Handle with care.” Those three small words can have a huge impact on students throughout Turlock Unified School District who may have been exposed to violence or trauma, thanks to a program that has quietly worked to help lessen the effects of traumatic experiences on children throughout Stanislaus County, CA over the past year and a half.
On Tuesday evening, the Board of Trustees received an update on the Focusing On Children Under Stress, or FOCUS, Program, implemented throughout the county last April. A partnership between the Stanislaus County Office of Education and the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s Office, the FOCUS Program was modeled after a similar program in West Virginia called Handle With Care, which allows law enforcement agents who encounter a child in a traumatic event (i.e. domestic violence, child abuse, death in the family, witness to a crime, loss of home due to a house fire, etc.) to collect the child’s name, date of birth and his or her school. Then, that officer proceeds to alert the child’s school that the student has been exposed to violence or trauma, and to handle them with care.
“For law enforcement, if we go out and do a search warrant, we hit the house hoping that everything there is what you’re looking for, but you also do your homework and make sure there are no children there,” said George Papadopoulos, an investigator with the County DA’s Office. “That doesn’t always happen, and the unfortunate thing is when we came across children before the program started here in our county, our resource was to turn them over to Child Protective Services.”
To read the full article by Angelina Martin go HERE
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