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Mahoning juvenile court, state launch joint effort to reduce delinquency
YOUNGSTOWN
Juvenile court and state officials Friday launched a collaborative effort to reduce repeat juvenile delinquency and keep minors in their family homes by having counselors go to the homes of the troubled youths.
The Ohio Department of Youth Services is funding the partnership, known as the Northeast Ohio Regional Reclaim Collaborative, at $250,000 annually for up to five years.
The Mahoning County Juvenile Court is administering the collaborative of juvenile courts and other agencies in Mahoning, Trumbull, Ashtabula and Geauga counties.
Under the program, family therapists meet with troubled youths age 12 to 17 and their families in the family residence instead of providing the therapy in a counselor’s office.
The program’s therapists are employed by Homes for Kids Inc. of Niles, a licensed children’s mental-health center.
“You can go right to the [home] situation and evaluate it and make observations and provide workable and worthy recommendations instead of just guessing” what the young person’s home environment is like, explained Judge Theresa Dellick of Mahoning County Juvenile Court.
Youths and their families get an average of five hours a week of intensive in-home counseling over an average of four months as the therapists identify and help correct behavioral patterns and family and peer relationships that have contributed to delinquency.
Besides the juvenile courts, partner organizations include child-welfare agencies and county mental-health and recovery boards.
The partnership is designed to facilitate mental health and alcohol and drug-abuse treatment, management of anger and truancy, prevention of bullying and human trafficking and a successful transition from youth to adulthood.
The goal is to keep young people in their families’ homes and out of local juvenile detention, community corrections and state youth correctional centers.
“We need to have an avenue for them to not go beyond this court,” said Mahoning County Commissioner Carol Rimedio-Righetti.
“When we all come together, we’re all that much stronger and all that much better,” Judge Sandra Stabile Harwood of Trumbull County Family Court, said of the collaborative project.
Case Western Reserve University’s Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education will monitor the Northeast Ohio group for DYS.
Case will conduct quality assurance and outcomes measurements to determine which strategies are most effective at reducing repeat delinquency and out-of-home placements.
The collaboration allows for regional pooling of cases among counties to make the program more cost-effective, said Patrick Kanary, director of the Center for Innovative Practices at Case.