Since the 2020 closing of Woodside, Vermont’s only juvenile detention center, the state has struggled to find beds for justice-involved youths. Plans for new placements have been proposed, changed, or gone through lengthy legal battles with local communities. In some cases, juveniles have been placed in adult prisons.

Now, the state Department for Children and Families is aiming to create what it says is a better way of meeting the needs of juveniles caught up in the justice system, one that moves away from a central locked facility to provide multiple options. Under the state’s new plan, four potential sites would provide 27 new juvenile beds that would be run by private contractors — almost as many as Woodside’s 30 beds.

But advocates for children in DCF custody say DCF’s approach relies too much on secure treatment beds rather than focusing on prevention, by increasing funding to address mental health challenges for instance. In all, at least 10 of the 27 new beds proposed would be in secure facilities.

And as DCF looks to private providers to staff the new beds, the state employee’s union has been ringing alarm bells for months calling the lack of a juvenile facility a ‘state of emergency.” The union is now seeking the public’s support through advertising.

“Vermont’s children and social workers need your help. Vermont does not have the system in place to protect kids or the workers who care for them,” read an ad recently placed in Seven Days by the Vermont State Employees’ Association. “Our kids are in danger of falling through the cracks.”

VSEA had opposed closing Woodside and later promoted a plan to use the former Windsor prison to house juveniles, citing the importance of a secure facility for state workers to safely carry out their jobs.

“We have what I would call an absolute five-alarm fire burning out of control in the Department for Children and Families family services division,” said Steve Howard, the executive director of VSEA, in testimony to the House Committee on Corrections and Institutions last week.

Trissie Casanova, chair of the VSEA’s labor-management committee and a deputy administrator at DCF, warned legislators in the same hearing that the lack of secure beds causes harm to children, communities and staff. She offered vivid descriptions of the violent youths DCF has to oversee in makeshift locations such as hotels or police departments, who would be placed in a juvenile detention facility if one existed. Teens who have stabbed family members, tased or threatened to kill people, and assaulted staff members, were examples Casanova recounted before the committee. She added that the rotating staff and settings these youths are subjected to only add to the teens’ mental health issues.

The children she described are generally “staffed,” meaning a staff member watches over them 24 hours a day in a one-on-one (or sometimes two- or three-to-one) setting.

DCF has increasingly become reliant on ‘staffing’ children due to the lack of secure beds, with 129 children staffed for a minimum of 10 hours in 2023. That marked a significant increase compared to 2018 when the department staffed seven to 10 kids all year, Casanova said during her testimony.

“We are on borrowed time for our staff, our communities and our kids and there will be another tragedy if we don’t do something now,” Casanova testified at the hearing. “This is a systemwide fracture within our communities and it cannot be fixed on the backs of DCF employees.”

According to Tyler Allen, DCF’s director of Adolescent Services, the department wants to step away from carceral approaches and focus on therapeutic settings for children who are justice-involved. DCF officials often refer to latter settings as part of its “high-end system of care.”

“There is a recognition that there is danger associated with the behaviors of some youth and that safety needs to be of paramount importance, but that doesn’t change the idea that we need to focus on them from a therapeutic perspective,” Allen said in an interview with VTDigger. “And it’s about meeting youth needs, not about serving the public safety need of ensuring that accountability is assured through a carceral approach. We’ve really walked away from that as a value.”

Alongside these new values, DCF has, according to Allen, chosen to outsource the programs so that department officials will not be “policing themselves” as they did at Woodside. The Essex facility was the subject of multiple abuse and neglect allegations that led to legal settlements last year following a federal lawsuit.

Just how many beds are needed?

Vermont’s Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate, which was created by the Legislature in 2022 to act in the interest of youths in DCF custody, remains critical of DCF’s proposed plans, saying the focus should be on preventing youths from entering DCF custody in the first place, above all else.

“DCF has not presented data to explain its calculations of the size and treatment modalities of any future facilities. The goal appears to build fast rather than to build carefully,” the office wrote in its first annual report to the Legislature that was released last month.

According to the report, DCF has not said how many young people are part of their “high-end system of care.” VTDigger asked DCF how many teens in their custody are currently engaged with Vermont’s criminal justice-system. A spokesperson said that the department would only release that information in response to a public records request, which has been filed. The advocate’s office estimates that the number of young Vermonters who require the highest level of security lies between zero and 10 at any given time.

“The bigger problem is not that we don’t have sufficient facilities in which to incarcerate young people. It is that we lack, as Vermont’s governor has said, “access to rehabilitation, services, housing and other supports needed to both hold these young adults accountable and help them stay out of the criminal justice system in the future.”

“Shouldn’t we focus on those needs at least as much as locked facilities?” the authors of the report asked.

According to Lauren Higbee, the deputy advocate, the diversification of the options for youths with urgent care needs, embodied by DCF’s plans for four new locations, is confusing and not necessarily serving the youths’ needs.

“I think the thoughtfulness, the clinical expertise needed to develop these facilities to actually be responsive to the need instead of being responsive to the crisis is really where we need to push,” Higbee said in an interview with VTDigger. “That’s the heart of not letting Woodside happen again.”

