Training How To Help Children Endangered By Drugs

Local law enforcement, human services, and others attended the Drug Endangered Children Conference at Fellowship Bible

Oskaloosa, Iowa – Helping children whose lives have been impacted, seriously and negatively, by a parent’s or other caregiver’s drug abuse.

The conferences sponsored by Iowa Alliance for Drug Endangered Children says, “Hundreds of children across Iowa go unnoticed and do not receive the necessary intervention and care to heal from these abusive environments.” The purpose then, as explained, is to “provide best practices in identifying and caring for drug endangered children.”

The conference intended audience is for those whose professional jobs might bring them into contact with such drug endangered children, such as: law enforcement, human services, healthcare, and education; just to name a few.

“Drug Endangered Children is a national organization and a state organization. It’s about limiting exposures and risk to children who are involved or connected to drug related activities.” says Eric Nation, a Lieutenant with Mid-Iowa Narcotics Enforcement Task force  and also a Lieutenant with the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office also Commanding the East Side Task Force.

“Protecting the children that are involved in search warrants, or whose parents are using illegal drugs or grandparents, who ever their care providers are” Nation explained, going on to say that probably 1 out of every 8 to 10 search warrants involve some exposure between the law enforcement and children.

I asked Nation about the children’s reaction when law enforcement enters a home on a search warrant. “It’s actually pretty shocking. There’s a huge detachment disorder where the kids really aren’t attached to the person they are living with. So like on all the removals that we have done, not that it’s a ton, the one’s we have done we have very few [children] that cry at the removal of their parents [or caregivers], which would be very shocking to people.”

I was curious then how such an event would impact the children’s lives. “Well, hopefully in a positive way,” said Nation. With this program the attendee’s were taking, it will help train those that will be part of the situation in how to make the incident as positive as possible for the child.

The classes consisted of a 90 minute core class, that also involved the history of the program. The class that was going on while we were there was a law enforcement child welfare specific drug-endangered training.

Ironically, this also went along with my question of the week I had for our readers, that if they thought there was a drug problem locally. 81% of the people responding to the poll believe there is a drug problem locally.