front&center Sharon Pallone

Her cause: the lost causes

By Amy Widner

LITTLE ROCK — Sharon Pallone of Rose Bud believes in people.

That’s why she has spent her life working with others, including the kinds of people society considers its worst. Abusive parents and prison inmates, as well as children and animals, have found themselves the focus of her attention and care.

Pallone said she went into the fields of psychology and counseling already believing that people are essentially good, and nothing she saw after she started the family-abuse counseling service SCAN and worked there for 27 years convinced her otherwise.

“When you provide them with the help they need, they don’t keep abusing,” Pallone said. “I saw that hundreds of times. My belief is that people don’t want to be bad. They get into bad situations, and they respond to that. So much of child abuse comes from being abused yourself. We parent the way we were parented.”

Pallone’s not sure where her belief in humanity came from but said her parents were a likely source. They didn’t make a life of helping others but definitely made room for it in their lives. At an early age, Pallone’s mother took her on routine trips to visit a deaf child and to nearby retirement home. She saw her father’s tolerance and never heard either parent pass judgment on others.

Maybe that’s why in 1971, when she met a woman in Little Rock whom she called Linda, Pallone said her first inclination was to try to help - and believe that Linda could be helped, despite the situation.

“I just went into it with that idea,” Pallone said. “It wasjust a part of me. When I met her, I believed she could be helped. She was retarded and schizophrenic.”

Linda, who was 18 at the time and had been in and out of foster care, ran into Pallone in a drug store, and they started talking. Linda was carrying an infant, and Pallone gave Linda a ride, some money and her telephone number. She kept up with her and started working with Linda, who eventually revealed that she was trying to kill her child by starving it to death.

In trying to find help for Linda and the child, Pallone discovered that the traditional approach to child abuse focused completely on the child and ignored the parent. The only solution the officials seemed to be offering was to take the child away and put the mother back on the streets to fend for herself.

As she advocated for Linda, she met a doctor who was interested in child abuse. He asked Pallone to start a group that would help people who abuse their children.

“I said, ‘Yes,’ having not known anything about child abuse, although I was in school at the time for psychology,” Pallone said.

SCAN was born. Pallone trained six volunteers in the techniques she and the doctor had been using with Linda, with the basic idea that child abuse could be addressed by treating the abusive parent. She built up the service, which eventually opened 23 offices in Arkansas and 10 offices in other states. SCAN training was conducted in 25 states.

Pretty soon, Pallone said, the average time a SCAN-assisted child would spend in foster care was six months. The national average that children outside of the program spent in foster care was six to 10 years.

Pallone retired in 1998, and former Gov. Mike Huckabee transferred SCAN’s services to the Department of Human Services in 2000, shutting down SCAN as Pallone had built it.

By the end, they were receiving 400 calls to their hotline a year and had treated 4,000 families, Pallone said. In Arkansas, there were 78 full-time professionals working with the support of 300 volunteers. Out-of-state branches of the service that chose to carry on after the parent organization closed have since changed their names.

Pallone said it was wrong to close the service, and she fears DHS doesn’t have the time or the staff to do what she and her dedicated group of workers and volunteers were able to do. For one, reports of child abuse went up because SCAN was able to do informational campaigns and give people a place to call and see results.

More importantly, she said an essential aspect of the program was that SCAN workers showed they cared and were the contact at each phase of the process - doing the investigation, providing the report and administering the treatment - tasks now delegated among local police departments and DHS.

“People got better,” Pallone said. “Abusive parents got better. They got better and stayed better. … One of the things we did in SCAN, was we would say, ‘We’ll be back to see you,’ and we would.”

That care and consistency was the essential technique that Pallone said not only made the program replicable across the nation with chid abusers but with other target groups. Since 1995, Pallone has volunteered at McPherson Women’s Prison, the only women’s prison in the state, with 700-800 inmates, Pallone said. She is a certified religious assistant and does one-on-one counseling, prayer and mentoring.

“I do the same thing now in prison,” Pallone said. “I let them know, ‘Hey, I care about you; God cares about you.’ You see these women coming out and staying out. Not all of them, but a lot of them.

“One of the women I worked with, when I said, “God loves you, and so do I,’ she looked at me like I was nuts. She probably thought I was nuts. Now she’s out, and she calls me at least once a week. She’s getting her degree online.

“I think when so many of the inmates get out, they don’t have much of a chance. They’re given very little money - $50, $100- and a bus ticket. I don’t know about you, but I can’t make it on that, and they don’t, and they end up back in jail and society says, ‘See, we knew it.’”

These days Pallone also does photography for fellow horse lovers and Web sites. Her home base is the Rose of Sharon Ranch, 1,000 acres outside of Rose Bud where she, three generations of her family and her animals (cattle, horses, dogs and cats) live in a neighborhood of sorts - a neighborhood that opened up during spring 2008 to 800 firstand second-graders who come to the ranch to participate in the Black Stallion Literacy Program. The children got to see horses, learn about them and read them a book, which they took home when the program was over.

Pallone hasn’t always called Rose Bud home, but after so many years helping others, the little town has helped her in return. She moved to Rose Bud in 1983 to get her teenage boys away from Little Rock.

“I love it,” Pallone said. “Moving to Rose Bud was a godsend. It really was the answer to my prayers.”

Pallone, who is 69, joked that at her age, her future plans are to keep breathing. But more seriously, she wants to continue her work at the prison.

“I love it,” Pallone said. “I want to do that and keep trying to be the best grandmother I can be.”

Although her life’s project hasn’t outlived her, Pallone said she absolutely looks back at it all with pride. SCAN may be gone, but thousands were helped and more still will be helped by its techniques in the future. She has continued on, doing what she loves.

“I enjoy working with people,” Pallone said. “The problems that they had were always fascinating to me, just like a big jigsaw puzzle to be reworked over and over again in trying to help people. And in the end, you discover that we’re all so close to the same. I love that.” - awidner@ arkansasonline.commatter of fact Birthdate: Aug. 8, 1939 Occupation: Retired Family includes: Parents: Mr. and Mrs. Dallas Raney, deceased; sons: Mike Pallone, (Aug. 28, 1969) and Pete Pallone (Oct. 13, 1967); two grandchildren: Colton Pallone and Brandi Pallone, whose parents are Pete and Traci Pallone; one grandchild: Dallas Pallone, whose parents are Dr. Mike Pallone and Dr. Karen Pallone Hobbies: Riding horses and photography My name came from: The Rose of Sharon in the Bible What people don’t know about me: I’m content being home with my animals and family I cannot live without: My family and my belief in God When I was young I wanted: To be a Christian psychologist What makes me mad: For people to “run down” people who need help The person I admire most: Those who are skilled in their job My favorite memory is: Riding a horse in the Rocky Mountains with my family The world would be a better place if: We all submitted our thoughts and words to Jesus before we spoke Favorite quote: “Suffer the little children to come unto me” My goals for the future: To continue studying, having fun with family and giving to those who are in need

Three Rivers, Pages 113, 114 on 10/05/2008