Sitters Meet Troubled Kids’ Needs : Families: A new program called Respite Care for Parents matches specially trained people with the severely emotionally disturbed.

Until this year, Gina and her husband knew that when a baby-sitter showed up at their Ventura County home, it would be the first and last time that the sitter would be willing to watch their 7-year-old son.

“When the girls came over with their schoolbooks, I would have to tell them that they wouldn’t get any work done,” said Gina, who has asked that her last name not be used.

“You couldn’t turn your back on our son. Once our plumbing system was damaged because he had thrown rocks down the drain. Another time, the girl was crying because he had locked her out. And then there was the time when he chased the baby-sitter around with a knife.”

Gina has finally found child care for her son, who was diagnosed at 4 as severely emotionally disturbed, or SED, a general diagnosis covering such disorders as hyperactivity, severe depression, certain forms of schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder.

The child care is being provided under a new program--sponsored by the Ventura County Mental Health Department, United Parents and Interface Children, Family Services of Ventura County--called Respite Care for Parents.

Funded by state and federal grant money, the Respite program matches a trained care worker with the family of an SED child, providing at-home supervision for 16 hours a month at a cost of from $2 to $5 an hour, based on income and supplemented by United Parents.

The program also trains Boys & Girls Club and YMCA workers to handle the children in a group setting.

“Many of these parents are prisoners in their own home,” said program founder Ellen Linder, who is the mother of an SED child and the director of United Parents. “Our kids look normal, but they don’t act normal, so we don’t get the help.”

So innovative is the program that Linder was invited to Portland State University in Oregon to explain how it works last week at a conference on families. Linder said she has been getting calls about the program from parents all over the United States.

To enroll in the program, Ventura County mental health officials said, a child must live in the county, be diagnosed as severely emotionally disturbed, and be identified by an institution such as a school, child-care program or foster home as difficult to deal with. Respite workers go through an intense five-week training program where they learn behavioral techniques to deal with the children’s anger, the side effects and results of drug therapy, and the situations that SED parents face 24 hour a day.

In exchange, they receive $9 per hour. So far, 13 people have made it through the Respite training program. Interface plans to hold a third session this summer.

“This training can apply to all kids,” said trainee Terri McDougall, a day-care provider who decided to become a Respite worker after receiving a phone call from a parent in dire need of child care. She was joined by her mother-in-law, Carol McDougall, who thought that the training would help her run her foster home.

The McDougalls and eight other recent trainees responded to newspaper ads and mailers sent to licensed day-care providers by United Parents. Workers were chosen based on their experience with children after a background check.

Seven of the 10 made it through the most recent training session, which opened with an orientation video introducing the trainees to severely emotionally disturbed children. Mothers of the children told stories of their sons and daughters climbing out the windows of moving cars or trying to choke their siblings.

“It was the menacing music and the camera angle that made the kids seem so bad,” said Lawrence Droughn, 26, a trainee who has worked with mentally handicapped children and was undaunted by the video. “It’s not like you’re dealing with anyone in juvenile hall.”

But that is where many SED kids end up, said Linder, whose 20-year-old emotionally troubled son is serving a second jail term for robbery.

“I’d rather they know right from the beginning what they’re getting into,” said Interface psychologist Rhoda Luick, who trains the Respite workers. Several times during the training session, Luick urged her pupils to drop the course if caring for the SED children sounded too tough.

Margaret Major, a licensed day-care worker and graduate of the Respite program, said the training sessions showed her how to circumvent the violent behavior described in the video and case studies presented in the classes.

“It could definitely be like that, and worse,” said Major, who has been a Respite worker for four months. “I just haven’t seen it yet. The tape opened my eyes that you have to be safe. I don’t let my guard down so the behavior never escalates.”

Organizers of the Respite program said that if more people who worked with children were trained to handle SED cases, there would be fewer incidents of behavior escalating into violence.

Many workers at the local children’s clubs agree.

Part of the $400,000 in grant money covers training for YMCA and Boys & Girls Club workers. Employees at the Ventura Boys & Girls Club, the Camarillo YMCA, and the Conejo Valley Parks and Recreation Department have been trained to deal with SED children.

Workers at the Boys & Girls Clubs in Santa Paula and Fillmore are taking the Respite classes. Those who have gone through the training said the classes help them deal with all challenging children.

“We recently decided to do a survey to see how many kids were on drugs for hyperactivity,” Ventura Boys & Girls Club Director Jane Goldschmidt said. “We found 50 at one of our clubs.”

So far, only two children from United Parents have been referred to the Ventura club, but workers say many SED children remain undiagnosed or have not enrolled in the Respite program. County mental health workers estimate that about 1,600 severely emotionally disturbed children live in the county.

“Emotionally disturbed kids definitely aren’t in the minority these days,” said Patti Birmingham, director of operations at the Ventura Boys & Girls Club.

But workers say the Respite training has taught them to handle SED children without interruptive outbursts and has provided them with a psychologist they can reach at all hours to ask questions, something they did not have before the program began.

Birmingham said many of the SED children are caught in a cycle of being removed from social settings so often that they never learned to play. “They’ll get into a game and get so frustrated that they don’t know what to do,” she said. “Right now, they throw a tantrum, but when they get bigger, they’ll take it out on people.”

She said a solution as simple as explaining a game to a child can avert a disaster.

Program Director Monique Price said she also learned to divert the child’s behavior, showing off the green and white cockatiels that she brings to the club with her every day.

“I’ve always brought them in, but the program taught me to use them in a constructive manner,” said Price, who brings out the birds to distract a child before he or she throws a tantrum or starts a fight.

“This training shows us that we can deal with this behavior,” worker Lea Cobb added. “Too many organizations don’t deal with the problem. They just call up the parents and say, ‘Come get your child.’ ”

Parents of SED children agree that that’s the usual approach.

“When you have a child who has a mental illness, there’s nothing like it,” said Ronald Stitch, a Thousand Oaks attorney who began using the Respite program when his child became too much for the teen-ager next door to handle. “You can’t get anyone to come over and help.

“This is extreme behavior,” he added. “People who aren’t trained to deal with it overreact. But our Respite worker, she’s great. She’s definitely been pushed a bit, but she always keeps her cool.”