MaRCH 23, 2 0 2 2 Vol . 6 6 I ss u e 23
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buglenewspapers.com Alex Foster’s basketball career has taken him around the world, but he is excited to return home to coach the eighthgrade girls’ basketball team where his own basketball life started — at Aux Sable Middle School. Foster attended Aux Sable before eventually attending Seton Academy in South Holland to advance his basketball career. Foster earned a scholarship to Division 1 Texas Tech after high school graduation. He attended Bradley University in Peoria, IL., and the University of Albany in New York before graduating from Bradley with a degree in sports communication, Foster said. Foster got an agent and played for Finland and the country of Georgia for two years. “I got to see the world just playing basketball,” he said. But Foster’s life goals changed as his children grew and he wanted to be closer to home, he said. Foster kept in touch through the years with Alfonso Lopez, Aux Sable Dean of Students and Athletic Director. Foster did not hesitate when Lopez called to ask him to come coach the middle school’s girls’ basketball team. “I was like ‘Are you serious?’ Absolutely,” Foster said. Lopez coached Foster when Lopez was the eighth-grade basketball coach, he said. Foster was part of the first sixth-grade class to open Aux Sable in 2006-2007. He followed Foster’s career and when Aux Sable was looking for a coach, Lopez said he thought of Foster. “He’s a huge role model for the kids,” Lopez said.“He will be at the school before practices and greet kids not on the team.” Foster admits he is still learning about coaching but believes he will be a better coach since he was a basketball player, he said. “If I see something in practice that’s wrong, I can correct it or show them how,” Foster said. “I can still play.”
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Pritzker announces initiative to improve children’s behavioral health services by gRaCe KInnICuTT
Capitol News Illinois
Gov. JB Pritzker announced the launch of an initiative Friday to improve behavioral and mental health services for children. The Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative will help build a coordinated response between six state agencies in an effort to support children with behavioral health needs while increasing transparency in the process. At the governor’s direction, the departments of Human Services, Children and Family Services, Public Health, Healthcare and Family Services, Juvenile Justice and State Board of Education are to take part in a working group aimed at bettering support for children in need of behavioral health services. Dr. Dana Weiner, Chapin Hall child welfare expert at the University of Chicago, will serve as the director of the initiative. Weiner will work alongside members of the Pritzker administration to develop a blueprint by the end of the year for overhauling the state’s response to children’s behavioral and mental health needs.
“Our current system is difficult to navigate and does not provide families with consistent, transparent solutions to the challenges they face,” Weiner said. “This uncertainty can threaten the health development of children and the integrity and stability of families.” Michelle Trager, a mother of four, told the story of how her oldest son, who is now 16 years old and lives in a residential facility in another state, has been in and out of the juvenile justice system due to significant health struggles. Trager said they adopted him when he was 14 months old and as he aged he increasingly struggled with emotional and behavioral problems that impacted his everyday life. For more than a decade, Trager sought interventions and recommendations from professionals to help her son. But she said it came to a point when her son’s behavior was disruptive and dangerous to himself and those around him. A comprehensive evaluation was performed that revealed the likelihood of her son having prenatal alcohol exposure with a background of early childhood trauma.
By the time Trager was advised and required by the school district to seek residential treatment, none of the limited number of facilities would or could accept him. Trager said at age 14, her son spent 331 days in county detention and continually harmed himself, resulting in multiple trips to the emergency room. “Out of 10 (visits), only once was the hospital able to secure admission to an inpatient psychiatric unit which sent him back to detention after two weeks of ineffective treatment,” Trager said. Her son was eventually moved to the Department of Juvenile Justice where they realized he needed treatment and not incarceration. Due to her son meeting his time limit at the DJJ, he was discharged even though he was not deemed safe to return home. With no Illinois State Police-approved facilities available for help, Trager said they had to find a residential placement out-of-state but had to go through due process in court to send him to an out-of-state facility. The six state agencies are to work through a step-by-step process that
examines and reviews if children and their families have access to behavioral health services in their community, schools or through residential programs. Agencies will review the allocation of resources to meet needs within existing programs, eligibility requirements for different levels of care, barriers to interagency coordination and the best practices from other child-serving systems across the country. Rich Bobby said the non-profit Little City facility at which he is senior chief program officer serves children and adults who are impacted by autism, intellectual, and other mental and behavioral health challenges. Bobby noted that problems regarding the state’s behavioral health response date back more than a decade, but the pandemic has made it “incomprehensible to a point where families are just at their wits’ end.” Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that children’s mental-health related emergency visits increased from March to October 2020. In Illinois, more than 100,000 students with
disabilities receive social, psychological or counseling services. In the proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2023, DHS would receive $50 million from federal funds for programs that address trauma, mental and behavioral health. DHS and the other five state agencies would partner with community-based organizations to establish and support the new federal 988 crisis line and response services for individuals experiencing a mental health crisis. The budget also includes $150 million to fully implement the Pathways to Success Program for children with serious mental illnesses. Pathways to Success is a program through DHS for Medicaid-enrolled children under the age of 21 who have behavioral and mental health needs. The program provides access to an evidence-based model of intensive care coordination and home and community-based services. “Our children are our greatest treasure and not one of them should fall through the cracks because of an antiquated system that is too small and too slow to fit the scope of their needs,” Pritzker said.
