Home Safe needs foster homes for neglected, abused children

.jpg” alt=”” width=”480″ height=”350″ />By: Dale M. King

BOCA RATON – Home Safe — an agency that provides protective services and residential care for abused and neglected children in Palm Beach County – deals with a multitude of issues, and has a multitude of needs.

Often, there are no simple answers. Keith Johnson, director of community-based service for Home Safe, recently told several Boca Raton-based organizations that the agency is in dire need of more foster homes.”

Johnson recently outlined Home Safe’s concerns to 300 members of the Junior League of Boca Raton and has also spoken to three Rotary clubs about the organization, what it provides and how the community can help.

“I’m not here to ask for money, although I won’t turn it down,” he told the Junior League at a recent meeting at the Boca Raton Country Club.

“We really, really need foster care providers,” he said. He noted that between March and August 2009, 485 children were removed from homes in Palm Beach County because of abuse or neglect.

He said 273 were placed with relatives, but the other 212 went to Home Safe.

Because there are not enough foster homes, some children must be placed in shelters, which, Johnson said, “are not places where kids should grow up.”

Johnson said the severity of some abuse cases is terrible. He dealt with a situation in which 4-year-old twins were forced to engage in sex acts while their parents videotaped them and posted the tape on the Internet. He said another young male came to Home Safe with 21 open wounds from being whipped with an extension cord.

Home Safe operates a shelter in Boca Raton where girls age 12 to 18 receive specialized therapy. Headquartered in Lake Worth, Home Safe also has a facility in West Palm Beach built with funding from Boca Raton philanthropists Richard and Barbara Schmidt.

Begun in 1979, Home Safe receives a number of referrals from Child and Family Connections, the office that links the agency with the Florida Department of Children and Families. “They are in charge of placements,” Johnson said.

Home Safe is often called in to find foster homes for newborns of substance-addicted mothers who are removed immediately after they are born.

“An infant can’t go to a day care center,” said Johnson. “The baby needs to be placed with a stay-at-home parent. We don’t have enough foster homes for children in the newborn to 5 year old group.”

And if that weren’t enough, the agency also has to find foster homes for older children as well. The age 13-18 category is tough because many young people in that group “get stuck feeling unwanted and spend their impressionable years growing up in a shelter or, worse yet, on the streets.”

Foster parents can be couples, a single man or single woman who go through orientation and then parent skills training before a child is placed with them. More than one foster child can be placed, depending on the size of the home, and biological and foster children can live in the same dwelling.

For those interested in providing foster care, Home Safe offers free, monthly orientation classes. If they want to proceed, the next step is Model Approach in Partnership to Parent (MAPP) classes, a free, 30-hour, Florida-mandated certification course. During MAPP sessions, participants learn about the child welfare system, home licensing requirements and how to care for abused and neglected children that will join the family.

Johnson said MAPP also tries to “open the parameters” of the type of child potential parents want. “We try to encourage flexibility.”

Persons of any age are eligible to adopt, he said. Home Safe does try to keep sibling groups together. “The only thing they have is each other,” he noted.

For information about foster care, contact Home Safe at 561-383-9800, extension 1225, or log onto www.homesafeforkids.org.