New youth home will serve children in crisis

Jim Fitzgerald has seen it all too often. 

Children, victims of bad parenting choices, moved from one home to another, one form of treatment to another. He has seen the nine-year-old child who has been in nine different foster home placements. 

He has seen how children, victims of abuse and neglect, have grown distrustful of adults and society. They lash out against school, law enforcement and their own families.

Intermountain is there to help these children whose parents are not there to raise them. 

Soon, local children from birth to age 12 will have a safe place to call home when they are removed from their families. Intermountain is building a new home for young children in Somers near the Blasdel wildlife refuge.

Last week Fitzgerald, chief executive officer of Intermountain, looked out over the construction of anew youth home being built near Somers. He’s glad to be able to provide a home like this, in a rural setting in the lower Flathead Valley. But he’s also concerned how we got to this point. “We’ve lost a basic understanding of rearing kids,” he said. “Third-world communities do better at passing on traditions of human connections.” 

Intermountain is a statewide organization that operates youth homes in Missoula, Helena and Kalispell. The Providence home being built near the Blasdel wildlife refuge in Somers will provide housing for up to 12 children, ages birth to 12 years. 

Intermountain is a ministry of the Methodist church, Presbyterian church and United Church of Christ. Intermountain started as a children’s orphanage in Helena in 1909 and transitioned to youth care in the 1960s. Intermountain has a residential program near the state capitol that provides treatment for 32 children. Intermountain has two homes in Missoula and a home in Evergreeen, which will be moved to Somers when the new home is finished.

“We’re a specialized provider for seriously disturbed young children,” Fitzgerald said. Intermountain serves over 800 children and families in Montana.

By the time children are removed from their homes and placed into one of Intermountain’s shelters, they are usually “at the end of the road” of treatment options, Fitzgerald said. 

“There was a lot of void in the Flathead” for long-term residential care for children, Fitzgerald said. He said he thought it was ironic how there are seven animal shelters between Polson and Whitefish, but no youth shelter — until Intermountain created one.

Intermountain bought the 75 acres of land near Blasdel refuge in 2005. They were looking for only 20 acres, but bought the 75 acres with the hope that they could eventually expand. Three years ago Intermountain started the fundraising campaign to build the home and they received a $450,000 community-development block grant.

The Somers project budget is $1.6 million and is still about $250,000 short of its fundraising goal, Fitzgerald said. Just over 70 percent of the costs of administering the group homes come from Medicaid. The rest of the money is raised through private donors and contributions. Congregations of the Methodist, Presbytery and Church of Christ contribute about 10-15 percent of the Intermountain annual budget, Fitzgerald said.

“Most of it is somebody writing a check for $10 or $15, from a farmer’s egg money to somebody who can write a check for $150,000,” Fitzgerald said. 

Children who come to live at Intermountain’s Providence Home are victims of trauma and abuse.

There are no crisis shelters or emergency foster care homes for children in the Flathead, according to Fitzgerald, who has worked with Intermountain for 36 years.

Intermountain uses a milieu-based therapy model that helps build a strong affirmation of role models and family bonding. “We see what goes wrong when that gets disturbed,” Fitzgerald said.

Intermountain works on the therapeutic, post-traumatic side of child abuse and neglect, but they also are strong advocates and providers of preventive care. Intermountain’s “Childwise” program helps provide services and education that interrupt the trajectory of youth delinquency. ChildWise helps educate the people and organizations on the front lines of seeing child and adolescent abuse, such as teachers, therapists, playground aides and the legal profession. ChildWise educates over 1,000 people a year on recognizing and identifying what Fitzgerald said are “marginalized” children.  ChildWise focuses on early intervention, awareness and public policy.

“We help decision makers better understand child development and trauma on the child when they’re thinking about removal of the child from the family,” Fitzgerald said. “You have all these players who are all looking at the situation through different lenses.”

The need is great in the Kalispell area for such a home, Fitzgerald said. Kalispell has as many referrals for youth placements as Missoula, he said. “It’s as high here as anywhere in the state,” he said.

Economic struggles and drug abuse seem to be heightened in the Flathead Valley. “Those weaken the family fabric that kids need,” Fitzgerald said.

Until American society and culture recapture what it takes to raise our children, there will always be more crisis homes and shelters like the one Intermountain is building in Somers, Fitzgerald said. “You can build as many beds as you want, but at the end of the day, you always need one more,” he said.

The Helena home has its own campus where the children are educated. Fitzgerald said he doesn’t know yet whether the Somers home — which will be called the Jim Fitzgerald campus — will educate its students at home or have them attend local schools.

Home schooling provides more of a nurturing environment, he said. “If you’re an emotional wreck you’re not in a great place to do learning,” he said.

Intermountain tries to help rebuild the family relationships with the child, if possible. If that cannot be achieved the child may be placed in foster care, after their 12 to 18 months in one of Intermountain’s homes. “It takes an incredible couple of adults who can take a kid in and succeed,” he said, “but it works.”

Fitzgerald said roughly 50 percent of children in foster homes will not graduate from high school.

Intermountain measures success by whether the child, after two years of discharge from a home, is with their family and is receiving some level of mental health care. Fitzgerald said Intermountain has about an 80-percent success rate.

“We’re after maintaining the psychological connection to the family,” he said, “but sometimes a child not being back in their family is not a failure.”

Fitzgerald recently stood in amazement. 

He watched a man who was walking a dog, pick up the dog’s excrement in a plastic bag.

That scene reinforced to Fitzgerald that parents would often rather pick up dog poop than change a child’s diapers. 

Case in point: Fitzgerald recently noticed a “drop-in” childcare facility that allows caregivers to simply put their kids away.

 “We move children around like they’re potted plants,” he said. “We’ve lost any idea of what children need.”

The Intermountain Providence home in Somers is expected to open in April.