New 'sensory room' can help kids facing court appearances

FRANKLIN – The newly furnished room on the sixth floor of the St. Mary Parish Courthouse looks like a good place for a kid to hang out.

Children’s books, each with a little stuffed animal to go along with the story, are on the shelves. Below the books are toys. On the other side of the room is what looks like a miniature jungle gym with ladders and a slide.

So there’s fun to be had. But the new sensory room at the courthouse, the subject of a grand opening Monday, isn’t just kid stuff. And if you live in St. Mary, you have a stake in the idea’s ability to help children who have been abused or neglected.

“The essence is to have a safe space,” said Amanda Landry of Court Appointed Special Advocates, which provides volunteers to help children during what can be the frightening, confusing experience of a court appearance.

On hand for the grand opening Monday were Sheriff-elect Gary Driskell; Lt. Oscar West, who coordinates the parish’s school resource officers; and Landry and Taylor Delcambre of New Iberia and Halley Romero of Morgan City, all representing CASA.

The St. Mary sensory room is the second of its kind in the state and is modeled on one in Caddo Parish.

Sensory rooms are designed to do more than offer distraction. Ideally, they include areas with physical activity, mental stimulation and a calming influence, all of which can help kids regulate their own behavior when acting up reflects the trauma in their lives.

“Every behavior is a communication,” West said.

The concept is one of the methods employed by the Karyn Purvis Institute for Child Development at Texas Christian University, part of a whole system known as Trust-Based Relational Intervention.

The institute’s website describes the concept as “an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention that is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. TBRI uses Empowering Principles to address physical needs, Connecting Principles for attachment needs, and Correcting Principles to disarm fear-based behaviors.”

West said the idea is catching on, and is being used in schools as well as justice systems.

Statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrate why children’s advocates and law enforcement are looking for successful methods.

“Child maltreatment roughly doubles the probability that an individual engages in many types of crime,” according to the bureau. “This is true even if we compare twins, one of whom was maltreated when the other one was not.”