State officials have been trying for years to build a new locked facility for the juvenile justice system. Without such a facility, some kids have been sent to adult prisons.
In May, the Department for Children and Families unveiled a plan to build a new secure youth facility in Vergennes — partially on land that once housed the Weeks School, a former youth detention center with a troubled history.
The Weeks School, which went by a few names, opened in Vergennes in the late 1800s. It housed youth accused of crimes, and kids whose families couldn’t take care of them. The school was connected to the eugenics movement in the 1900s, and throughout its history there were reports of alleged abuse, like beatings and solitary confinement.
In March 1944 a boy held at the Weeks School told the Burlington Daily News he’d “rather be pushing up daisies” than go back.
“The history of the school, it's very clear that the children were not protected,” said Melody Mackin, a commissioner for the Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The panel is tasked with investigating discrimination perpetuated by the state.
After the Department for Children and Families announced plans to open a new youth facility, the TRC released a timeline showing the history of abuses at state-run facilities for kids. The group hoped to highlight that the state needs to reckon with its past, said Mia Schultz, another member of the commission.
“If we keep having new facilities thinking we can do it better without addressing the real reasons why we need facilities in the first place, we're going to continue to have the same history repeat itself,” Schultz said.
The Weeks School closed in 1979 and was replaced seven years later by Woodside, a 30-bed jail-like building in Essex. The facility was run and regulated by DCF. In Woodside’s final years, lawsuits, regulatory reports and news stories detailed instances of abuse, unlawful restraint and dangerous conditions at the facility. And an investigation by Seven Days last year found that top state officials ignored these problems.
DCF Deputy Commissioner Aryka Radke said in a recent interview that the department is “absolutely committed” to learning from the mistakes of the past.
Unlike Woodside, the new facility, called the Green Mountain Youth Campus, will be run by a third-party organization, and DCF will just provide oversight, Radke said.
“We are committed to making sure we are in touch with all parts of the division,” Radke said, “to make sure if there's some important information that needs to make it up the chain, that it makes it up the chain and that we act on it.”
But some child welfare advocates say the state is investing too much into a type of facility that is more harmful than helpful. A recent report by the U.S. Senate found kids held at residential facilities often face physical, sexual and emotional abuse. The harms are “endemic” to these facilities, according to the report.
Matthew Bernstein, Vermont’s child, youth and family advocate, sees the state’s lack of a secure facility as an opportunity to reenvision its youth treatment system.
“Our framing question should be, ‘how do we keep families intact,’” he said in a recent interview. “And how do we keep kids in their communities and with the people that already love them and are willing to care for them.”
But DCF officials say without a secure facility, kids are being sent to adult prison and the department is more frequently using “staffing” — which is where a staffer watches over a youth 24 hours a day. The 14-bed Green Mountain Youth Campus will be a better option, Radke said.
“The goal is to make sure that it's rehabilitative,” Radke said. “Not so much that you're being locked away because you're bad.”
Eight of the beds at the new facility would be for short-term stays focused on crisis de-escalation. The other six beds are for longer-term stays. But Deputy Defender General Marshall Pahl is concerned that the facility is still too big.
“We don't want to see something that's used to essentially warehouse children when we don't have other placements for them to go to,” Pahl said in a recent interview.
DCF officials say they’ll review each child’s placement at the Green Mountain Youth Campus daily. The project, which DCF estimates will cost about $20 million, is still in its early stages of development. And before construction begins, there’s a lengthy local zoning process that Vergennes city officials say will, at a minimum, span several months.
The Department for Children and Families previously tried to build a secure youth facility in Newbury, but scrapped that project after strong local opposition. The department is planning to open a temporary four-bed locked facility in Middlesex this fall as a stopgap measure until a permanent facility is built.
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