By Aubrey Weaver | Community News Service

The Department for Children and Families has been in and out of the Statehouse in recent weeks to initiate the process of building a new rehab and detention facility for juveniles in Vermont, the latest steps in a plan drafted back in December.

Lawmakers in the Senate appropriations committee April 11 heard from recently appointed department commissioner Chris Winters and deputy commissioner Aryka Radke and adolescent service director Tyler Allen, who all testified about the significant need for a new juvenile facility. Then Radke joined Allen April 25 to urge members of the House judiciary committee not to increase the number of potential juvenile offenses as outlined in S.4, a nine-point bill more notable for its proposed gun control measures.

“I think our system urgently and desperately needs access to secure crisis stabilization,” Allen said to the committee. “So I would say first and foremost, I would like to see that in place or very close to something in place before we can talk about expanding population.”

This discussion comes nearly three years after the state shut down its lone permanent facility, Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, amid accusations of abuse and neglect by staff.

The years since have spawned many heated public meetings around the state on the existing system of pop-up staffing sites and micro-facilities to house crisis youth. Officials in recent months have made plans to stand up a temporary center in St. Albans and a small, two-bed facility in Brattleboro — moves that would be funded by $4.6 million in the budget adjustment act — but the department and lawmakers want to reestablish a permanent system for housing and rehabbing youth in crisis and in the justice system.

Legislators agreed on the need but seemed wary about how it will be paid for. There is “much more on the request line than on the revenue side,” said Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, in the April 11 meeting. Her committee, she said, is trying to figure out where to “put their first dollar.

Winters looked to defuse any tension and give legislators perspective.

“I sincerely hope that folks can take a step back from what’s become a very heated conversation and remember that we are talking about a treatment facility for crisis stabilization,” Winters told the committee. “In a place like Newbury, we’re talking about six boys at the most, boys ages 12 to 17, who are in crisis and who are in desperate need of help. These are our kids — these are our neighbors’ kids — they live in our communities already and we have a collective responsibility to care for those kids.”

Winters was referring to the state’s stalled plan to replace Woodside with a facility in Newbury — a move that received widespread rebuke in the community and was rejected by the town’s development review board. The plan now sits mired in court proceedings. Lawmakers in committee that day said they weren’t happy with the makeshift system either.

“We don’t think that the closure of Woodside, and what needed to be done after it, was done very well, to be honest,” said Kitchel in committee.

Winters and Radke both started their time with the department after Woodside’s closure. Winters, who began his role only weeks ago, described himself in committee as a “somewhat neutral observer who was airdropped into this backcountry fire that was already in progress.”

The department prepared a “High-End System of Care Plan” in December that outlines its goals for a permanent program. The system has four tiers based on the needs of youth, but the request for funding focuses on the first two, both of which require a new secure structure to house children who need a secure place to find stability and treatment.

The proposed facility would be a short-term secure stabilization facility and lines up with what most imagine a juvenile detention center to be.

It is “designed to immediately manage acute safety crises for any justice-involved youth” and would be an eight-bed facility to temporarily house youth until “when they’re in a position where they can start absorbing therapeutic intervention more purposefully,” said Allen, the adolescent services director for the department, in the April 11 committee meeting.

Department officials pushed back on calling any part of their plan a “detention” center, as a handful of senators had done in that discussion.

Allen mentioned that the department views a secure facility as part of a treatment plan and said words like detention can be “loaded.”

“I think for some people the thought of detention starts to turn into incarceration — it starts to turn into imprisoning youth, and I’ve seen very often that it can become inflammatory,” said Allen in the Senate meeting. “The mindset that DCF has really evolved to over the past decade has been to reduce the reliance on detaining youth and to increase our emphasis on treating youth needs rapidly and in the most appropriate environment to them.”

Allen continued: “If we view them as children that are predisposed towards being violent and being harmful, then we will enshrine them in that behavioral pattern. And if we view them as young people who are dealing with a very complex system of pain internally and externally, then we can start to help make sure that that doesn’t become part of their kind of persistent pattern.”

Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, jumped in with a counter.

“When they start hitting staff with frying pans, they’re violent, and that’s the problem,” he said. “Right now we don’t have anything at the top of the system to hold those violent youths. While I appreciate your approach, and I don’t disagree with what you are saying, I think we have to keep in mind that many of these kids are violent and can do extreme damage to physical property — but more importantly staff members and other kids. I encourage you to listen and call it what it really is.”

Everyone in the room seemed to agree on the urgency of this issue, including Sears: “The problem needs to be solved today, not six years from now. So we need the interim facility quickly, as quickly as possible.

Radke, the deputy commissioner, explained that the department doesn’t have a set date for when the permanent facility would open but said it should hopefully be “much less” than five years from now.

For the permanent facility timeline, Allen said in a committee meeting this week that the state Department of Buildings and General Services told him things like this often take between five and eight years to develop.

In the meantime, the department is focusing on standing up a temporary facility until a permanent one can open. “The conversation we last had about this was in reference to potential modular construction in St. Albans, which is still one of the conversations we’re having,” said Allen to the House judiciary committee this week.

The Community News Service is part of the Reporting and Documentary Storytelling Program at the University of Vermont.