- November 17, 2024
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In the past, when a Flagler County parent was barred from unsupervised visits with their child, the two would either have to travel to Volusia County to see each other in a court-approved visitation facility, or not visit at all.
Parents who swapped children for visits but had a history of domestic violence with each other used the flagpole outside the county courthouse as a makeshift neutral meeting place, because there wasn’t any better option within the county.
That’s about to change. With a ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday, Dec. 8 attended by officials from the county and the cities of Palm Coast, Flagler Beach and Bunnell, Flagler County opened Sally’s Safe Haven, a roughly 2,000-square-foot visitation facility near the corner of State Road 100 and U.S. 1 in Bunnell.
It will begin opening three days per week in the coming month, Children’s Home Society of Florida Associate Executive Director Kim Pleasants said, and will probably host about six visits a day. The Children’s Home Society will run the center.
“This provides a safe place for kids to visit with the offending parent and for the victim parent to be present,” Pleasants said. “The whole purpose really is to provide a quality visit, and for there to be relationship building.”
Families will come to the center through a judge’s order from family court, she said. In the future, the center will expand its hours and possibly also begin hosting supervised visits of foster children with their birth parents.
The center has three rooms, brightly decorated for different age ranges, and two entrances for parents who are not permitted contact with each other. Toys and children’s books line the shelves, and the walls are painted in cheery pastels.
The center, housed in a county-owned building at 103 State Road 100, was a long time coming. It was conceived three years ago, said Flagler County Deputy Administrator Sally Sherman — who’s hard work to make it a reality placed her name in the center’s title — but the county only recently received the $400,000 federal grant that will allow it to open and operate.
The initiative started with Judge Raul Zambrano when he worked in Flagler County.
“It came as a result of a tragic event, a case that I had where I had no place to send a mother to visit with her children on a Thanksgiving eve,” he said. “As it turned out my bailiff at the time, Julie Martin, decided to take this mother to her house, and the children to the bailiff’s home so they could have visitation on Thanksgiving day. And I can tell you this: Not a Thanksgiving goes by where I don’t remember what happened on that day, because it became very meaningful to me roughly about three weeks later when that mother passed away, and all I could think was going back to that day when she got to see her children on Thanksgiving because my bailiff decided it’s important that mom sees her child on that day. That’s what brought to my attention the need for a facility such as this.”
Zambrano was on the Public Safety Coordinating Committee, chaired at the time by County Commissioner Barbara Revels. He brought the idea to Revels and to Sherman, who “picked up the ball and ran with it,” he said.
Flagler County families commuting to the Volusia County centers have caused long waiting lists at those facilities, Sherman said, and the commute is hard on kids and families. She said she expects "a really good volume immediately" at the Safe Haven.
“At the end of the day, if it helps one child to maintain that connection with their family member … then it’s worth it,” she said.
