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Advocates make case for 'putting kids first'
(by Rebecca S. Rivas - March 04, 2008)
Of the 1,845 teenagers who ran away from their homes in St. Louis County in 2006, about 330 of them were able to stay in shelters.
The rest had to fend for themselves, according to a mental health care assessment for the county published in January.
If 100 additional “safe places” were established in the county, local service providers could catch these teens before they spiral downward into patterns of drug use and crime, the report states.
Sheltering teenagers is one of the many needs that county service providers hope to address by raising the county’s sales tax one quarter of a cent.
The proposed tax increase would raise $40 million to fund the Putting Kids First initiative, which involves 20 county providers of mental health care and support services for children. Putting Kids First is working to get the tax proposal placed on the November 2009 ballot.
“We have the largest population of children in the state,” said Kate Tansey, Putting Kids First program coordinator, who also works with Catholic Family Services. “It’s always been a struggle. This is a way to ask the community for support.
“Protecting our kids is protecting our future — that’s our slogan.”
Given the drastic cuts to mental health care through state sources in recent years, several surrounding counties, including Lincoln, St. Charles and Jefferson counties, have passed sales-tax increases to fund mental-health programs.
The initiative in St. Louis County would develop a Community Children’s Fund, which would grant money to groups that provide services to children in the county. Based on an assessment report, the county needs $70 million for services, including temporary shelters, crisis intervention, family counseling, and drug and suicide prevention programs.
According to the report, the largest need, $33 million, is for outpatient substance-abuse treatment. For adolescents in the county, there are no providers that offer treatment unless the person has some form of insurance, Tansey said.
Tansey said she knows there are serious addiction problems in the county, because of her work with Catholic Family Services’ in-school counseling programs.
Preferred Family Healthcare currently offers such programs to adolescents in Lincoln and St. Charles counties. Putting Kids First hopes that the funds raised by the increase in sales tax would allow PFH to expand its programs and meet the needs of this population in St. Louis County.
Jean Sokora, PFH program director for adolescent services, said that the group has already established outpatient substance-abuse programs. “We’re ahead of ourselves,” she said. “We already know what we’re doing.”
Sokora said that although the Lincoln County tax generates $1.3 million a year, service providers often go through those funds quickly. “We’ll spend the rest of the year servicing kids for free,” she said. “We’re not going to turn them away.”
However, not everyone will work for free. For example, the county has a shortage of child psychiatrists, Tansey said. Because they are in demand, child psychiatrists are less likely to take in children who can’t pay. “They can fill their books with families who can,” Tansey said. An increase in tax revenues will supplement payments to doctors so more children can receive psychiatric care.
How the money is dispersed would depend upon a to-be-appointed board. If the law passes, the county council would chose nine members to consider proposals and make decisions on how the funding should be allocated. The board meetings will be open to the public.
A decades-long debate
Brian Sowatsky, executive director of the St. Charles County Community and Children’s Resources, said it has taken more than 20 years to figure out a way that the community would support a tax for mental-health programs.
In the 1980s, the idea of a property tax to cover mental health programs for both adults and children was rejected numerous times in St. Charles County.
In 1993, state lawmakers passed a law that would allow counties to create locally governed funds for mental health through sales taxes.
St. Louis city passed a property tax for mental health care and drug abuse programs in 1992, with revenue first becoming available for distribution in 1994. The city passed another property tax for children’s services in 2004.
And in 2004 St. Charles and Jefferson counties passed an eighth-of-a-cent sales tax; Lincoln County followed in 2006 with a quarter-cent sales tax. These funds are for children’s services only.
“St. Louis County is the hole in the donut at this point,” Sowatsky said.
Asked why the St. Louis-area counties have approached the question of taxation and mental- health care services in such different ways, Donald Cuvo, executive director of St. Louis Mental Health Board, said, “That’s hard to answer. The priorities are different. The people in the county are much more attuned to taxation, especially property taxes. It is possible that voters just [see] the tax on the ballot and not the potential benefits for the community.
“Voters in the city are more attuned to human need and have been ready to add additional taxes to meet that need.”
Sowatsky speculated that St. Louis city has more renters and possibly these voters did not think a property-tax increase would affect them.
Proposition K
The 2004 St. Louis city initiative, known as Proposition K, differs from the others enacted in nearby counties because it is a property tax. However, once the money has been collected — it equals 1.2 percent of a given property-tax bill — it is distributed in much the same way through a locally run, grant-awarding board.
Last year the St. Louis Mental Health Board’s budget was $11.8 million. It gave out grants totaling about $6.6 million for children’s services and $3.5 million for adult services.
Scott Hummel, director of Our Little Haven in the Central West End, said that one of the reasons these initiatives have been successful is because the funds are governed locally.
“The Mental Health Board is not a political animal,” Hummel said. “From a provider’s point of view, it’s been successful because the approach of the Mental Health Board has been a team approach.”
Hummel said there is an ongoing relationship between the St. Louis Mental Health Board and the various organizations that it helps fund, but this is not always the case with funding agencies.
One danger in the health-care realm is that organizations might try to align themselves with goals for which it appears easier to get funds, he said.
“For example, right now there’s a big emphasis on helping kids who are aging out of foster care,” Hummel said.
The St. Louis County assessment report found that these transitional- living services are the second highest need in the county, at $12 million.
Hummel said an agency that might want to obtain the funds could change its mission and start a transitional-living program.
“The Mental Health Board doesn’t want you to do that,” he said. “It wants to look at your mission and what your expertise is.”
Our Little Haven has offered overnight care for abused and neglected children in foster or adopted homes since 1993. It also provides parenting classes and one of three therapeutic preschool programs in the state.
Multi-year funding from the Mental Health Board has kept Hummel from having to spend time every year to “beg for more money,” he said.
“Before the funding, we were already doing the work, but no one was paying for it,” he said.
State budget cuts that have occurred over the past decade have left many providers with inconsistent funding. However, with the tax revenues as funding sources, providers can focus on long-term goals, Sokora said.
“The beauty of the tax is that no one can take that away from our kids,” she said.
Many volunteers are working on gathering signatures for the ballot initiative, and that’s the first step in bringing this mechanism to St. Louis County, Tansey said. To date the organization has 3,000 of the 40,000 needed signatures to put the proposition on the ballot.
For information about the initiative, visit www.stlcokidsfirst.org.
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