As program director for the Shelton Safe Homes, Coretta Owen is like the mother of a large, sometimes troubled family.
Safe homes are group homes where children are placed after they’ve been removed from their families by the state Department of Children and Families.
Sometimes the children are at the safe homes overnight; sometimes their stays last up to a year, while the trouble at home is sorted out.
Regardless, Owen and the staff at the Shelton Safe Home, which is operated by the non-profit agency Family & Children’s Aid, are there to help make the children feel welcome.
The home can house up to 12 children, ages 3 to 12, at any given time.
Last week, Owen and Family & Children’s Aid development director Nick Hoffman reflected on Owen’s post at the home, the program, and the children she sees each day.
Valley Independent Sentinel – The Shelton Safe Home is part of a network of 24 such homes in the state. Can you explain how they work?
Coretta Owen – Safe homes are kind of a residential version of a family setting for children who are victims of abuse, family neglect, or some kind of combination of both.
They are all currently involved in DCF and have an open case. For whatever reason, DCF has determined it’s not safe for them to reside in their homes at the time. So they stay here.
It’s very much a family setting: They have regular bedrooms. We cook all of our meals here. They help cook. They help do laundry. We do activities with the community. They play games here, they go to school in the community.
We also provide clinical services here to help them with the trauma that they experienced in their home, and also with the removal from their home.
Valley Indy – What are some of the reasons children are brought here?
Owen – Domestic violence. Deplorable conditions in the home. Physical abuse. Sexual abuse. Kids being left at home while they’re parents have been out doing horrible things. A lot of poverty affected things.
Basically all the reasons DCF gets involved. When it comes to the point where it’s considered an imminent risk, when it’s a safety concern, they’re pulled from the home.
Valley Indy – Do you see more cases in the tough economy?
Owen – We’ve seen more poverty stricken cases. The parents are more stressed out, they’re not able to financially care for the kids. They don’t have enough food, don’t work enough jobs, don’t have enough gas in the car to have the ability to get them to services.
When parents are more stressed out, if they’re already having issues, maybe there’s physical abuse in the house. That’s something that can increase.
Valley Indy – Nick, you mentioned that Family & Children’s Aid recently brought to Shelton a service to help families before problems get too bad.
Hoffman – Those are clinical teams that go to work with at-risk families to prevent the kids from having to be removed. I think in terms of response to the economy, we’ve seen the case load in that segment of our service grow more so than with the group home stuff.
You know, the families where you see people laid off, and the stress levels have increased. Maybe it’s not as nurturing an environment as before, but it’s not as dyer as the kids in the group homes are experiencing.
Owen – We also use them after the fact, to keep the progress going.
Hoffman – As much as we love these kids (in the safe home), and we love working with them, ideally if they don’t have to be in a situation where they’re taken away from their homes, everybody’s better off.
Valley Indy – Coretta, you said you came to the Shelton Safe Home from Danbury last year. What are your initial impressions of the Valley?
Owen – I definitely enjoy working down here. It’s a different area, different people. So although I’m doing the same thing, there is a change in it.
I enjoy the support that we get from the Valley down here. It’s very different from the support we get in Danbury.
Valley Indy – We’ve heard of two groups recently who have made donations to the Shelton Safe Home. The Shelton Exchange Club just gave money, and Luther’s Garage is collecting monkeys right now that will end up in the hands of some of these children. What other kinds of support have you had here?
Owen – There are many community groups that help us out tremendously. We have the Valley United Way.
We’ve had churches that help, day cares. We have the same people every year who donate Thanksgiving dinner. The same people who donate Christmas dinner.
The Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care Associates, they take care of our kids on the drop of a dime. They could have never seen these kids before, and we might not even know their names.
Hoffman The key to the community support that we get is it allows us to do those special things (such as taking the kids to a Broadway show, or to a summer camp).
Obviously state budgets calculate what it costs to run a house, how much it costs to pay your staff. They don’t calculate what the price of giving a kid a genuine childhood is.
And that’s what the exchange club, the support from Luther’s Garage, Echo Hose, there are tons of people in the Valley that support us in so many ways. It allows us to do these special things for the kids that from our point of view is what we have to do to help them heal.
