Thank you Chris Serres & Star Tribune for identifying how severely the St Cloud Children’s home for children fails abused and neglected kids.
Children live here because a judge found their birth homes so dangerous that the child needed to be removed from the home and placed at the St Cloud Children’s Home.
Instead of providing a safe haven, this facility has been tagged repeatedly with multiple violations over many years. Children having sex in the presence of a staff member, head banging to the point of black eyes, swollen faces and abrasions.
To put a human face on what these violations look like;
As a volunteer CASA guardian ad litem, one of my 11 year old child protection boys (call him John) was misbehaving at a Cambridge Children’s Home.
John was forced outside by a low paid, undertrained staff member, on a ten degree MN night and told that he would be allowed back inside in an hour.
Instead, John walked home, in a T shirt, on the highway from Cambridge (35 miles). 11 year-old traumatized youth don’t often make good decisions (especially children on multiple psychtropic medications).
John was in child protective services (and this group home) because his father tied him to a bed and left him alone for days without food or water from the ages of four to seven.
John was regularly sexually abused, beaten & starved over 4 years living with his dad. When I met him, this 7 year-old boy was covered in bruises from head to foot and on both sides of his body.
All tortured children have behavioral problems. A mental health facility for tortured children needs staff trained in dealing with those problems.
For years, the St Cloud Children’s home has had children climbing on and jumping from the roof (suicidal behavior), over and under medicating (psychotropic drugs) of children and worst; a long history of punishing children that have been through hell already.
ACES and the medical community have demonstrated clearly that punishing traumatized children does not work. We know that coping skills and overcoming trauma are critical if the child is going to have a chance at leading a normal life.
Years of delivering traumatized children into punishment oriented foster homes and state facilities is wrong on so many levels.
When Dee Wilson delivered the Casey Foundation’s report on Child Protection to the Hennepin County Commissioners, he gently referred to how overwhelmed our children’s mental health services in placement homes are. Especially St Joseph’s Home for Children in Mpls.
There are thousands of traumatized state ward children that pass through these homes (including foster homes) that receive an overdose of punishment & psychotropic medication instead of coping skills & genuine concern for their well-being. This needs attention.
All Adults Are The Protectors of All Children
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