A program implemented in Manatee County back in April is providing new information to schools and child welfare advocates about potential threats to child safety at home.
- "Handle with Care" program adopted from similar WV program
- Schools alerted if law enforcement visits child's home night before
- Numbers surprising considering where incidents were happening
The "Handle With Care" program alerts a child's school to keep an eye on a child's behavior if law enforcement was called out to the home the night before. The program was patterned on a similar program instituted in West Virginia.
The hope behind the initiative is to better understand the child's behavior with that information in hand if the child acts out in some way.
"The thing that shocks me the most is how could we possibly have expected these students to come to school and to perform the next day when something in their life like this has happened before," said Manatee county school board employee Michael McCann.
Manatee County is the first county in Florida to test out the initiative.
Since April, law enforcement reported 49 cases of either domestic abuse, substance abuse or overdoses that officers responded to in a child's home to area schools.
Prior to this program's institution, schools were only alerted of an incident in a child's home if the child had been removed from that home.
The numbers were even more surprising when the program's coordinators realized where the reported incidents were occurring. The majority of the reports came from west Bradenton, Ellenton and even some in Lakewood Ranch.
"It's not necessarily our high risk zip codes that we initially thought the notices would be coming from," said Nathan Scott, Child Welfare Systems advocate.
"To my surprise, the more ... affluent zip codes, shall we say, reporting the domestic violence situations," McCann said.
While there is still a question of what to do with all of this new information, the county knows the program is helping them get closer to making sure no student potentially in distress slips through the cracks.