by Suzanne Hurt of The Register-Guard
While adults grazed on taco dip, submarine sandwiches and potato salad at a long folding table, 12-year-old Josh Ortega sat with the kids and munched on cookies. His best friend, Matt, was perched by his side.
It all appeared so ordinary. But that was the beauty of it.
Two years ago, Josh couldn’t have sat still through a meal. He would have been fighting with the kids around him. And he didn’t have any friends. In fact, Matt is Josh’s first best friend.
But that was before New Opportunities, a 2-year-old project run by Lane County Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health, or LCCABH, for families with children who have serious mental, emotional or behavioral disorders.
“This is what we’ve been dreaming about,” Josh’s mother, 30-year-old Franki Ortega, said at a tearful dinner celebration held recently at the family’s apartment complex in Eugene. She watched her son–shoes untied and wearing a big smile–bestow handmade key rings to thank everyone involved in his success.
“We’ve been through a lot of rough times,” Ortega said earlier in the day. “Counseling didn’t work. Schools didn’t work. Me being home didn’t work. Disciplining him didn’t work. Talking to him didn’t work.
“Anybody can be a parent. But it takes a lot more to communicate with a child who has disabilities.”
The project works to form alliances among social service agencies to coordinate services for children such as Josh, and to guide families in how to best use resources for their unique challenges.
New Opportunities helps gather a support team of friends, relatives and community professionals around the parents and children.
Following the philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child, the team then works together to identify needs and come up with solutions.
It also provides funding for car repairs or other needs to help families maintain stability while working toward change.
The Ortegas were one of the first families to go through the project, said Bruce Abel, who oversees the project as director of LCCABH, a program of Lane County Health and Human Services.
School was never easy for Josh.
By third grade, he couldn’t stay focused long enough to do any schoolwork. If he wasn’t hitting and kicking other children, he was provoking them until they beat him up. Or telling his teacher where she could go.
He was just as hard to manage at home.
His family got him into therapy, where he was diagnosed with dual disorders. He began taking prescription drugs for depression and attention deficit disorder. After a tumultuous year, the principal kicked him out and he changed elementary schools.
The next school year was even worse. The fights continued. He began lying and stealing at school and from friends. His mother nearly lost her new job at a grocery store because the school principal called her daily about Josh’s emotional and behavioral problems.
Home life was no better. Josh and his only sibling, younger brother Matt, argued and physically fought so much that they couldn’t eat dinner together anymore. Discipline by his mother and stepfather, such as timeouts or taking away play time or a favorite game, didn’t faze Josh.
Then things really got bad.
Josh didn’t understand why he behaved the way he did. He just knew that he couldn’t seem to get along with anybody. When he was 10 years old, he started contemplating suicide.
“Every night when we went to bed, it was, I want to die. I don’t like my life. If I went away, everyone would be happy,'” said his mother as she sat at the family’s dining room table.
She experimented with nutritional therapy, but it was too expensive.
Josh was on his second medication. He was no longer in therapy, stopped after a year and a half because his mother felt there was nothing more his therapist could do. Counseling had been the only service she could find for him.
Even worse, everyone around Franki Ortega–her family and friends and Josh’s teachers–blamed her parenting. They told her she just needed to be stricter and more structured.
“They’d say, I think it’s you,'” she said. “Community blame is definitely the hardest. Cause nobody gets it.”
She even blamed herself. “It was my fault. He’s my kid. I’m the one who raised him. And there were times I thought maybe he is a brat. Because I’m human, too.”
Then her other son, who had once questioned his older brother’s anti-social behavior, began imitating it.
Ortega didn’t know what to do. She just knew she couldn’t handle the problems alone anymore. She even considered having her son admitted to the state psychiatric hospital. About that time, her son’s former therapist told her about a new project for families such as hers. It was called New Opportunities.
This year, New Opportunities will help 200 families facing multiple problems such as poverty, unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence.
They are the families of the community’s most disturbed children, said Abel, the program director and previously director of outpatient services for Looking Glass Youth & Family Services.
Research shows that children with serious disorders are more prone to suicide, teen pregnancy and crime, he said.
The Center for Mental Health Services, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, estimates that 7.7 million to 12.8 million U.S. children endure mental and emotional disorders that interfere with daily functioning.
One in 33 children and one in eight adolescents suffers from depression. For most, the illness goes undiagnosed and untreated.
Children experiencing stress or a loss, or who have attention, learning and behavior disorders are at higher risk for depression, the National Mental Health Association reported during National Mental Health Month in May.
Until New Opportunities got started, help for children with severe emotional disorders was scattered and redundant. Families may have received help from mental health programs, the juvenile justice system, foster care, the public school system, special education programs, and the state’s Adult & Family Services Division.
New Opportunities, one of 22 such projects across the country, aims to better coordinate services and communication among agencies. To qualify, families must be involved with at least two agencies.
Once she got into the program, Ortega created a team of adults who were already part of Josh’s life: relatives, his fifth-grade teacher, his former therapist and three of Ortega’s friends. They hired a University of Oregon student as a mentor and role model.
Ortega eventually became her team’s family support worker, a paid team member who facilitates the group. For two years, these people not only acted as sounding boards and helped solve problems, they offered to spend time with Josh, help with household chores, or locate resources.
“I learned to say I can’t do it all. I learned to say I need help. That’s been the hardest part for me, because of my pride,” Ortega said. “The whole objective is to keep him in my home with the support of my friends and relatives.”
New Opportunities is operating on a five- to seven-year grant of about $13.5 million from the federal Center for Mental Health Services, as well as on local matching dollars or services.
Of that, $1 million is spent annually on staffing: Abel, four clinical staff members, two support workers, 12 family support workers, and a number of behavior support specialists who are hired as needed.
And $2 million–$10,000 to $14,000 per child–pays for services such as family therapy or crisis services, as well as individual needs such as a YMCA membership, utility bills or eyeglasses. Families must contribute time or money, whatever they can afford, Abel said.
Psychiatric hospitalization costs $40,000 to $50,000 per child per year, he said.
Data compiled for New Opportunities indicates that the functional level of most children stabilizes or improves by six months. Out of 107 children, 57 scored relatively the same and 41 improved significantly on assessments of emotions, social behavior, thinking problems, self harm and substance abuse six months later. The scores of nine children worsened.
“For some of these kids, holding steady is a positive finding as well. Because one of the goals of this program is to keep these kids out of the hospital. A lot of these kids are headed that way,” said Courtney Padgett, a project evaluator at Oregon Social Learning Center, the Eugene research institute that did the study.
The Ortegas don’t need any figures to see Josh’s improvement. Now, Franki Ortega gets calls from Josh’s principal only once a month. He’s been put in a classroom for students with disabilities, and teachers understand him better.
At home, he is finally doing chores, the boys don’t argue as much, and Ortega can leave the kids with her husband for dinner when she needs to. Perhaps most important, she feels that the pressure to “fix” him has been lifted.
“I feel we are well on our way and that I now have the skills, and all the people around me, to continue doing it,” Ortega said. “It’s never over. We’re always going to be going through this. But there is hope at the end of the tunnel.”
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 1997, The Register-Guard, www.registerguard.com.