NCCEV Press Releases

For immediate release: March 8, 2004

Training Center Serving Traumatized Children Opens Today

NEW HAVEN CT, CHARLOTTE, NC – The National Center for Children Exposed to Violence (NCCEV) at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven CT announces the designation of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Child Development-Community Policing Partnership (CM CD-CP) as the NCCEV Southeast Regional Training Center in Charlotte. The Southeast Regional Training Center is the outcome of eight years of an ongoing collaboration between the CM CD-CP Program and the NCCEV at the Yale University, School of Medicine, Child Study Center with the New Haven Department of Police Service. This collaboration in New Haven between police and mental health professionals responds to children and families who have been involved in violent emotional trauma.

The goals of the NCCEV Southeast Regional Training Center designation are:

To establish CM CD-CP as the Southeast Regional Training Center as a formal partner with NCCEV at the Yale Child Study Center, to respond to training and technical assistance requests for collaborative efforts by first responders to children exposed to violence
To establish CM CD-CP as an additional resource for consultation and technical assistance to local law enforcement and mental health professionals during national crises/trauma responses
To establish CM CD-CP as an additional source of information and increase the public awareness of the needs of children at risk for traumatic reactions to the emotionally overwhelming experience of exposure to violence
To acknowledge CM CD-CP as a partner in the formal research and evaluation of the CD-CP curriculum to include the efforts of other critical incident response professionals in the United States.

The NCCEV was established in 1999 by the Department of Justice and the White House. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg CD-CP was one of the first of 14 program replication sites to implement collaborative police-mental health responses to children exposed to violence “The establishment of the Southeast regional Training Center is a testament to the excellent work done through the Charlotte-Mecklenburg CD-CP and the Police-Mental Health-Child Protective Services partnership since it was established in 1996,” said Dr. James Lewis III, the Chief of Operations, NCCEV.”

The initial activity of the new Southeast Regional Training Center is to train a partnership team from the Raleigh (NC) Police Department and the Wake Country Department of Child Welfare and Mental Health Services. The approximately 50 hours of training will be conducted in Charlotte, from March 8th-12th.

“Over the years our colleagues in Charlotte have become our teachers and our friends. We are thrilled that we will have the opportunity to work even more closely as we strengthen our efforts to address the needs of families and to the children exposed to violence to whom we are committed,” said Dr. Steven Marans, Director of the NCCEV and Harris Associate Professor of Child Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. James Lewis III., NCCEV
203 737 5099
james.lewis@yale.edu
Mandy Giannini, CM CD-CP
704 336 2338
agiannini@cmpd.org