Fighting child abuse on three fronts is the goal of a program that began recently in the early childhood classes at Dorn Primary School.
CARES, or Communities Achieving Respect, Esteem and Safety, was developed by Metropolitan Family Services Southwest.
Marianne Guilfoyle, a social worker at Dorn Primary School, said a global approach makes the program especially attractive.
“It reaches out to the kids, the parents and the teachers,” Guilfoyle said.
Vivian Malloy, a social worker at Metropolitan Family Services Southwest, said the agency deliberately took “a three-pronged approach.”
Protecting children adequately means strengthening the support they can receive from parents and teachers, Malloy said.
“We didn’t want responsibility for preventing child abuse to lie solely with children because that doesn’t make sense,” she said.
CARES grew out of a sharing of experiences and teaching methods among several social agencies, including Metropolitan Family Services Southwest, Family Care and the South Suburban YWCA.
“We pulled out what we considered to be the salient features (of successful programs),” said Malloy.
Under CARES, a series of weekly lessons for children, with communication and support from parents and teachers, offers relevant lessons about awareness and protection.
The “Body Rights” program for children focuses on safety skills that children can exercise if they find themselves in a dangerous situation. Safety skills include saying no loudly, escaping to a safe place, such as the home or school, and seeking help from a trusted grownup.
“We try to make sure that this is not just information,” Malloy said. By the time they have created safety booklets, identified their own network of trusted adults and participated in songs, discussions and dramatic play, “they own (the knowledge) it,” she said.
A parent open house was held last month so parents could review program materials and discuss their own concerns.
Through the classroom program, which began in March and runs until June, parents will receive regular notes informing them about subject matter and listing ideas for parent-child activities that reinforce those concepts, she said.
There will be regular meetings with classroom teachers to assess how well children are learning the material. Classroom teachers will schedule a weekly activity that reinforces the CARES lesson.
The costs of the CARES program are being funded by a $3,000 grant from Marshall Field’s Circle of Giving program.
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