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Wednesday, July 18, 2001
By Steve Twedt, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Family by family, activists in five local neighborhoods hope to prevent emotionally disturbed youngsters from marking their adolescence with a side trip through the juvenile justice system.
Community Connections for Families is a federally-funded, Allegheny County-run program designed to intervene when pre-teens appear headed for trouble.
The group gets its money from the federal Center for Mental Health Services in Rockville, Md. The center has issued grants to 67 communities and intends to produce a national study about the mental health services available to families, along with recommendations on how to improve them.
The front line soldiers locally for this initiative are "family support specialists" -- people recruited from each of the neighborhoods to organize and help families. In many instances, their "specialist" training comes from their own role as parents or, more precisely, mothers who've lived through the experience of having a child with mental health problems.
One of the soldiers is Carol Collington, a longtime community activist in Garfield. She already volunteers in various church and neighborhood programs, but agreed to help Community Connections, in part because she's convinced if such a program had existed when she was a young mother, her oldest child might not be serving a life sentence at SCI Pittsburgh, better known as Western Penitentiary.
Another is Karen Hadix of Sto-Rox, whose daughter was diagnosed with depression at age 7, and as an adolescent ran away repeatedly, lived in several group homes, had five psychiatric hospitalizations, and was charged with assault after she struck a group home staff member.
Her daughter is 18 now, on her own, and doing better than ever. But Hadix believes if her family had been supported by a group like Community Connections, the group home placements, hospitalizations and criminal charge would never have occurred.
"She needed some intensive, family-based counseling and that never happened. I had nobody to go to. Nobody really knew what was going on with her."
Fearing for her son
Another of the specialists is parent liaison Carmella Miller of the North Side, whose young son is autistic. "My big fear is that, as an African-American, my son was born a target. He's 6 now, but when he's 11 those behaviors may be seen as intimidating, and someone may call the police."
Lisa Brown of Monroeville, who coordinates the family support specialists in East Liberty, Sto-Rox, the Hill District, McKeesport and Wilkinsburg, feels the urgency of her work every night when she looks in the eyes of her 11-year-old autistic son, Brennen.
Brown says Brennen learned to walk at nine months, but didn't speak his first words until he was 3. Brennen looked like any young boy, but he exhibited odd behavior at times, such as hugging perfect strangers. As he grows older, his mother's worry increases.
"There are things that were considered cute at 8 or 9, but now that he's almost 12 ... People wouldn't understand why a 12-year-old wants to hug them."
Her worry is the next five years, when acceptance and independence become more important to Brennen. "I don't know what he will pick up between 12 and 15. Maybe he'll say, 'My brother gets to drive, why can't I?' I can't be everywhere at the same time. What if he runs into the wrong type of friends who say, 'Hey, Brennen, why don't we do this?' "
Brown, who holds a degree in criminal justice and previously worked in a group home for girls, knows the intricacies of getting services and advocating for her child. "If I were in the wrong environment, where I did not have the support of my family, if I didn't have the advocacy skills that I have ..."
Carol Collington could finish that sentence. Her son, La'Rone, was born when she was 15, after she had a childhood noteworthy for the abuse and alcohol around her. "As a kid, I grew up confused about parents," she said. She said she wasn't prepared to be a parent herself, and La'Rone tested what skills she had.
By age 9, he was breaking into houses, and fights at school became a regular occurrence. Barely an adult herself, Collington said she was not equipped to recognize or handle what was going on with her son. "There was no control once he decided he wanted something." She believes he had attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder but "back then, they didn't talk about mental health."
A life term
Now it's too late. In 1988, at age 21, La'Rone was convicted of driving the getaway car in a North Side convenience store robbery during which a security guard was killed. "He wouldn't be doing life if he could see the world clearly," she said. "Now that I realize he was sick, it hurts."
Her pain reaches inside the walls of the state prison. "She felt like it was her fault, and it's not her fault. I made my own choices," said La'Rone, now 34. While the thought that he has hurt his mother makes him ache, he said he's proud of her work. "I like what she's doing. I like it because it says somebody's trying to change things and care for people out there."
As of last month, 117 children were enrolled in Community Connections for Families, 80 percent of them boys and more than half African-American.
Even at this early stage, 18 months after the first community program started, there are signs of the program's impact. Among the first 26 families enrolled, their children had spent an average of 28.5 days in detention during the six months before Community Connections staff interviewed them. In the following six months, the average fell to 12 days.
"The majority of our families are self-referrals, which means word of mouth. Family members are hearing about us and calling up," said Gwen White, director of Community Connections.
But, even as word spreads, the funding clock may be running out.
Under the provisions of the grant, Community Connections received three federal dollars for each dollar it raised during its first year of operation. This year, local dollars must match the federal contribution and, starting in October 2002, the original formula will be reversed -- $3 in local money for every federal dollar.
"We haven't gotten there yet, but we're working on it," White said. "We have this saying in the office: 'We're building the plane while we're flying.' That's what we're doing."
Lisa Brown wants to make sure her autistic son Brennan, 11, safely navigates his teen-age years. (Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette)