Described by advocates for youth as two trailers plopped in a parking lot, the Red Clover Treatment Center is Vermont’s temporary — and only — locked juvenile facility.

The secure program, opened in October 2024, was meant to meet an immediate need, providing a crisis-ready option for children in the juvenile justice system requiring short-term care.

The temporary facility in Middlesex, Vt., bought the state time to build a permanent, secure complex in Vergennes, Vt. But now, plans for that project are up in the air, and officials are grappling with the limitations of Red Clover given that the program may operate longer than intended.

Vermont’s scarce options for secure placement of youth are having immediate effects. Just last week, a 14-year-old boy was held at Marble Valley Correctional Facility in Rutland, Vt. — an adult jail. The boy was charged as an adult with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was later transferred to Red Clover, according to court documents.

Advocates for youth and Vermont Department for Children and Families officials agree that Red Clover’s operator — the for-profit contractor Sentinel Group — is making the most of an imperfect space. They agree the facility functions well when children are held there short term.

However, that doesn’t mean juveniles are receiving ideal care, and the experiences of youth reveal the constraints of Red Clover’s stopgap nature.

The state is often holding juveniles at the Middlesex facility for a month or more. Providing an education in such a restrictive setting can pose a challenge, and without a complete kitchen, the facility often relies on takeout — including fast food — to feed residents.

“In our opinion, Red Clover is suitable as a short-term facility. It’s not suitable as a long-term facility,” said Marshall Pahl, Vermont’s deputy defender general. “No matter what kind of programming they put in place, even if they had great meals there, it would not be a suitable long-term facility. It just isn’t built that way.”

A temporary building for short-term stays

Since the closure of Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in 2020, Vermont has been without a permanent, secure facility for youth where residents are locked in and closely guarded.

To fill the niche, the Department for Children and Families proposed the Green Mountain Youth Campus. The 14-bed concept, originally slated to open in 2026, would be half the size of Woodside, serving children in a space designed to be therapeutic, not punitive.

But the state pulled back its plan to build the permanent facility in Vergennes last month, running into local opposition and zoning obstacles. Though department officials assert the state still intends to construct the facility, they have not chosen a specific site.

In the meantime, Vermont has Red Clover. The Middlesex program, itself a repurposed psychiatric facility formerly run by the Vermont Department of Mental Health, is intended to stabilize children in crisis through short-term stays. That means holding youth charged with or found guilty of violent offenses, many of whom may also be in mental health distress. The facility is designed for ages 13 through 17, although teens up to the age of 19 can be sent there in certain circumstances, according to the state’s contract with Sentinel.

On average, the state has held teens there for 34 days, according to Aryka Radke, deputy commissioner of the department’s family services division. Eighteen children have been held in the facility at various times since it opened in the fall.

“The facility itself lacks the size, expansion potential, and projected lifespan to meet the full needs of the state,” Radke said in an email. Otherwise, she said she’s confident in the quality of service the department has provided so far.

According to Tyler Allen, the department’s high-end system of care director, youth held at Red Clover for extended periods of time fall into two broad categories: Vermonters whom the state cannot find a bed for at a different program and juveniles from out-of-state with court proceedings in Vermont.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vermont has lost about half of its youth residential treatment beds, Allen said. The decrease, driven by programs’ staffing shortages, has caused statewide capacity to slip from roughly 200 to 100, he said.

In the web of residential placements, Red Clover is the only program required to accept any youth, space permitting, regardless of their legal record.

Sometimes, another program might reject a youth because of their past behavior, according to Allen. And sometimes there just isn’t another place to put a child, he said, which has resulted in Red Clover’s longest stays. The department did not answer a request to provide data on the longest it has held a child at Red Clover.

Out-of-state youth have also wound up with extended stays at Red Clover, in part due to the separate regulations governing them. The Interstate Compact on Juveniles outlines how states interact with each other when dealing with children in custody.

If a child from elsewhere is charged with an offense in Vermont — in family court or criminal court — the youth generally must remain in Vermont until their case is resolved.

Adult criminal court proceedings for juveniles can be especially complex because they typically involve a serious offense, drawing out a youth’s time in Vermont’s custody.

So far, four of the 18 children held at Red Clover have been housed through the interstate compact before being transferred to their home states, according to Radke. Most of those youth have been held for around 50 days, she said.

To Vermont’s top juvenile public defender Pahl, much about Red Clover only causes concern if youth are held there for weeks and months rather than days. He praised Red Clover’s operators for making the most of the space and noted they offer youth more freedoms, such as extensive time outdoors, than other programs.

However, the physical space poses limitations. A therapeutic program starts with designated treatment space — something Red Clover clearly lacks, Pahl said.

“I mean, it’s literally sort of two trailers joined together in an L-shape with a courtyard between them,” he said. “They’re doing the best with what they got, but it ain’t a good space.”

