Lindsey was 14 when her home burned down in a serious fire after a row of homes in the city was set afire by a teenage arsonist. Until the fire, she had been a good student and enjoyed school. After the fire, she began to lose interest in her schoolwork and her grades plummeted. Lindsey’s mother brought her into the case management unit complaining that Lindsey was depressed and needed attention. Before the fire Lindsey had often talked of going to college, and her mother worried that Lindsey’s goals would soon be lost if she continued to do poorly in school. The case manager listened to the mother and then talked at length with Lindsey. Lindsey explained that during the fire all her schoolbooks were lost, including notebooks with notes in them and her dictionary. School officials at the inner-city school had been reluctant to issue a new set of books because they rigidly adhered to a regulation that students got only one set a year and were “responsible for replacement of any damaged books”.

What would you do if you were Lindsey’s case manager? How might you use the concepts of 1) Planning; 2) Linking; 3) Monitoring; 4) Advocacy. What resources or support systems might you use?