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Our Kids
Butterfield Youth Services now serves approximately 80 - 85 severely emotionally disturbed (SED) children and adolescents daily, in this agency's combined programs and services. The average length of service for each child and family is four to six months, and 175 to 200 children and families are served annually.
BYS now serves 80 - 85 children at any time
| Residential Treatment : |
residential treatment must resolve serious presenting risks, so the children can safely and successfully return to family, school, and community living. |
| Therapeutic Foster Care : |
Youths selected for BYS' Therapeutic Foster Care program are generally those whose primary families are not available to them for timely reunification. |
| Day Treatment : |
Day Treatment, for children in their own homes, follows BYS residential treatment over a 30 -60 mile radius of the BYS Center. |
| Independent Living : |
Through this supervised program, older adolescents can begin living independently, while working or continuing their education. |
| The BYS School : |
The BYS School serves children at all grade levels from elementary through high school, to approximately 80 students daily. |
BYS places a priority on serving children within a radius of 100 miles of the BYS Center in Marshall, Missouri. That proximity, over a wide rural region and the metropolitan Kansas City, allows BYS to include the child, the child's family, and the home community in the active service plan and throughout the child's stay at BYS.
Most are children who have been placed into the legal custody of the Missouri Division of Family Services (DFS), because of court findings of neglect, abuse, or harmful conditions to the children that are outside of the capability of their families to manage. By the time children are determined in need of residential treatment, their own behaviors have generally become problematic. Typically, the children are placed at BYS when they are presenting very serious personal crises, with behaviors that have become harmful to themselves and/or are now placing others at risk.
The children served at BYS are, in large, children who have become marginalized in their own communities, schools, and in many cases in their own families.
Placement of a child in residential care at BYS is typically only the last of a whole sequence of preceding out-of-home placements. Our task at BYS is to help each child form new and positive connections with others, and to rebuild positive relationships at home. That includes repairing family relationships that can become mutually positive and affirming, establishing social skills and achievement for improved school relationships at home, and demonstrated basis for a positive trust and acceptance in their home communities. BYS cannot do that alone, so our success depends upon cooperation and mutual support with other organizations here and in each child's home community. BYS encourages and facilitates frequent home visits with concurrent involvement of each child in his/her home community while in BYS care.
Accordingly, children are not placed for BYS to become their 'new home'. Rather, children are placed at BYS to acquire the skills and preparedness to eventually return to their own homes as positive and productive family members. BYS does indeed provide a 'home away from home' for all the children, and in the same process a positive transitional bridge back to their own family homes and communities.
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