PARENTS ‘AT WITS’ END’
Special needs school facing closure
A unique Richmond school for children with complex special needs will close without immediate government funding, devastating parents who say their kids have nowhere else to go in B.C.
“This is his chance. I’ve seen such a big change in him in just three months — imagine what a year can do. He said he is so proud of himself. Last year he was saying, ‘I want to kill myself,’” said Lara DePauli, whose seven-year-old son Forrest has attended the Glen Eden independent school in Richmond since September.
“But we’re at the point of shutting down. … We have 14 kids here, and where would they go? All of the parents who bring their kids here are at their wits’ end.”
For more than 30 years, Glen Eden has offered therapeutic and clinical services alongside academic courses to mentally ill students who have not been able to survive in the regular school system. But in 2012, the then Liberal government began to cut its funding, which caused a significant downsizing from the school’s peak of 60 students.
School director Rick Brennan has appealed to the new NDP government for about $300,000 to keep the school afloat this year. In a statement, the Education Ministry said it would “support engagement with Dr. Brennan” but offered no additional money.
“We worked with B.C. Children’s Hospital for many years and took lots of complicated cases. … Richmond school district referred kids to us who were a threat to the staff,” said Brennan, who has a PhD in child development. “These kids’ needs are not met in the public system.”
As the new NDP government considers making changes to create a more comprehensive youth mental health system, experts say good programs and services already exist in B.C. — but they need more funding and support to reach more people.
“There is just not enough money in the whole child and youth mental health system,” said Bev Gutray, head of the B.C. branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association, which has made recommendations for changes to the system, including more early intervention.
“It is always pointed at the pointy ended … there is one crisis after another, and that is how the system works, versus an integrated and comprehensive system.”
An estimated 84,000 B.C. children — 13 per cent of kids aged four to 17 — will have a significant mental illness. B.C.’s youth mental health budget would have to triple to reach the 70 per cent of those kids who aren’t receiving proper treatment, said Charlotte Waddell, a child psychiatrist and Simon Fraser University professor.
Other jurisdictions, she argued, have confronted this problem. Ontario recently doubled its spending on youth mental health, and in the past decade, Australia doubled the number of children getting treatment and prevention services.
“There’s a lot we could do through the prevention end of things. If we wait until (mental health) problems are really entrenched, then it is really tough,” said Waddell, director of SFU’s Children’s Health Policy Centre.
B.C. is a leader, she said, when it comes to the quality of prevention programs, which can protect some kids from disorders such as anxiety, depression and substance use. But the programs that exist need to be expanded and more of them are required.
Some good programs already at work in B.C., Waddell said, include the Nurse-Family Partnership, which can prevent behavioural problems in preschool years; the FRIENDS program, which helps anxiety-prone students; and Confident Parents: Thriving Kids, which provides a telephone helpline for 3,000 families with children with behavioural problems.
The telephone helpline has a waiting list, despite the fact it’s never been advertised, Gutray said. “There is pent-up demand.”
Another promising program, experts say, is the new Foundry health and social service centres for people ages 12 to 24, now open in Vancouver, Campbell River, Kelowna, Prince George and the North Shore. A location serving Victoria and another for Abbotsford and Maple Ridge are expected to be open soon.
Judy Darcy, the NDP minister for mental health and addictions, called Foundry a “building block to the future.” Once youth walk in the door, she said, they can access connections to education, employment, counselling, peer support, and mental health and addiction services.
“It’s really about trying to support youth early on,” Darcy said.
Waddell said the Foundry concept “has great potential,” but will fail if the centres point the youth to services that have long waiting lists.
“Helping kids navigate to where to get resources, that is really useful, but we still have an underlying problem: There is still an overall shortage,” Waddell said.
Darcy said she will work with other ministers — including housing, health, children and family, social development and public safety — to tackle waiting lists and other problems as the NDP tries to make the youth mental health system more comprehensive.
“It is going to take some time, but we have embarked on it,” she said.
She will get some help from the federal government, which has pledged $105 million to help B.C. with mental health and addiction services, although most of that won’t arrive until 2019 or 2020.
Youth mental health services, overseen by the Ministry for Children and Family Development, got a $15-million-a-year boost in the NDP’s mini-budget in September, bringing its yearly funding to $96 million. Much of the new money will be used to bolster several prevention programs and hire 120 youth mental health workers, who will connect 7,000 additional youth to resources each year, the ministry said in a statement.
Children’s Minister Katrine Conroy acknowledged that some families with mentally ill children have fallen through the cracks.
“(We will) put in place a system that supports families with the full range of mental health services that they need,” she said.
Glen Eden, though, cannot survive on the per-pupil grant it receives as an independent school because it maintains a three-student-to-one-teacher ratio, and its staff have high-level clinical training. It raised its annual tuition to around $30,000, but that drove away many families who couldn’t afford the cost. This summer, the school cut the tuition in half, hoping the NDP would agree to its request for more funding.
Brennan, the school’s director, said he needs just $300,000 to pay off debt accrued since September and to get through the rest of the school year. He said his school could be a key part of the new youth mental health system, and said it has space for more students.
“There are hundreds of kids like this in the province,” he said.
DePauli, a single mother, loves her son Forrest, but openly admitted he has been a challenge to raise. As a preschooler, he was kicked out of three different daycares and two nannies quit just weeks after she hired them. She pulled Forrest out of school following a violent incident in Grade 1, and had to quit her job to say home with him.
He has been diagnosed with autism, schizoid personality disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and anxiety.
DePauli, who lives in Vancouver, brought him to Glen Eden in September, and said the change in his behaviour at school and at home has been remarkable.
“For the first time, I don’t dread getting up in the morning and wonder how to deal with this kid. Is he going to hit or bite me today? I’ve been very thankful,” she said.
The school developed a specialized education plan for Forrest that focuses on his strengths, such as building things and engineering. He cannot read or write, but Forrest asked his mother for the first time recently if he could draw — and printed the letters of his name.
“When you have a kid with special needs and they do the most ordinary thing, it is very special,” DePauli said.
Paying the tuition has been a sacrifice. She applied for some bursaries and cashed in her RRSPs, but that is not sustainable. She said she hopes supporting a program like this will be part of the government’s restructuring of the youth mental health system.
“This is the only place where I feel safe putting him,” she said. “Will my son struggle with complex behaviours for the rest of his life? I’m now hopeful that he will be able to learn school and life skills now that he feels safe, understood and supported.”
For the first time, I don’t dread getting up in the morning and wonder how to deal with this kid. Is he going to hit or bite me today?