Grant helps Children’s Advocacy Center of Centre County continue work

A crayon-colored sketch of the Little Mermaid mounted on the hallway wall greets people as they walk into the Mount Nittany Health Children’s Advocacy Center of Centre County.

The waiting room contains a shelf full of board games. A Keurig coffee maker sits on the counter for the adults.

Established in February 2014, the center’s purpose is to create a more child-focused approach to preventing and identifying child abuse. It bridges the gap between law enforcement, Children and Youth Services and child victims, which Executive Director Kristina Taylor-Porter said speeds their “journey to healing.”

In December the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency distributed grants totaling $3.4 million to 44 entities to combat child abuse in the state, including $100,000 to the Children’s Advocacy Center of Centre County.

These funds were the first round pulled from the $48 million that Penn State was required to pay by the NCAA as a penalty resulting from the Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal. The Endowment Act directs that the money be used in the state.

The center’s funding is “to help the child victims in the counties surrounding Centre County gain access to the services in Centre County,” commission Chairman Josh Shapiro said. “Our goal statewide is to have a children’s advocacy center within a 60-mile drive time of every child in Pennsylvania.”

In the 2014-15 fiscal year, the Children’s Advocacy Center of Centre County dealt with more than 350 child abuse cases. Most came from Centre County; it also took cases from Blair, Cambria, Clinton, Huntingdon and Mifflin counties.

“Prior to having a (Children’s Advocacy Center) here in Centre County and even within central Pa.,” Taylor-Porter said, “Children and Youth (Services) would have to go out and interview the child, then law enforcement would have to interview the child, and if they did need medical assistance or if they even made it that far, then the doctor or nurse would also interview the child.”

At the center, the children go to just one appointment where forensic and mental health specialists interview them, with representatives of law enforcement agencies and Children and Youth Services listening from another room. The center is located at 129 Medical Park Lane in Bellefonte.

This way, all parties get the information they need to conduct their investigations, but the children don’t have to give the same interview multiple times. All of these interviews, Taylor-Porter said, create trauma for the children, as each agency’s questions force them to relive the incidents.

According to the commission’s records, the center was also awarded an additional $50,000 grant to support its “operating expenses and to help staff revise the current county child abuse protocol.”

Of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, 24 have children’s advocacy centers. The grants given in December will establish centers in Blair, Clearfield, Wyoming and Susquehanna counties.

Act 28 of 2014, which was added to the Endowment Act, created the Children’s Advocacy Center of Centre County as a result of the Sandusky scandal. Because of these circumstances, Taylor-Porter said, it is hard to quantify how successful the center has been, or even how to measure its successes, especially given its short existence

The highest number of cases in Centre County in a calendar year before the center’s creation came when 237 were reported in 2014. Since 2009, the number of reported cases has increased each year.

In part, the increase in child abuse awareness seems to come from the Sandusky scandal, which emerged into the public eye in 2011, Taylor-Porter and Shapiro said.

“We want to make sure that from the horrors of the Sandusky scandal can come some hope for children who are victims of abuse,” Shapiro said.

“If we can use these resources from the Endowment Act to better protect the children,” he said, “then we’ve accomplished an important objective.”

This story was originally published February 5, 2016 at 5:57 PM with the headline "Grant helps Children’s Advocacy Center of Centre County continue work."