OZARKS TONIGHT
Welcome back to Ozarks tonight.
I'm Heather Lewis. 2020
has certainly been a year of
change amid the pandemic.
Students especially are adapting
to a new way of
learning and living. To make
sure all their needs are being
met one organization is stepping
in to help. Joining us tonight
is
Mike Duggar president of
Lutheran Family and Children's
Services and Julie McAfee the
director of Hilltop child and
family Development Center. Thank
you both for being here. Thank
you for having me. So Mike,
let's start with you. I
understand Lutheran Family and
Children's Services has recently
expanded the hilltop child and
family Development Center to
include what is known as
wraparound Services. Could you
explain what wraparound services
are and how they're
implemented? Sure. Just a very
simple way of looking at it is
wraparound just starts with the
kid in Hilltop and Julie can
give
you a little bit more specifics
on how she works with the
children and families, but we
really started looking at what
does the
family need to help that child
be successful and what we found
is that when you're looking at
underserved communities and this
is Statewide. If you go into any
Community, that's really dealing
with violence. Socio economic
struggles. A lot of
times. Our families are faced
with situations that they cannot
provide all the other resources
of those families who have
means can school we work with
the child at all.
On top and then if the family
needs additional resources,
whether that's Counseling
Services parenting Services
anything that we can connect
them within the community we
try to wrap our arms around them
and help them in any way we can
so we don't ultimately impact a
child.
So there are several things that
are included in this idea of
wraparound education. Then now
absolutely and wraparound is not
a new model. It's been used in
the mental health field
has been used in residential
treatment in foster care. So we
wanted to use that model and
apply to educational setting in
the results that we're seeing
which do we can talk about are
absolutely amazing. Yeah. So
Julie, let's get to that tell us
how
we wrap around Education Works
at the hilltop Center understand
there are licensed social.
On-site we do we have our valued
Mr. P as the kids call
him. He has been wonderful in
our program. We've been doing
this for about two years now
study. And what we find is
everything in education or
really in life, right? It starts
with relationships getting to
know the clients that we serve
be that the
children in our program as well
as their parents in early
childhood. It's always been on
the Forefront to
Focus on that kindergarten
Readiness piece, right? But in
the last five or so years, we
have noticed that childhood
trauma and family trauma has
been exponentially higher than
it
ever has been before. So what we
were seeing is we have kids
coming into school that aren't
ready to learn and we had to
sort of answer that and figure
out how we help these children
and also make sure that they
have the keys to success for
when they lose move on from our
program examples of those
trauma. We've
Exponential gun violence issues
in this country drug addiction
death of family members divorce
all of these things are weighing
on the children in our program
and we have to through our
relationships know how best to
help those kids and mr. P is
stepped in and has taken on the
play therapy model with them
and really gets them sort of
talking about their feelings and
how to just kind of cope when
they're starting to feel that
stress
that
That's really weighing them down
at times. So you said that
this has been implemented they
are for about 2 years. What is
research shown about rep around
education even before
the pandemic.
The pandemic I mean all the
trauma stressors that I sort of
named. I mean it just is like
the tip of the iceberg, but then
you talk about a pandemic now,
we've got people who are going
through job loss. We've got
families that have never had to
deal with lack of food access or
just the basic resources that
they need to function daily. And
we also have families that have
never had to navigate the state
system in regards to subsidy
Foods.
ABS Medicaid, you know for
health services and so we're
here to help them sort of
navigate through that.
Yeah, and if you're looking at
research on this not a lot of
organizations are using this
kind of model and we're actually
our strategy for Hilltop is to
continue to build the model so
we can
have people come in whether its
partnership with a university to
go in and actually do research
and show that how we're
approaching Children and
Families from these types of
backgrounds actually helps them
in the long run because
we're not looking, you know, the
one thing that I wanted to
mention.
We're not ending a relationship
when a child comes to Hilltop
and maybe they're an infant and
they're with us for five years
and they go on to kindergarten.
We're actually tracking those
kids through the fourth grade
because we want to show an
impact on their third grade
reading proficiency. And if you
look at our location where
Hilltop is located the average
reading Proficiency in that that
three zip code location is
between 26 and
28 percent compared to the state
average.
Age of sixty percent. So we're
really working with those
children in our programs her
turning the curve in that area
and then hopefully get some
research Partners in there so we
can actually show how we
approach working with Children
and Families from socio-economic
areas that are
struggling High violence area is
this kind of model works and
like this really has a ripple
effect on the community to
absolutely and
Julie can tell you this more
than I can because she lives at
every day.
When we can get kids that are
knees disadvantaged areas and
sixty percent of those kids are
testing at a 3rd grade reading
level. It can transform a
community. So absolutely this
has Ripple effects and ink and
are what we want to do at
Lutheran Family is to impact
children and family for
Generations.
Julie did you have anything to
add on that?
I would just say, you know, it's
kind of our the back of our mind
always that if we can have
Healthy Families, we have
healthy children and then that
will in turn make for a healthy
Community for generations to
come just as Mike was sort of
saying and one last question
about to run out of time, but
Mike can anyone benefit from
wraparound services?
Oh, I will I believe so, you
know, it's a child focused
program, but
it's family driven and one of
the things that we're doing in
all of our programs is we're
implementing a very similar
model whether it's foster care
adoptions Behavioral Health and
prevention. So Julie was our
guinea pig and and we're just
seeing great results. So yeah,
we're going to continue to work
that through so it'll be a
seamless system for all the
children families we serve.
Okay, very good Mike Julie.
Thank you so much for being here
to tell us about this wrap
around education.
Service that is affecting people
here locally as well and we'll
put
some more information with your
website included on our website
after this story years.
Thank you so much for having us.
Thank you, and we will be
right back with more Ozarks
tonight. Keep it here.