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DCFS director held in contempt for 7th time in 10 weeks For the seventh time in 10 weeks, a Cook County judge found Illinois Department of Children and Family Services Director Marc Smith in contempt for failing to comply with a court order. DCFS was ordered by a judge in March 2021 to move a 16-year-old boy who has low intellectual functioning and cognitive delays from his temporary shelter to a placement to meet his needs, according to the Cook County Public Guardian’s Office, who represents the boy in court. Despite a court order entered a year prior and the agency’s own recommendation for a residential placement appropriate for him and his abilities, the boy remains in a temporary placement. “This boy has spent every major holiday in the last year stuck in a place unable to provide him the care and nurturing he needs,” stated a release from Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert’s office. On Thursday, Cook County Judge Patrick T. Murphy found Smith in contempt for failing to move the boy and fined him $1,000 a day for every day the boy remains in temporary housing. The fine was stayed until March 24. “DCFS and our private partners have aggressively been attempting to locate homes for those children. They had been doing it for months. There was no ignoring of the need of those children. And the truth is it takes a lot of negotiation with many providers for them to be able to develop the resources to care for those individual children,” Smith told a Senate appropriations committee on Thursday. It was hours before Smith faced a seventh contempt order from Murphy. In two of the seven cases, the contempt order was purged when the kids were placed in their recommended setting. Those two cases involved: An 8-year-old girl placed in a locked
psychiatric hospital unnecessarily for more than seven months. A 13-year-old boy kept in a “temporary” shelter in Mt. Vernon – nearly five hours away from his family – for nearly five months. Before the shelter, DCFS placed him in a utility room in an office. In the other four previous cases, the contempt order remains in place and the children remain in their present settings. Those cases involve: A 17-year-old boy who was placed in a locked psychiatric hospital for more than four months beyond medical necessity. A 16-year-old girl housed in 25 different places in two months, including hospitals, emergency shelters, a shelter in Indiana, and temporary foster homes. Before that, she was in a locked psychiatric hospital for nearly two months after it was recommended that she be moved. An 11-year-old girl medically approved for discharge from a locked psychiatric hospital for nearly a year waiting for a transfer to a residential placement. A 15-year-old girl placed in a locked psychiatric hospital since December 6, 2021 – approximately three months waiting for transfer to a specialized fos-
ter home. Each of the seven children in these cases is represented by the Cook County Public Guardian’s Office. The orders for contempt were signed by Judge Murphy, who served for 25 years as the Cook County Public Guardian. DCFS has placed 356 children statewide in inappropriate settings for an average of 55 days, Golbert said. There were so many children that Murphy, the presiding judge over the child protection division, created a separate “beyond medical necessity” or “stuck kids” docket. A court order in one of the contempt of court cases filed against Smith noted that in 2020, DCFS had 314 wards in psychiatric hospitals beyond the date of discharge. In 2014, there were 75 DCFS wards in mental health facilities beyond the date of discharge. That number doubled in 2015 to 168. Golbert has said that holding a state agency director in contempt of court is extraordinarily rare. In the more than 30 years that he has been practicing in juvenile court, he could not recall a single prior instance where a judge held the DCFS director in contempt.
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