Legally Speaking: Stephanie Record - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette

April 18, 2019 at 06:39AM

Although April has been designated Child Abuse Prevention month, that's the daily goal of the Crisis Nursery in Urbana. The so-called "island of safety" marks 35 years of service to children and families in Champaign County this year.

STEPHANIE RECORD has been the executive director since 2008. With master's degrees in education and social work, Record is well-equipped to deal with the daily operations of a place open around the clock, where no two days are ever the same.

As the UI's head cheerleading coach for the past 25 years, she has just the right tone to get the attention of her "kiddos."

Why do people come to Crisis Nursery?

Every situation that brings a family to us is unique — parental stress and feeling overwhelmed, homelessness, domestic violence that puts children in a risky situation. ... Our main goal is to provide that emergency care for them in that crisis so that kids aren't in that situation that could lead to harm. So we are preventing child abuse and neglect down the road.

Who may come and for how long?

We can serve 12 to 15 children, depending on our staffing situation for each shift, at one time. That varies based on the needs of the children. We have to have three children per one adult.

One of the benefits of the nursery is it's very easy to use our services. There aren't many barriers to accessing care. If you're in an emergency situation or a crisis situation, there's no one else you can call that can support you, and you need our help and we have space, we're going to do what we can to provide that support. We serve for an average of about eight hours. It's a flexible maximum of 72.

Tell us about your staff.

We have about 30 people ... a combination of full- and part-time because we have to staff the facility 24/7. A lot of our staff are ... college students who are close to campus.

We have about 140 volunteers a week. They do two-hour shifts and that allows us to care for as many kids as possible. They're not ever unsupervised.

We are a DCFS-licensed facility. All our volunteers or staff have to go through a background check, fingerprints, physical, TB test.

The nursery has branched out from providing just emergency respite care, right?

We also have the Strong Families program so we have master's-level employees in those positions that provide direct support to families who are in need and also may be struggling with perinatal or postpartum depression.

We also received a new grant ... for our prevention initiative program so we work with children, birth to three (years old), really providing support to make sure they are ready for kindergarten.

You completed an expansion of the nursery in 2016. What's next?

The next step and the reason we continue to push and raise funds ... is to increase staffing. The only way we're going to be able to serve (up to 18) kids is to bring on more staff.

The volunteer numbers are pretty high already and it's important to have sustainable staffing in the facility at all times.