a teacher, wouldn’t you appreciate having that heads-up?” said Andrea Darr, who helped put together Charleston’s “Handle With Care” initiative, now in its third year since its launch at Mary C. Snow West Side Elementary School.

Darr last week addressed a joint meeting of Kansas’ three Citizen Review Panels. The panel members – a mix of judges, attorneys, social workers, state officials and child advocates – are charged with monitoring the state’s child-protection efforts and recommending improvements.

“If you’re in the second grade and the police get called to your house at 2 o’clock in the morning and your mom ends up in the hospital and your dad gets taken off to jail and you get sent to a relative’s … how do you think you’re going to do on that spelling test in the morning?” Darr asked the audience.

“If you were that child’s teacher, you wouldn’t expect him to take that test.” she said. “And if that child misbehaves that day, you might want to have him go to the counselor’s office instead of the principal’s office.”

Handle With Care has benefitted children in Charleston, Darr said, because it has lessened – rather than accelerated – their exposure to trauma.

Darr was accompanied at the Kansas meeting by a police officer, a school nurse and a social worker, all of whom had a hand in launching the Charleston initiative, which they said was modeled after a program in Massachusetts.

“You have to use whatever works for you,” said Darr, of the West Virginia Children’s Justice Task Force.

In Kansas, police typically do not notify a child’s school when a parent is arrested or the child is exposed to violence.

“We’re just starting to talk about this,” said Melissa Ness, a lobbyist and child advocate who coordinates the panel meetings. “I can see this happening in Kansas. There’s interest in it. But the point of today’s meeting was to get people thinking about trauma and school success, and to start connecting the dots.”

Mary Thrower, a district magistrate judge in Ottawa County who also oversees the foster care and juvenile offender dockets in Saline County, welcomed the idea.

“I see this as a perfect opportunity for us to recognize what’s going on in these kids’ lives and do something about it in a very systematic way,” Thrower said.

“We kind of do it now,” she said. “When a child is placed in police protective custody, law enforcement notifies DCF (Department for Children and Families) and the judicial system. Couldn’t we add schools to that list? And couldn’t we broaden it to include DV (domestic violence) or law enforcement’s being aware that there’s been a traumatic event in the home?”

Haskell County District Magistrate Judge Thomas Webb also embraced the concept.

“If a child’s mind is struggling with the hurt, the fear and the frustration of what’s going on at home and what’s going to happen to them when they get home, it’s very hard for them to learn,” Webb said. “I think teachers would love to have this information and would make good use of it.”

Kansas privatized most of its foster care services in 1996, after the state-run system failed several court-ordered reviews.

According to DCF records, more than 6,000 children were in the state’s foster care system in March, April, May and June – the most in state history.