Keeping at-risk children with disabilities safe

Dear Generous Supporter,

Thank you so much for supporting our project to keep at-risk children with disabilities safe. During the first few months of the war, our centers in Ashkelon were closed due to the enormous amount rockets that came into the city. People were confined to their homes and shut in their bomb shelters at this time. Because of this situation, we shifted our services to provide home outreach that consisted of food, medicine, toiletries, communication and assistive technology, physical therapy equipment, and educational aides.

We have also been sending our staff to each child’s home every week to activate their bodies and minds with their personally prescribed therapies. At these visits, they have discovered very frightened children, due the threatening noises and reverberations of the sirens, Hamas rockets, and IDF bombs from nearby Gaza. They also observed parents who did not know how to properly care for their child and their disabilities. As a result, when the children came back to the centers in mid-December, we saw that they lost significant progress because they could not continue the same level of therapy at home that they received in our centers.

The regression put the children at risk of not reaching the potential gained through early intervention. This is critical for their age group because the neural circuits in the brain, the foundation for learning, behavior and health, are only most adaptable during the first three years of life. The intervention can mean the difference between the children requiring support or not in their later years and through adulthood. 

Now, thanks to your support, we are continuing to provide parental education and home therapy equipment so the children can catch up and the parents can be better equipped to support their children’s disabilities. The program is now delivering targeted child development and family relationship intervention as well as helping parents improve their communications with their child and adopt appropriate responses to their child’s needs.

When the war is over, we hope to be able to implement our After-Hours Program for At-Risk Preschool Children by extending the day in Ashkelon to 6:30pm, as an alternative to home care. The preschool children with disabilities who will participate are living with issues such as extreme poverty, abuse, neglect, and inadequate parenting. When the centers close at 3:30pm, many of these young children are put in unsafe and inadequate environments. Here, while their refugee/migrant/immigrant parents work low-paying jobs, these little children are left in cheap daycare that consists of crowded tiny rooms in apartments or basements with poor ventilation, no activities, and scant food. Worst of all, even if the caregivers know how to properly address these children’s special needs, these environs have too many children for the caregivers to be able to provide the attention they need.

The after hours program that we will implement will provide one-to-one rehabilitating and nurturing care alongside leisure and enrichment activities. It will also continue to deliver targeted child development and family relationship intervention.

Thank you again for your continued support as we adapt our services to the changing needs of the communities that we serve.