Casanova emphasized in her testimony the urgent need for a facility that may have too many beds rather than too few.

“It’s really better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it,” she said.

According to her estimation, Vermont needs at least 10 secure beds, which includes beds for justice-involved youth both from Vermont and out-of-state, as well as youths in the custody of the Department of Corrections charged with more serious crimes.

“We can’t wait any longer. If we had a place to put kids that was secure, we would have used it as recently as yesterday,” she said.

In the midst of such discussions, DCF is moving forward with its new plans, hoping that three out of the four locations will be fully functioning this year.

Brattleboro Retreat: 15 beds for mental health

According to DCF, the 15-bed new psychiatric residential treatment program proposed for the Brattleboro Retreat — addressing youths with persistent mental health concerns who may or may not be justice-involved — would fill a void that now exists in Vermont. Youth who typically need this level of care are now sent to facilities out of state, including to Bledsoe Youth Academy in Tennessee, which has been accused of physically and verbally harming teens.

“We have a lot of kids out of state in (these types of programs). So a lot of these would be kids that we could return home,” Allen said. “It would be about bringing kids home and serving them closer to their families.”

The program will be a collaboration among DCF, the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Disabilities Aging and Independent Living. The departments are currently in the process of creating the program and, according to Allen, entering contract negotiations with the Brattleboro Retreat.

The program, which planners hope to be operating by this summer, will, according to Allen, not feature a fully locked facility, but these types of programs are commonly perimeter-secured, meaning they are enclosed by fencing.

However, when members of the Office of the Child, Youth and Family Advocate toured the facility, specifically the inpatient psychiatric units for children, they said in their report, “there is no question that this is a locked facility, the most restrictive setting young children can experience.”

The size of the program, at 15 beds, has also caused concern among some stakeholders in working group meetings held to plan for housing justice-involved youth.

“Whatever beds we have get filled up,” Marshall Pahl, deputy defender general, and chief juvenile defender, said at a November meeting on the issue, according to a transcript. “My concern with the jump in bed numbers is that we had DCF reporting zero to five kids who needed secure confinement and now we’ve tripled that.”

Higbee, the deputy advocate, shares Pahl’s concerns, saying that she feels the facilities are not being developed in response to a specific type of need, but just to create more beds.

Middlesex: Four beds for short-term stabilization

In Middlesex, a temporary location has been in the works and is scheduled to finish construction at the end of this month.

“My hope is within the next two to three months that the program is operational,” Allen said.

DCF is currently talking with a potential private provider, whose name Allen would not share with VTDigger because there is no contract yet.

The four-bed facility will be used as a “short-term secure stabilization” program, meaning its doors and rooms will be fully locked. The beds will house justice-involved youths of all genders in cases where there is a concern of harm to self or others.

According to Allen, the facility will be operational for about two years, until 2026, while a more permanent location is finished. Vergennes and South Burlington have been named as locations for a replacement of the Middlesex facility, Allen said.

Newbury: A six-bed group home faces challenges

The six-bed “group home” that has long been proposed by DCF in Newbury went through several legal battles with the local community, which cited safety concerns. Residents said the town also lacked adequate infrastructure and resources to accommodate the facility.

In December, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state, meaning the location is an option again for DCF, which Allen described as a “relief”. However, Newbury citizens filed for a new review of the case earlier this month.

The locked facility would fall under “short-term secure treatment” and is intended for a four-to-six-month stay for youths with a persistent risk of harm to themselves and others. It aims to put delinquents in a treatment environment to address continuous problems. According to Allen, its opening will likely be at least a year away.

With the opening of the facility in Middlesex, the landscape and needs have changed, according to Allen.

“We need to have some discussions with the provider that owns that (Newbury) property and we need to find out an engagement strategy with that town again so that we can discuss what that program will look like,” Allen said.

Brattleboro: Sheriff’s building provides 3 beds

The Windham County Sheriff’s building in Brattleboro will be home to three beds (one is already in use) labeled as “staff-secure crisis stabilization.” Unlike the facility in Middlesex, the doors of these programs will not be locked and although staff can physically restrain youth if necessary, they are allowed to go out into the community.

Two new beds are expected to come on-line this summer and will be run by an outside provider offering a therapeutic approach to children placed there, Allen said.

The third bed is a one-bed program that is already in use. It provides a “rest stop” where youths are “staffed” for a short period while awaiting placement elsewhere.

“These settings are ideally to get through a night, over a weekend, (a) very short amount of time. Ideally it’s 48 hours or less,” Allen said.

According to the report by Vermont’s Office of the Child Youth, and Family Advocate, youth who are staffed “typically have no access to education treatment, peer interactions, or community engagement.”

The report states that youths who are in staffed settings for the longest period, the highest number of days in 2022 was 26, are children with an intellectual or developmental disability, a kind of care in which DCF is not specialized. Allen said this is why DCF’s programs overlap and interact with other departments, such as the Department of Aging and Independent Living.