Programs

Butterfield Youth Services provides a continuum of programs for children requiring out-of-home care. BYS provides specialized treatment and educational support Services across all of the programs.

The BYS programs are conceived as child-centered and family-focused. Our goals are to enable the children to develop the essential skills, values and personal attributes necessary for successful family living. Those are skills and values that will serve them for the rest of their lives. Success or failure to achieve a reasonable balance of family living skills and values will greatly impact the lives of others close to them.

Child Centered

Our programs are child-centered because each child is treated at BYS according to a carefully developed individual plan of services, that is specific to his or her particular set of needs and experiences that have led to this placement. Multiple programs are offered at BYS, so that progressive options are available to each child's changing needs and condition over time. For example a child may progress from a more structured residential facility at BYS, to a more open, community-centered residential facility of BYS. Similarly a child may progressively move from a BYS residential facility into a Therapeutic Foster Family Home. Still another child may progress from residential care into the day treatment program. In the day treatment program the child resumes living in his/her own family home each night and weekend, and continues to benefit from the BYS program services and alternative school each weekday.

In similar manner, if a child experiences a relapse while in a BYS program, (s)he may move into a more intensive program of BYS until the adjustment crisis is resolved. Without such a continuum of program offerings to serve as a safety net, that child may have to be discharged from BYS and placed in still another location and with another whole set of new people. Such repetitive movement from one placement to another is damaging to the children, and that pattern has been characteristic of the overall population of the children served by BYS and in this field generally.

A truly child-centered approach begins with a commitment to each individual child who comes into care, and we think the key to an organization's capability to appropriately and successfully stay with each child over an effective period of child rearing is to offer a continuum of different program options. When it comes to out-of-home care for individual children with a wide variety of presenting needs and circumstances, one size and one shape program does not fit all.

Family Focused

Our programs are also family-focused because the outcome objectives for the children in our care always include their development and exercise of family-living skills and values. That is in addition to the individual needs each child presents for psychiatric or related therapy and for specialized educational services.

To say the programs are family-focused does not mean that the intended placement outcome of BYS services will be return of each child to his or her own family home, or even to the home of a relative. The circumstances of the children, in relation to their primary families, are such that some may eventually return to live with their parent(s) or a relative; and some may not. Some may progress to live in a foster home, and some may move into young adulthood with the help of BYS Independent Living Program utilizing community apartments. For all of the children, however, family-living values and skills are necessary outcomes that will be essential to their future quality of life. Much is at issue. For some of the children, their capability to ever return home and to complete their childhoods with parents and siblings is at stake. For others, their capability to complete their childhoods in a loving and fulfilling foster family home is at stake. For all of the children, their eventual adult capabilities to form committed and lasting parenting relationships in support of their own future children is at stake. The essential crises we must address in the lives of all the children we care for at BYS are crises in family-living. Please keep in mind these outcome objectives, as you visit the various BYS programs and services on this web site.