Terry Johnston works at Schwegler Elementary School, located at 2201 Ousdahl Rd. But Terry isn’t a standard teacher or school administrator. Johnston works with the WRAP program, designed to help keep students from acting out. Unfortunately for Terry, the children she helps aren’t the only thing she has to worry about. Financial cuts from the City of Lawrence have caused the WRAP program’s budget to shrink drastically.
“If we don’t have any money, there won’t be any WRAP program,” Johnston said. “Every child in the world is at risk, and we need to be able to help them.”
The Working to Recognize Alternative Possibilities, or WRAP program, aimed at the mental well-being of at-risk students in the Lawrence public schools, has long been funded by the Lawrence School District, City of Lawrence and grants and private donations. But effective January 1, the city will no longer fund the program.
The WRAP program began in 1997 as a way to help kids in the Lawrence Public Schools. Instead of targeting kids who needed help in the classroom, the program set out to help kids that acted out or were thought of as “at-risk” in terms of mental health. The program focuses on prevention of mental health issues as well as intervention for kids who are already troubled.
According to the City of Lawrence budget, the city funding for the WRAP program has come from two sources: general funds and the special alcohol fund. In 2007, the WRAP program received $250,000 from the city’s general funds, and $100,000 from the special alcohol fund. The special alcohol fund is money collected from taxes on alcohol sales in the state of Kansas that can only be used for drug and alcohol prevention. The WRAP program will receive no money from either the city’s general fund or the special alcohol fund in the year 2008.
The cut in funding will mean a cut in staff. The program will have less people to go into the schools and meet with children. Currently, each high school and junior high in the district has a WRAP coordinator at each school, while most elementary schools have a WRAP coordinator or share one with another elementary school. According to WRAP Program Director Charlie Kuszmaul, this will probably mean less time will be spent on preventing mental health issues and more time will actually have to be spent fixing mental health problems that have already developed. Kuszmaul says that while the cut in funding won’t endanger the existence of the program, it will certainly hamper its success. The program has already lost 25% of its staff, and Kuszmaul says losing up to 25% more is a possibility.
“There are fewer workers. Because there are fewer workers, there are less kids we can work with,” Kuszmaul said. “As you lose funding, you decrease prevention, and you have to put your resources toward intervention.”
Kuszmaul said the success of the program lies in its ability to take some of the negative stigma away from the idea of needing mental health counseling.
“We can see kids for five minutes because their dog died all the way to kids that have been brutally raped,” Kuszmaul said. “By seeing a kid in a natural school setting, we’re able to keep away that stigma, and the kids will be more comfortable asking for help if they need it in the future.”
Kuszmaul said the program planned to apply for city funds again in the future, but it was unable to tell if they would ever receive money from the city again.
“Once our portion is out of the budget, it’s much less likely for it to be put in,” Kuszmaul said. “We’re currently preparing as if we won’t have that money back.”
City of Lawrence Budget Manager Casey Liebst said some of the reason for the city’s cut in funding was due to the Lawrence School District’s questions about whether or not they would continue funding the program. According to Liebst, the school district first considered cutting the program from its funding, which led the city to consider the same.
“There were preliminary conversations indicating that the school district was going to put their priorities elsewhere,” Liebst said. “If the school district was changing their priorities on the WRAP program, we felt that we needed to examine that as well.”
The school district eventually decided to continue funding the WRAP program, while the city did not. Lawrence School Board President Linda Robinson said the decision was made to continue funding the program because of its importance in the district.
"It's one of those programs that the school system really needs to have," Robinson said. "It came down to more than money. We wanted to work things out with the WRAP program because we felt it was an asset to kids in our schools."
In the absence of the WRAP program, the city decided use the money from the special alcohol fund to increase the funding for school resource officers in the public schools.
Liebst agreed that the WRAP program could possibly return to the city budget in the future. She said that the program was welcome to apply for city funding for the year 2009, and it would be considered for funding like every other program that applied.
“When resources are limited, decisions have to be made,” Liebst said. “There just isn’t enough money to go around for everybody that wants it right now.”
But Kuszmaul believes that despite the decreased amount of money spent on the program, the city actually will not see any money saved in the long run.
“I see the money spent on the WRAP program not as an expense, but as a cost-saving measure,” Kuszmaul said. “These kids that have problems don’t go away. They have less education, so they’ll have worse jobs. This means they’ll have less money. They end up getting pregnant faster, abusing substances more and using the emergency room more. If we do interventions earlier, you save yourself money in all these places later on.”