A research team from the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics is partnering up with Onondaga County to help youth with mental and emotional challenges stay out of the juvenile justice system.

The team consists of faculty members, a graduate student and Onondaga County System of Care (OnCare), and is leading the research project titled “Mental Health Services and Crossover to Justice System Involvement.” The project works to identify why children who receive services, like those given by OnCare, get into the juvenile justice system and also to change the current system to better serve at-risk youth.

Matthew Mulvaney, director of the project and a child and family studies professor, said children who receive mental health services are at higher risk of getting involved with the juvenile justice system.

“What we want to do is figure out if we can identify those kids who are receiving mental health services, are likely to get involved with the juvenile system and figure out preventive procedures to reduce the likelihood of that,” Mulvaney said.

He said the research is in its beginning stages. It is in the process of gathering information on the children and families who receive services from agencies across Onondaga County, including the children’s involvement with mental health services, the parents’ mental characteristics and the quality of the home environment.

Linda Lopez, director of OnCare, said in an email that changes will be made to the current system to better serve children who are involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

In January, Lopez said Onondaga County’s new Department of Children and Family Services will start a team that will work with young adults and their families that have crossed over into the juvenile justice system, she said. The team will include juvenile probation officers, child welfare case workers and paid professionals who are or have parented a child with serious emotional or behavioral challenges, she said.

Every child who becomes involved in the juvenile justice system will be screened to see if he or she has current or past involvement with the child welfare system, Lopez said. If there is, he or she will be referred to the Crossover Youth Team for more intensive family-based supports and services, she said.

Kimberly Raymond, a doctoral candidate in child and family studies and the only graduate student involved with the project, said one of the team’s goals is to combine all of these services together.

“Right now it’s really disjointed,” Raymond said. “These systems don’t speak to one and another at all. It’s like ‘youth is over here in child welfare and over here at the same time in juvenile justice.’ These two groups may not even know it.”

Another part of the project is reducing structural barriers and sharing information among existing agencies to better serve at-risk youth.

Lopez said that a priority in the project is creating an integrated system of care, with strong cross-system collaboration between all of the child-serving systems. She said OnCare wants to provide services that will help children and families achieve long-term success.

“Our goal is to help these youth achieve success in home, school and community settings,” Lopez said. “To do so, we will need to provide more intensive services to the youth and to their family.”

Published on December 2, 2013 at 12:24 am

Contact Ellen: ekmeyers@syr.edu | @ellenkmeyers