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| Newsroom
A new path to healing the hurt Behind the closed door, a child cries out. The sound is so guttural, so primal, that it's hard to tell if it's coming from a boy or a girl, if it stems from rage or despair or both. Each time the child pauses to catch a breath, a woman's voice fills the vacuum. She's speaking softly, soothingly, trying to talk the child through the problem. It's just another day at the Matthews campus of Thompson Child & Family Focus, a former orphanage that has remade itself in recent decades as a mental health treatment center for troubled youngsters. The agency serves about 220 children a day through various programs spread across several sites. Many of the children are society's most troubled youngsters. They are abuse and neglect victims, or they suffer emotional or behavioral difficulties. A typical day can find one child sullen and silent, while another might explode in violent tantrums. It is critically important work. But, as is painfully obvious to the staff, many people in Charlotte know little about Thompson's work. Hidden behind a thick cordon of trees, the Matthews site is so easy to miss that motorists whiz by without realizing it's there. On the campus, Thompson offers a day treatment program for children ages 6 to 14. It's like regular school, except the reading, writing and arithmetic lessons are backed up by counseling sessions, speech and language therapy, spiritual education and recreational therapy through playing on a ropes course. In the residential program, children live for about nine months, on average, in one of four cottages on the wooded 40-acre campus. The 40 or so children who live there have already bounced from group home to group home. Some cynics call such children "throwaway kids," but Thompson President Ginny Amendum believes they can be saved. As if to prove that, Thompson next month will wade into a treatment challenge few, if any, other mental health centers in the region have accepted. The agency will devote one of its four residential dormitories to housing and treating children with attachment disorders. Children with such disorders have trouble forming appropriate emotional and social bonds with people around them. They reject parental affection, and often wind up in intense control battles within their families. Other symptoms include superficially charming behavior, learning problems, lying and poor peer relationships. The disorders often turn up among foster and adopted children. Amendum said the diagnosis is on the rise, in part because officials are getting better at understanding what creates emotional dysfunction in children. Services for treating attachment disorders have been so rare in the Charlotte region that some parents and public agencies have had to send children to out-of-state treatment centers. "These children have huge issues," Amendum said. "They are plagued with severe emotional and mental health problems." Thompson already deals with such children, but the new program -- partially supported by a $175,000 grant from the Duke Endowment -- will launch a more specific and intense focus on treating the disorder. "What we're trying to do is deepen a service we already offer," said Laura Taylor, vice president of resource development at Thompson. The agency, founded by Episcopal churches in 1886, is an easy one to misunderstand. Old-timers might remember Thompson as the sprawling orphanage that once occupied a large, working farm near today's Central Piedmont Community College campus. But today, Thompson isn't near uptown; it moved in the 1970s to its site off Independence Boulevard in Matthews. Plus, the nonprofit agency runs a group home in Goldsboro, guides a network of foster parents and operates two highly rated child-care centers north of uptown. The centers try to prevent problems in younger children, even as the Matthews campus tries to heal them in older ones. "The goal (in the centers) is very definitely success of children and their families as they move out of their preschool years and into public school settings," Amendum says. But perhaps the toughest challenges come in the residential program at the Matthews campus, where the agency uses licensed therapists and child psychiatrists to help youngsters learn to trust adults and respect themselves. The goal is long-term foster care placement and adoption. Treating such troubled youngsters remains an expensive proposition. Amendum estimated it costs about $100,000 a year to offer a child residential treatment "fully loaded" with therapy and educational services. Thompson has an annual operating budget of $10 million and an endowment of more than $20 million, but Amendum said the endowment is controlled by strict spending limits. The agency gets some money through Medicaid, state reimbursements and child-care subsidies, but each year raises about a third of its operating budget through charitable contributions. "To me, it's always about the promise of the next generation," Amendum says. "They're so filled with potential. Our mission is to help them move forward and live happy and productive lives." | |||||
