Donor's gift will help keep Sedgwick County Child Advocacy Center open
The Child Advocacy Center, which barely survived in Sedgwick County this year, has found additional money that might keep it going beyond this year.
Diana Schunn, the executive director, said a private donor will soon announce that the center will get $50,000 a year for three years. The Sedgwick County Commission, after a tough debate, gave it $120,000 in February to keep it alive one more year.
"Eventually we still hope to talk about some capital campaigns," Schunn said. "We're hoping to do some grant writing and fundraising."
The nearness of the center's extinction has played out as a contrast to what was being said about child advocacy centers only four years ago in Wichita.
After two little girls were tortured and starved in Wichita four years ago — and after a state investigation found that it all happened even though callers had tipped off the state about the ongoing abuse — the governor of Kansas at the time made a recommendation.
Among other things, then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said, the state needed a system of child advocacy centers, a specific kind of office staff that overcomes the many unusual complexities involved with cases involving children and connects the many complicated dots.
The case involving the two girls prompted public and government outrage at the time. Charges against the children's father and stepmother alleged that the girls, 6 and 7, were tortured, beaten and inhumanely punished over 10 months. They were starved and dehydrated by the time investigators took them away.
Afterward, Sebelius said the state had failed the two girls. She ordered an investigation of the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, which reports to the governor. Officials later said that several people in the Wichita SRS office were disciplined over "systematic weaknesses" in investigations that had prolonged the girls' suffering.
Sebelius said later that she hoped that every Kansas child would have access to an advocacy center by 2011.
All that happened before the economy tanked, and before state budgets got cut by hundreds of millions of dollars in the past two years.
The current center, located in the Finney State Office Building downtown, has only two employees, but both are located next to the investigators and staff of the Exploited and Missing Child Unit. That unit employs both law enforcement and SRS investigators to work with child crime victims, runaways and other young people.
One of the main arguments proponents put forth about advocacy centers is that there are many different agencies involved in child cases, and that it would help children a great deal — and streamline their interviews — to put many of those investigators under one roof.
Schunn said her office works with 2,500 cases a year, about 200 a month. Eventually, she said, she hopes to have a building where investigators would all work together.
This story was originally published May 23, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Donor's gift will help keep Sedgwick County Child Advocacy Center open."