EARLY DETECTION AND TREATMENT OF CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFICULTIES

The proposed early intervention program, the first of its kind to be conducted in Israel, has been designed by the University of Haifa's Interdisciplinary Clinical Center (est. 1996) to locate and treat behavioral, cognitive, emotional, sensory-motor, speech and social deficiencies in kindergarten children ages 3-5; to provide guidance and training to their parents and relevant educational staff; and to perform a follow-up study tracking the functioning and accomplishments of first-graders whose developmental difficulties have been detected and treated during their preschool years. The project will be staffed by communication therapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and social workers. An evaluation of outcomes will be performed with an eye toward refining and sustaining the project and replicating it in Israel's other cities and large townships.

MOADONIT – MUNICIPAL AFTERNOON DAYCARE CENTERS

The Municipal Welfare Service provides community based afternoon daycare to Haifa's neediest children via 22 moadoniot distributed among disadvantaged Arab and Jewish neighborhoods throughout The City.  The program benefits approximately 350 children ages 3-17 divided according to age groups, with about 20 children cared for per moadonit. The wide age range indicates the city's commitment to providing continuity of investment in these children throughout their school careers. Funds are needed to provide the children with such extracurricular activities as professionally led art and music workshops, and cultural outings to a children's-theater performance or the Haifa zoo. In addition, individual centers wish for computers and computer games, an oven for the children to make "home-cooked" meals with adult monitoring and help, and other classroom equipment.

KIRYAT CHAIM YOUTH CLUB

The Kiryat Chaim Youth Club was established over thirty years ago and continues to use its original building, which is sorely in need of renovation. The clubhouse is located in the working-class neighborhood of Kiryat Chaim (est. 1933), a Haifa Municipality bay town that absorbed many Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived in the massive aliyah from the former Soviet Union after 1990. It provides a substitute home away from home and after-school activities from 4 - 9 PM daily for 100 neighborhood children ages 11-17 who otherwise would be roaming the streets. These children come from large families of low socioeconomic status and include many immigrants from the former Soviet Union.  The club is staffed by a director, a sports counselor, 2 social-activities counselors and teenage youth-movement volunteers.  Activities include the supervised preparation of homework; a full roster of sports including basketball, soccer, Thai boxing, and martial arts instruction in self-defense; and an emergency life-saving course taken by the oldest teenagers just prior to their enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). 

The Kiryat Chaim Youth Club has 3 major needs: structural renovation of the original building's dilapidated ceiling, floors and restrooms; purchase of a dozen computers and printers and a variety of educational and other computer games – a pressing need because these children's families lack home computers; and acquisition of basic clubhouse furnishings.

THERAPY PROGRAM FOR AT-RISK INFANTS & CHILDREN IN DAYCARE   

The Haifa neighborhood in question is home to a distressed population plagued by multigenerational poverty, chronic unemployment, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. Its daycare center operates from 7 AM to 7 PM and benefits 56 neighborhood youngsters ages 3 months – 6 years. The aims are to prevent the children from being removed from the family home, to foster a connection between parent and child that is different from the dysfunctional model to which the families are accustomed, and to provide the youngsters with a positive childhood experience that will nourish them throughout their lives. In the aftermath of the Second Lebanon War of July-August 2006, the center's Therapy Program budget has been heavily slashed. As a result, the psychologist's 10 hours per week have been cut back to 6; bibliotherapy (from which the children had benefited 5 hours per week for 3 years), pet therapy, physical education, and rhythmusic have all been dropped; and the staff has lost the professional guidance of an organizational counselor and a Municipal Welfare Department psychological supervisor.  This has occurred at a time when the children are exhibiting such symptoms of postwar traumatic distress as jumpiness, anxiety and fear at the sound of ambulance sirens or thunder, and when the most vulnerable of their parents have regressed to such behavior patterns destructive of self and family as domestic violence, drug addiction and prostitution.  

TREATMENT OF POSTWAR MENTAL STRESS AND TRAUMA IN K-12 PUPILS  

According to a report published by the newspaper Yediot Aharonot on August 26, 2006, just shortly after the UN-brokered ceasefire to the Second Lebanon War, 35% of the children who had stayed in northern Israel during the war were exhibiting symptoms of nervousness, restlessness and anxiety and suffering from nightmares. Among schoolchildren, prolonged exposure to severely stressful events is related to behavioral problems such as extreme introversion, late arrival to school, lack of class participation, failure to do homework, and violent acting-out; poor academic achievements; and various short- and long-term health problems.

 On September 1, 2006, two weeks after the ceasefire, Haifa's 50,000 K-12 pupils began the new school year on schedule. Since then, for the most part, systemic intervention on behalf of traumatized children has been performed by teachers who simultaneously have had to process their own private experience. For approximately 5% of Haifa's schoolchildren, such classroom intervention is not adequate. These children continue to feel anxious, angry, ashamed and guilty, helpless, hurt, and grief-stricken. They   require clinical treatment by a trained psychotherapist or social worker to help them process their traumatic experience, cope with their distress, and build on their own strengths.

INTERDISCIPLINARY CLINICAL CENTER

The target group is 40 K-12 pupils throughout Haifa, who will receive 20 individual meetings per child, with another 10 individual meetings per family provided to younger participants' parents. Participants will benefit from the Interdisciplinary Clinical Center's bilingual (native-Arabic and native-Hebrew speaking) staff of mental-health professionals.  The sessions will be held on the University of Haifa campus at the ICC, whose treatment rooms are bright, cheerful, spacious and well-equipped.  Healing techniques will include art and movement therapy; behavioral, cognitive and psychodynamic psychotherapy; biofeedback; guided imagery; and play therapy. As with every project conducted by the ICC, an evaluation of outcomes will be performed with an eye toward refining and sustaining the project and replicating it in Israel's other cities and large townships.  

HAIFA CENTER FOR LEARNING ENHANCEMENT

When exposed to the trauma of war, learning-disabled children are at heightened psychological risk; for them, past traumas are rekindled and past apprehensions, tensions and disputes resurface in the individual, in the relationships between children and parents, and within the family at large. The project calls for the Haifa Center for Learning Enhancement to provide urgent postwar therapeutic interventions to a target group of 200 K-12 pupils throughout Haifa.  Of these, 80% require only group therapy, 10% require psychological treatment within the family, and 10% need combined treatment. Two-thirds of the proposed target group is already receiving treatment at the Center for preexisting learning disabilities; the additional traumatized children have been referred by worried school principals, who appreciate the Center's multidisciplinary, holistic approach to learning difficulties and have asked the staff to provide emergency emotional support. Healing techniques will include bibliotherapy; drama, movement, music and play therapy; and psychological treatment.  

URBAN EDUCATORS KIBBUTZ IN THE HADAR NEIGHBORHOOD

In 2005, a nationwide call went out to people in their mid-twenties – all idealistic army veterans and graduates of youth movements, who were living in small urban communes throughout the country and working as educators – to come live and work in Haifa. In January 2006, in response, 70 men and women ages 26-28 came to the distressed Hadar Hacarmel neighborhood, where they have established the first Urban Kibbutz in Israel and are working round-the-clock as youth educators. The target group is 800 at-risk young people ages 7-22, among them children with police records for drugs and property crimes. Project goals are to intervene in the neighborhood children's lives before they fail at school, drop out, and enter a life of alcohol, drugs and crime; to provide a dialogue-based educational framework that nurtures each child's potential for self-esteem, autonomous learning, social responsibility and leadership; to provide the neighborhood with an example of gainful adult employment; and to refine and sustain the Urban Kibbutz model and eventually replicate it regionally and nationally.