Across the District, hundreds of children fall victim to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that can often hamper educational, safety, housing, behavioral and health outcomes.
Through an innovative medical-legal partnership, AmeriHealth Caritas DC is working in tandem with Children’s Law Center to provide legal advocacy services aimed to reduce housing and health-related ACEs and strengthen District families and communities overall.
On Oct. 23, AmeriHealth Caritas Foundation awarded Children’s Law Center a $100k grant to help bolster the organization’s support toward some of the city’s most vulnerable families.
“Children’s Law Center not only helps children and families navigate individual legal barriers, but is also a strong proponent of meaningful changes across all the systems that impact the lives of children across the District, such as: foster care, housing, education and children’s behavioral health,” said AmeriHealth Caritas District of Columbia Market President Karen Dale.
The services offered through the partnership, will help AmeriHealth enrollees when poor housing conditions trigger life-threatening asthma attacks in children.
According to the Children’s Law Center, children living in unhealthy housing, particularly in lower-income areas like Wards 7 and 8, are 20 times more likely to end up in the emergency room due to asthma triggers stemming from poor housing conditions, compared to children growing up in wealthier neighborhoods like Ward 3.
In an effort to bridge access to the Children’s Law Center network of lawyers, the nonprofit organization partners with institutions throughout the city to provide legal services in roughly eight different community health clinics with a lawyer on the ground.
Their additional partnerships include Children’s National Health System’s primary care clinics including THEARC, Anacostia, and Shaw-Howard, two Unity Health Care sites, and Mary’s Center’s Fort Totten location.
Under the circumstance of a child experiencing health implications due to poor housing conditions, AmeriHealth care managers will refer that child’s family members, who are AmeriHealth enrollees, to the Children’s Law Center staff.
At that point, the attorneys proceed to converse with those families to understand their living conditions and what needs to be addressed. Once determined, attorneys then work to hold landlords accountable to fix poor housing conditions or relocate the residents to safer, quality homes.
“We embed [a] lawyer on [each] medical team and solve problems that really can’t be solved by medicine,” Judith Sandalow, executive director of Children’s Law Center, told the Informer.
Improving Health Outcomes for At-Risk Children
While Children’s Law Center aims to reduce asthma-related emergency room visits among District children, the nonprofit organization also tackles a host of other adverse childhood experiences across the city including; special education needs, abuse, and neglect cases.
Sandalow highlighted the organization’s efforts to represent diabetic children, often sent to hospitals for care due to a lack of available nurses to manage the condition within their school.
Similarly, cases of pediatric referrals for asthmatic children call for legal interventions to address housing conditions for potential mold or infestations in the home, that goes beyond the parent’s control of care.
“A lot of the work we get is special education, so, kids who are not having their educational needs met,” Sandalow explained. “Pediatricians understand that poor education outcomes go along with poor health outcomes in the long term, so we get a lot of those referrals as well as physical health issues related to education.”
According to a report by the Data Resource Center for Child & Adolescent Health: “School performance goes hand-in-hand with ACEs. Compared to school-aged kids with [two plus] ACEs, those with no ACEs are 1.3 times more likely to be engaged in school [and three] times less likely to repeat a grade.”
Further, the report reveals children with ACEs are more likely to have chronic health problems and parents who also battle poor health.
“For instance, those with [two] or more ACEs are [two] times more likely to have chronic conditions, and [five] times less likely to have a mother in good health,” the report states.
Beyond the scope of health, which also includes cases of mental and substance disorders, Children’s Law Center has represented youth residing in households involving custody disputes due to domestic violence or a parent being incarcerated and a family member may be needed to step in.
But despite the nature of these cases, Sandalow underscores the mission of Children’s Law Center and AmeriHealth’s partnership, is to help support families who are faced with challenges beyond their bandwidth of resources. While people commonly question parents for the varying adversities their children face, Children’s Law Center understands that many are doing the very best they can with the circumstances they are dealt.
“The way we think about it is that parents are walking around with this massive burden of poverty, trauma, and racism on their shoulders, and our job is to help lift that burden off of their shoulders,” Sandalow said. “That often takes the form of housing or education, because one of the big burdens is, if a child is not doing well, school is stressful on a parent.”
Children’s Law Center aims to reform the city’s behavioral health system as a whole, helping families across the city with a keen focus on supporting children’s physical and behavioral health issues that their parents are seeking help for.
“All kinds of things, which I like to say, ‘rich people can buy their way out of,’ people without money can’t. That is a huge part of the work we do.”