Children's Advocacy Center is expanding

With a major expansion nearing completion, Highlands County's Children's Advocacy Center will soon truly centralize its staff and most of its agency partners under one roof.

With about 55 full-time employees working in the building, "we will be one of the most, if not the most, inclusive centers in the state of Florida," Children's Advocacy Center Director Jeff Roth said Wednesday. For the most part, all of the agencies and/or teams from an agency, who work with children's services, will be located in the center.

The 7,438 square-foot addition will increase the center's size about two and half times to 12,707 square-feet.

The sheriff's office victim advocates and special victims unit will be moving into the new addition, Roth said. Law enforcement will have its own pod.

Also, all of the Department of Children and Families, except economic services, will be housed at the center.

The center will have facilities and staff for medical exams and the mental health component of Children's Services, Roth noted.

"You will still go up to the Sweetbay site Desoto Square Shopping Center for economic assistance, but adult investigations - both their children's unit and their entire legal staff - will be moving over and will be occupying that section," he said.

The entire Guardian Ad Litem program, which is currently in a house behind the county jail, will move into the existing Children's Advocacy Center building.

The project is 30 days behind schedule.

"We were targeting a Jan. 1 move-in date. Now we are looking about Feb. 1," Roth said.

The building construction cost is around $800,000, with the total cost including site work, parking and outfitting of the building is about $1 million, according to Roth.

Also, at Wednesday's meeting of the Children's Services Council, Highlands County Sheriff Susan Benton said statistics show that the services for children in the county are working.

There were 819 juvenile delinquency complaint affidavits filed in 1999 with the clerk of courts and nine years later in 2008 that number had increased only slightly to 823, she said.

"What's very interesting, 460 of the 823 were deferred so they never went to the court level," Benton said.

So these are right on with national statistics where 50 percent or more of the cases are deferred and the kids learn their lesson and they usually don't come back into the system, she said. The next group of juveniles is put on probation. Usually about 2 percent of the offending kids are the serious habitual offenders.

Highlands County has only about 120 juveniles who are on probation, Benton noted.

"I think it's really important to see that the fruits of your labor are in what is really happening in the community," she told the Children's Services Council.