School Board gives boost to program for troubled kids

The St. Mary Parish School Board found some money Thursday to help pay for a program targeting students with truancy and behavior problems.
But the effort to help those kids, which at times has brought together the school system, the 16th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, the HB Young Foundation and the Louisiana Supreme Court, is still short of funds.
The School Board agreed Thursday to pay $15,000 to help the District Attorney’s Office Family Service Division pay for its work with the schools in the Families In Need of Service program.
The move came in response to a request from the Family Services Division’s Gannon Watts.
“Although we understand that funding is very limited, should St. Mary Parish Schools have any discretionary funding available to support additional days of FINS Program case management, we would be able to increase the number of St. Mary Parish students that could be handled through the FINS Program,” Watts wrote to Assistant Superintendent Joseph Stadalis in an August email.
Watts wrote that from 1999 to 2014, the DA’s Office received money from the School Board to operate its Truancy Assessment Service Center Program and Prosecutor’s Early Intervention Program. By 2014, the funding climbed to more than $136,000 a year for services, including case management, at 14 elementary and middle schools.
But in 2016-17, the School Board reduced funding to $55,000. The DA’s Office moved case managers out of six schools, Watts wrote.
The DA’s Office got one year’s worth of funding from the HB Young Foundation and moved cases into the Families in Need of Services program, or FINS, which was funded by the state Supreme Court. Watts wrote that the focus was narrowed to the students judged to be at greatest risk in order to match the services to the resources.
Now the DA’s Office has received word that there will be no more Supreme Court funding, leaving the FINS program with a $15,000 budget for St. Mary.
“We estimate that with this amount of money, we will be able to provide one part-time case manager 2 days a week to St. Mary Parish students,” Watts wrote. “At the very most, this case manager will be able to cover a total of 40 cases this school year with a limit of 20 open cases in the case load at any given time.”
The School Board’s $15,000 doubles the FINS budget.
The FINS program “is a helpful service to our schools and students given the types of counseling services offered and the ability for schools to refer children that are in circumstances that are impeding their ability to learn,” Superintendent Teresa Bagwell wrote to The Daily Review in an email.
“Additionally, it serves as an ongoing connection between the school and social services, which is much needed when teachers and/or administrators encounter a student who is experiencing difficulties that require such a partnership for the benefit of the child.”