The purpose of ASCI’s in-home model is to implement family-oriented mental wellness services for kinship children and families in their homes, to strengthen and preserve healthy kinship families for children. ASCI is committed to servicing the entire triad—child/youth, caregiver and birth parents—to effectively preserve and strengthen the kinship family unit.
Our goals and objectives:
- To preserve the kinship family placement through safety, stability and well-being.
- To promote permanency through planning with members of the kinship triad.
- To improve the overall mental and emotional wellness of members of the kinship triad.
- To reduce the incidents of parent-child, sibling and extended family conflict.
- To eliminate emergency out-of-home placements due to runaways and psychiatric hospitalizations.
- To decrease adjudications of delinquency among dependent youth through crisis prevention services.
- To moderate the risks of truancy, drug use, gang activity and teen pregnancy through crisis intervention.
Services provided to address federal outcomes of safety, permanency and child well-being:
- Individual and family assessments; mental health treatment recommendations; educational advocacy; kinship family empowerment; permanency planning; support-group facilitation; clinical supervision of parent-child visits; information and referral services.
- We teach:
- Anger management skills, life skills, social skills, positive parenting skills and effective communication skills for kinship families.
- Referral criteria:
- Kinship families who are most appropriate to receive in-home services may have characteristics that include but are not limited to:
- Referred for assistance with prevention resources.
- Mild to moderate emotional, psychiatric, behavioral and/or physical and cognitive issues.
- Children at risk for truancy, drug use, teen pregnancy and delinquency.
- Adult-child, sibling and extended family conflict.
- In need of crisis intervention services to prevent a disruption in their kinship placements.
- Require education, mediation, support groups, counseling and/or preparation for permanency.
- Teens and young parents aging out of the child welfare system in need of support systems, parenting skills and self-sufficiency services.
- Unresolved visitation plans that require clinical supervision, assessment and mediation.
- Exclusionary criteria:
- Kinship families with severe emotional, psychiatric, behavioral and cognitive issues.
- Service delivery: Crisis safety plans; critical case conferences; kinship preservation assessment; FACES III and treatment assessments completed by masters-level clinical specialist determine the frequency and duration of in-home services.
- In addition to the clinical tools utilized, ASCI has a special-needs checklist, an assessment tool that helps identify critical-services needs of an individual kinship care child and evaluates PAT level assignment.
If further psychological assessment is needed during the intake, assessment or discharge/termination phases of service delivery, the kinship child or family is referred immediately to an appropriate, qualified mental health provider.
Special in-home services provided:
- Post-adoption services for kinship children and families adopted under the SWAN unit
- Educational advocacy
- Counseling by Masters-level clinicians
- Counseling services
- Psychosocial assessment
- Treatment planning
- Individual and family counseling
- Treatment plan reviewing
- Crisis services
- Critical Case Conferences (CCC), which are comprehensive, all-provider-inclusive staffing for children in ASCI’s kinship care, facilitated and structured clinically from a crisis perspective.
- Case consultations, recommendations and referral services
- Specialized trainings for staff and families
- Mental health advocacy and awareness through Mental Health Awareness Campaigns