Centerstone to pull out of its DCF child welfare contract

Since 1998, Centerstone of Florida, formerly Manatee Glens, has handled some of the child welfare case management in Manatee County.

But that nearly 20-year arrangement will officially end May 15 because Centerstone, which is Manatee’s lead behavioral health agency, has decided to go in a different direction, its new chief executive officer, Melissa Larkin-Skinner, said Thursday.

“We notified the Sarasota YMCA that we are going to end the contract,” Larkin-Skinner said. “We did this because we decided we wanted to focus on our core services, which are mental health and substance abuse.”

Child welfare case management involves providing in-home services to families after a child welfare investigation has found evidence of child abuse or child neglect, or that children are at risk for either.

In Manatee County, the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office handles all child welfare investigations for the Florida Department of Children and Families. The cases are then handed off to the Sarasota YMCA, and a department within their organization, the Safe Children’s Coalition, is the the community-based care organization tasked with case management.

Currently, since the Sarasota YMCA has a limited number of case managers, they subcontract with Centerstone of Florida and Youth and Family Alternatives to provide case management.

“It’s not behavioral health services like we do in the rest of the organization,” Larkin-Skinner said. “This is specific to child welfare. There’s a lot of court work and court paperwork.”

Centerstone’s contract for providing services to the Sarasota YMCA amounted to $1.6 million annually and involved 32 staff members, Larkin-Skinner said. Those staff members are expected to be hired by Youth and Family Alternatives and other partner agencies, and likely will pick up the outstanding cases, she added.

This is typical, according to DCF spokeswoman Natalie Harrell, when there is a voluntary ending of a contract such as this scenario, that the other case management organization will pick up the case work and hire the former case managers from the other organization.

“It was an amicable relationship,” said Brena Slater, vice president of Sarasota YMCA’s community based care.

The Sarasota YMCA, through the Safe Children’s Coalition, will continue to work with Centerstone to provide behavioral health services to children under their care.

The change will make Youth and Family Alternatives the only organization subcontracted for case management in Manatee County, which could help to streamline things, she added.

Centerstone will pitch its own idea

Although it is canceling its contract with the Sarasota YMCA, Centerstone wants to create a new Child Welfare Diversion program in Manatee County.

“We’ve submitted an application to Manatee County government for funding, somewhere between $350,000 and $400,000 annually,” Larkin-Skinner said. “What we would do is hire master level staff to work with families in their homes to meet all the needs they have.”

Larkin-Skinner believes this intense work will make an impact in the number of children who have to leave their homes and be put in foster homes, which has escalated recently due to the opioid epidemic.

“Our focus would be anything that reduces stress in the family,” Larkin-Skinner said. “You know it’s often the case that people are treating their kids the way they were raised. We want to teach them there are other ways. We will take any family. We want to get these families engaged.”

This story was originally published April 13, 2017 at 6:39 PM with the headline "Centerstone to pull out of its DCF child welfare contract."