PARACHUTE celebrates 25 years of helping abused children

New court filings of abuse, neglect and dependency

2008: 438

2009: 486

2010: 596

2011: 545

2012: 656

Source: Butler County Juvenile Court

How to Help

For more information, contact PARACHUTE Butler County CASA at 513-867-5010 or visit www.parachutecasa.org on the Internet

In 1986, the case of 3-year-old Tiffany Hubbard rocked Butler County and the world.

She had been removed from her home by Butler County Children’s Services and placed with her father Jeffrey Hubbard, who is still serving time for her abuse and murder.

The details of the incident, that she was found emaciated and infected with gangrene on a bathroom floor and that she had been repeatedly raped by her father, caused so much outrage that the community was driven to respond.

“The community was outraged that the court and Children Services had given the child to her dad,” said Chris Schultz.

The Hamilton Junior Women’s League found out about the national Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children and spearheaded the effort to form PARACHUTE Butler County CASA, which was founded two years later.

Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, PARACHUTE has to date helped 1,624 Butler County children find safe, permanent homes by recruiting, training and supervising a total of 446 community members to serve Butler County Juvenile Court as Court Appointed Special Advocate volunteers.

“We call them CASAs,” said Schultz, executive director of the agency.

PARACHUTE volunteers have attended 5,223 court hearings to speak up for the best interest of local abused and neglected children.

But there are currently only 80 active CASAs, and with each handling just one case, the agency can only serve between 10 percent and 15 percent of the cases of abuse, neglect and dependency that are referred to them.

“We only get the worst of the worst,” said Julie Joyce Smith, a CASA board member and former CASA. “They’re truly in the system because their parents made horrific decisions.”

CASA volunteers go through 40 hours of training before taking on a case and are sworn in as representatives of the court so that they can have access to a child’s school and medical records, Schultz said.

A staff of four supervises the volunteer staff, which currently numbers about 80, Schultz said.

“The CASA will follow the case as it goes through the whole system,” she said. “They will try to track down lost relatives and facilitate the system. They won’t take them to the eye doctor, but they will report to the court that the child can’t see so that the judge can put that in the order.”

Schultz said that national statistics show that a child with a CASA will get more services in a shorter period of time and are safer in their environments than children who don’t.

“We try to match our CASAs with the needs of the child,” she said. “They things they do are the icing on the cake, the extra, but that’s what you have to do to get them in the best place.”

Schultz said that she and her volunteers maintain a good working relationship with Children’s Services even though their missions are sometimes at odds. But CASA can keep a closer eye on each case because a case worker at Children’s Services might be monitoring 20 or 30 children at a time.

“They have the mandate to try and keep the child with their family,” she said. “We’re going to take the time with each one so we know the child has a better ending.”

Schultz said the average case will be active for about 18 months, so they ask a new volunteer for a year’s commitment, but some of them have been at it for 20 years.

Bonnie Tromans went through her training in the fall of 1994 and took on her first assignment in January the following year. Since then, she’s had 10 cases involving 19 children.

“The staff provides a lot of support,” Tromans said. “They know what services are available and who to contact when you have problems.”

She said the key to being a good CASA is to be a good listener.

“You have to listen to the parents to get them to trust you and share with you,” she said. “And you have to listen to the children because they need someone to pour their hearts out to.”

She said she’s currently working with a 12 year old girl who is in her third foster home in three years, and on her last visit with her, she just spent two and a half hours on a picnic letting the girl talk.

“I’m the one person, apart from (the Children’s Services) caseworker that is a constant in her life,” she said. “The caseworker sees her once a month, and I see her once a week and spend a significant amount of time with her.”

Tromans said that most of her cases has had a successful outcome, but one child “aged out” of the system and ended up in prison. She said she worries about her cases as she does her own children.

“By definition, if they’re in foster care, they have problems,” she said. “The worst of it is their abandonment issues.”

Smith said that she switched from being a CASA to a board member when she had children of her own, but said she willingly took on the most horrific cases, including two girls who were ritually abused in what appeared to be satanic worship and another young girl who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather but was probably more traumatized by the fact that the mother took his side.

But PARACHUTE tries to first weed out volunteers “who would be too emotionally involved and those who are not involved enough,” Smith said, and then try to match a volunteer with the right case.

The reward, she said, is in knowing you’ve helped a child. In the case of the girl being raped by her stepfather, Smith said that she was able to go to court and sit in the chair behind her when she testified.

“I wasn’t allowed to speak,” she said, “but I could hold her hand, and she got through it. That’s where the reward was.”