Kids

At the center of our service model is a focus on strengthening families, raising the level of competence of teachers and parents, increasing access to empirically sound interventions, and a commitment to a high standard of care. Consistent with other Centers for Excellent nationwide, the CDHD has undertaken the lofty goal of a clinical service center to address a regional dearth of more advanced assessments, consultations, and treatment for children that were, until recently, dispatched to Seattle or Portland for these services. In the past year we have initiated the first phase of this clinical service component under the direction of W. Rand Walker, Ph.D. in cooperation with a number of clinicians and faculty from both University of Idaho and Washington State University. The "University of Idaho Child & Youth Study Center" was developed last year and has focused on delivering direct services to children and families presenting with more severe behavioral disorders, pervasive developmental disorders, learning disabilities, and other mental illnesses impacting normal development.

These services have been made available to families and agencies with limited resources at a cost that is determined on a sliding scale according to individual needs and ability to pay. In line with the mission of training at the CDHD, the program is staffed primarily by advanced doctoral students from the respective universities and supervised by faculty. Drs. Tim Rehnberg, Len Burns, Tom Trotter, and Brian McNeill, have been the primary site supervisors with numerous other faculty consultants assisting on specific cases. In the next five years we are hoping to establish more comprehensive services including interdisciplinary approaches to case coordination and treatment implementation, advanced training for providers and parents including the development of specialized skills for chronic disabling conditions, specialty clinics that are rotated into the region for team consultations and individual staffing, and empirically supported treatments for a variety of conditions related to developmental delays, educational impairment, and children at risk.

Program History

Five years ago the State of Idaho instituted changes in mental health service models for children that resulted in marked increases in the numbers of families needing assistance. During that time, in an effort to address the shortfall in services, Dr. Rand Walker independently established the Idaho Child & Youth Study Center with the idea that many resources from the respective universities were either dormant or inaccessible to people in the community. From his perspective, the change in State policy was an opportunity to improve the quality of care to underserved families and to provide desperately needed practicum training to doctoral level students interested in working with children and youth Since that time the program was adopted by The University of Idaho, the Center on Disabilities and Human Development, and Washington State University. To date the center has provided over 7,000 hours of direct services (including over $50,000 in diagnostic assessments for children with disabilities), established a library of "gold standard" assessments and educational testing via a grant from Stepping Stones Foundation, and is now training on average seven doctoral level students a year (both pre-doctoral and postdoctoral). Our students and faculty are directly involved in the schools, early childhood education, developmental screening for early detection of problems, provide in-service training to teachers and student body, are currently developing a website as a resource to parents and professionals, and carry active psychotherapy caseloads. Not only have we been able to address the paucity of services regionally to individuals without resources, we have also established a reputation as a high quality alternative to the University of Washington and the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland for more advanced diagnostics and intervention development.

As a result, we have had a direct impact on restoring the stability of families, maximizing the potential of scores of children and youth, and have helped young people at risk rebuild a path to a positive future. Importantly, we are strongly committed to a "positive psychology" model that emphasizes concepts such as resilience, flow, competence, and contribution to others. Subsequently, prevention and integration of protective factors is a thread that weaves throughout virtually all of the interventions.