Attention disorder agency faces closure

Kaiwaka youth Matt Hayes, expelled from Rodney College, was helped by TeenAdders to find part-time work. Picture / Richard Robinson

The only specialist agency for teenagers with attention deficit disorder in the country, Orewa-based TeenAdders, is facing closure unless it succeeds in a last-minute appeal to the Waitemata District Health Board today.

The agency, founded 11 years ago, works with about 90 teenagers and their families in the Rodney area to get medical and educational help for their disorders, which often cause behaviours that get the youngsters expelled from schools.

Kaiwaka youth Matt Hayes, 16, has not been in a classroom regularly since he was 11 and was suspended from Rodney College in 2004 for taking a pistol-sized ball bearing gun loaded with plastic pellets to school. TeenAdders has helped him get part-time work as a landscape gardener.

Howick doctor Tony Hanne, who specialises in attention deficit disorders, said TeenAdders was one of only three groups providing support to youngsters with the disorders - about 3 to 5 per cent of school-aged children. The other two are both national voluntary associations.

TeenAdders employs a fulltime manager, Sandy Bowmar, and five part-time family support workers. It has covered its costs of $100,000 a year with a $20,000 grant from Child, Youth and Family Services plus constant applications to Sky City, the Lottery Grants Board and other charities.

"It's too shaky. It's too hard working like this. We have to look after our staff because it's a very emotional job, and if we can't offer them secure employment it affects the whole service we are providing," Mrs Bowmar said.

"Everyone is starting to get burnout."

She said she had applied repeatedly for Government funding over 11 years, but was "ping-ponged" between the health and education systems.

For Matt Hayes, she organised meetings from the Special Education Service and mental health services.

"They were all sitting round passing the buck of responsibility round the table.

"No one actually wanted to take over the case," she said.

"We were asked if we would. We did, and we got a contract with Northland Disability which provided money for us to put a support worker alongside Matt. His medications were looked at and we got him to a fantastic specialist, which meant his anxiety was treated and it opened up his world."

But she said TeenAdders' general funding reached "crisis" two weeks ago and the agency would have closed last week if another mental health manager had not stepped in and arranged a meeting with the district health board.

Health board funding general manager Tim Wood said the board's budgeted increase in mental health spending for the year starting July 1 had been cut by a third, so the board had to be "quite focused" in the areas it could fund.

Child and adolescent mental health was high on the list but he could not guarantee that attention deficit disorder would be funded.