GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — April is the month for protecting our future. It’s Child Abuse Prevention month.
The Children’s Assessment Center located at 901 Michigan Ave. in downtown Grand Rapids opened their doors for tours this week.
Company spokesperson Amy Herring explained the importance of what they do for the community and finding answers for kids who have been hurt emotionally and physically.
“All of our services are free of charge for our families and our kids, so that means that no bills come home, and that kids can come back as long as they need to for their therapy. Sometimes, we have children who are quite young, go through months of therapy and then they find that when they go through puberty, they need to come back and process it at a different age and at a different stage in development.”
“Also, we have law enforcement on site here. We have three officers from GRPD. We have three from the sheriff’s department, and then we have four CPS workers, and they work in a very collaborative approach with the rest of our staff.”
Deputy Matt Hooker spoke about the 2 year old black lab named Jaycee.
“Jaycee is a therapy dog. She was acquired from Paws with a Cause in August and since then she has been coming with me to work. She went through a training program with West Michigan therapy dogs in December and after she was done with that and certified she started working with the kids here.
Basically, the purpose is to make it a little bit easier for them to come here and tell their story to us. We need to hear all the details about everything that happened during our investigations and that can be tough sometimes. Anything that we can do to make it easier is what we want to do.”
“We also know that this process of having everybody on site and having everybody come and provide the services to the child, saves our taxpayers about $1,200 per case,” Herring added.
Click here for more on the Children’s Assessment Center.
