Dear Editor:
RE: Concerned neighbours, April 18.
Aletha McArthur is more than qualified to handle this facility and she has done so for several years. As a matter of fact, she has spent her career working with children.
All the Staff, including me, are paid trained staff, not volunteers.
Eligible kids are asking for help, as are their families. Sadly, without this facility these kids would be shipped off to big city centres, sometimes very far away, where they are too far from family to encourage reuniting and healing and where they feel awkward and uncomfortable being from a rural area. This doesn’t help provide a safe comfortable setting to heal. These kids and their families are asking for their community’s support. They are desperately trying to stay together with their families and avoid separation.
These are children, not hardened criminals with weapons and drugs. It takes a village to raise a child. Are you turning your back on these children seeking your support? Well, you won’t be able to avoid the fallout for long, as it is proven that when communities fail their children in need there is a higher rate of kids on the street, desperate, doing desperate things.
Where would you rather they be? On the street? Cold and alone? Or in a respite with genuinely caring people only focused on their well-being and doing all they can to keep them with their families and showing them the path to happier reality where they can ultimately feel gratitude to the community that supported them by becoming healthy law abiding citizens.
As I read this misinformed letter to the editor that prompted this response, I realized Sharon O’Sullivan had quoted the culprits to this lack of information or simple fabrications of the facts as being local media.
Want to make an educated conclusion of this space on your own terms? Pop in for a tour, get to know your neighbour, Aletha, and get to know the selfless support she is offering your community’s children, your neighbours’, possibly your, children.
Then make an educated decision based on first hand facts, rather than fear-mongered fabrications.
Erin Kiers,
St. Jacobs