Organization Remakes Itself to Better Serve Children

April Petry of Elon, N.C., wants to be an opera singer. This fall, the newly minted graduate of The Elon School will enter Belmont University in Nashville to study vocal performance. Whitney Stitt, valedictorian of the Class of 2010 at the Kennedy Charter Public School in Charlotte, N.C., will soon choose which college she’ll attend as the first step toward her planned career as an anesthesiologist.

Both young women were launched toward their dreams by CHHSM ministry Elon Homes and Schools for Children. Originally created as an orphanage in Elon, the 103-year-old organization has reinvented itself in response to both a changing regulatory environment and the changing needs of its constituency. It still helps children across North Carolina who need foster care and related services, but in recent years its primary focus has shifted to education.

In 1998, the agency opened The Kennedy School, a public charter school for children in grades 6 to 12 at risk of failure in traditional public schools. The Francis Elementary division now serves younger children, and total enrollment is about 400. Whitney, who moved to Kennedy from a public middle school, had always earned good grades. “I liked it because there was more one-on-one time,” she says of the small classes at Kennedy. “The teachers have more time and they stay more on you.”

The Elon School opened in 2007 to serve high-achieving, college-bound students; enrollment at the independent, tuition-based school was 86 last year. Before starting there as a junior, April was frustrated in public school. “I felt I was wasting time and not learning anything,” she says. She graduated from The Elon School with an award for personal integrity, intellectual curiosity and social responsibility.

In a sense, the reinvention of the former Elon Homes for Children was spurred by crack cocaine. The Rev. Dr. Frederick Grosse, the agency’s CEO and president, says widespread use of that drug in the 1980s caused the numbers of abandoned, abused and neglected children to explode. In 1985, the organization bought Boys Town in Charlotte and shortly thereafter began taking in what Grosse calls “court order kids” at both their Elon and Charlotte campuses.

“In 1999 or 2000, we realized we had a growing agency and our board wanted a better grasp of what it was governing,” Grosse recalls. “We had gone very quickly from an orphanage to residential treatment.” He himself joined the organization in 1996, right around the time the Adoption Safe Family Act reordered — and to some extent dismantled — the nation’s system of care for orphans and foster children.

“We decided to sit back and ask who do we really want to serve and who can we serve,” he says.

Redefining the agency “was a very logical move,” says Dr. Barbara Tapscott, who chaired the board when it voted to open The Elon School. “We wanted to do the best we could for children given our resources and location. In Elon, when residential care was phased out, we were left with a very beautiful campus in a community that had supported us for almost 100 years. We looked at what we could do to give back, and there wasn’t an independent private school in the community.

“We were started to serve children, and we continue to do it,” she says.

April and Whitney are heading for college as a result.

“Because Failure is Not An Option for our Youth:” Kennedy Charter Public School

In recent years, reforms in the federal child welfare system have presented nearly every child-serving ministry with challenges, and opportunities. One CHHSM ministry, Elon Homes for Children in North Carolina, has adapted to this change by learning how to serve children and families in a different way.

Our board, which operates on a policy governance model, consulted experts from around the state and the country, says the Rev. Dr. Fred Grosse, president of Elon. •We determined that, although we still provide long-term, residential and specialized foster care and know it is an important service, we believe that it needs to be short-term and in concert with the community and the family. To make a difference long-term for the young people we serve, education is the answer.