A Safe Place
Boys & Girls Town has been providing therapy and a safe, trusting environment for abused or at-risk children since 1989. Find out all they are doing for Greene County’s kids, and learn how you can help, too.
On a cold, windy winter afternoon, Sara Franco, development coordinator for Boys & Girls Town, led me into one of the six residential cottages at the organization’s Springfield campus. In that cozy space were two teenage boys, hunkered down on the living room couches reading books. It looked like any other living room, where kids find quiet ways to spend chilly afternoons. But it’s not a family that lives in this cottage—not a family in the way the dictionary would tell you to think of a family. There isn’t a mom and a dad and their three kids. But it is a family in the sense that the people who reside here are a close-knit, trusting unit.
This is the residential program at Boys & Girls Town, and it’s the biggest component of the organization. It’s where children ages 6 to 18 can go to receive intense daily therapy in a safe, stable environment. Some of them have behavioral problems. But most are wards of the state and were sent to Boys & Girls Town by the court system, some the victims of lifelong neglect or physical or sexual abuse. “Some of them are so little that the abuse is all they’ve ever known,” says Franco, who points out that Greene County’s child-abuse rate is double that of the rest of the state, with only two counties having higher rates of abuse.
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The kids staying in the residential program attend daily group and individual therapy, as well as family therapy when that's appropriate. There are even opportunities for experimental therapy (which aims to increase trust and self-confidence), such as rock climbing or the high ropes course at the organization’s Wilderness Ranch. At the cottages, children stay until their therapists are sure they are ready to move on. The average stay is 8.5 months, but each child has an individualized discharge plan.
Boys & Girls Town—which has campuses in Springfield, St. James, St. Louis and Columbia—came to 417-land when the need arose for a treatment-based program and safe place for at-risk kids. The facility was originally an orphanage, the city-run Springfield Children’s Home, until Boys & Girls Town took over in 1989. Now, the non-profit has grown into a flourishing organization that helps children in many ways beyond just the main residential program. There is also a crisis shelter, the Ozarks Family Resource Center, that takes in at-risk children and sibling groups from birth to 18. The center provides a safe, loving environment for the children while adults determine their next placement; an average stay is about 30 days.
The Ozarks Family Resource Center is also home to the Empowering Youth Program. It’s not a shelter, but rather a two-week program, along with follow-up, that takes homeless Springfield teens and gets them off the streets. With all programs, Boys & Girls Town’s main goal is to work closely with the families and reunite them with the children, Franco says. Only when that’s not possible does the organization move onto other options, such as foster care or (if the child is old enough) an independent living program.