Vermont’s children would benefit from more intermediate placement options in less restrictive environments, Pahl argued, and the state should focus on expanding access not just to the most secure youth treatment programs.

Otherwise, Pahl fears youth will face the same issues they experienced at Woodside — like physical abuse, neglect and retaliation.

“We will see those same kinds of problems again if youth wind up at Red Clover for way too long,” he said.

Takeout and fast-food

Red Clover’s licensing agreement grants the program special permission to bring in food from off site, including takeout.

The kitchen has limitations, such as lacking ventilation for its stove, which prevents staff from cooking meat, according to the Department for Children and Families. Equipped with an oven, range and microwave, facility staff prepare cold foods and warm up precooked meals.

The inability to prepare whole-cooked meals has worried advocates.

Patrick Warn has served for more than eight years as a guardian ad litem — a volunteer who advocates for youth in court. He’s worked with two kids placed at Red Clover.

“Basically, their dinner is they literally run out to McDonalds or Burger King or whatever,” Warn said.

He acknowledged that giving youth the ability to choose their meals — including fast food — can be a tool to reward or incentivize good behavior but said it should not be an everyday practice. Pahl thinks similarly.

“Is serving kids McDonald’s at a placement a problem? Maybe it wouldn’t be if it was actually a short-term placement, if kids were only at a placement for a day or two or three,” he said. “But it’s not just a food problem. It’s a problem because that place was never meant to be a long-term placement. It wasn’t built for that. It’s still not built for that.”

Allen, the department official who oversees Red Clover, rejected the idea that the program serves takeout daily. Instead, he said the program’s staff try to find creative ways to expand dining choices for youth. That includes offering food from local restaurants, such as Thai, Chinese and more-upscale establishments, noting that fast food is one of the less frequented options.

He acknowledged that the program serves takeout “more often than your average family.” While he did not know the exact frequency, Allen estimated Red Clover serves takeout “probably three to four nights per week,” which he described in positive terms.

“Having some choice in meals is, I think, one of the things that we’ve appreciated about the program,” Allen said. “They’re willing to make that investment of time and energy to tailor it to kids.

Pahl and Warn also identified similar concerns with the education youth receive.

“Courts have always held that kids are entitled to their education, whether they are in DCF custody (or) incarcerated,” Pahl said. “My understanding from our clients is that they are getting some educational services. Is it as good as we could have if we had a more permanent, better-staffed, well-structured program in place? Definitely not.”

Warn, who’s worked with kids held at placements across the state and country, said programs often struggle to provide an education when they are not attached to an actual school. To him, Red Clover is no different.

He compared the schooling to when a substitute teaches a class — an interruption to the educational flow.

In contrast, Allen described Red Clover’s educational tutoring as adaptable and a stabilizing factor for youth entering the program, some of whom weren’t regularly attending school beforehand.

Public versus private accountability

When Vermont closed Woodside in 2020, state officials declared it the end of an era. Since then, Department for Children and Families leaders have said the state should no longer both run and oversee a facility themselves.

Instead, they would turn to private contractors to run secure programs in the future. That way, the state could serve as the watchdog, ensuring accountability, officials said.

As Allen described it, the Woodside model involved a conflict of interest.

“That inherent conflict creates a gap that can limit the power of your regulatory intervention,” he said.

But advocates for youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems have argued the opposite. They are skeptical that privatization will bring increased accountability.

The state tapped the for-profit company Sentinel Group to run Red Clover and help create the still-to-come Green Mountain Youth Campus. The company’s owner operates other youth facilities around New England, including the Vermont School for Girls in Bennington, Vt., and Mount Prospect Academy in New Hampshire.

At the Bennington school, some staff have faced criminal sexual abuse charges. As recently as March, an employee was charged with repeatedly sexually assaulting a student. In New Hampshire, Mount Prospect Academy faces more than 100 lawsuits by current and former students alleging, among other claims, physical and sexual abuse, Seven Days reported

Vermont pays Sentinel about $343,500 a month to run Red Clover, according to the state’s contract.

Some advocates for juveniles think a tarnished reputation is inherent to any secure facility.

Mike Maughan, who’s lived in Vermont for more than a decade, grew up in foster care and youth shelters in Pennsylvania. At age 15, he was stuck in a juvenile detention facility for a year and a half when officials could not find a therapeutic setting to treat him in, he said.

The secure facility was not designed to heal him but rather contain him, Maughan said. Grouped together with violent kids, he suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was caught in the middle of an altercation and hit by a chair that had been thrown, he said.

He doesn’t want the same thing to happen in Vermont. Maughan doesn’t think it’s possible for a company like Sentinel to run a facility that’s truly therapeutic, he said.

He finds the design of Red Clover and the Green Mountain Youth Campus to be problematic — “it’s just the perfect environment for abuse of youth and staff,” he said.

He sees the abuse as a symptom of the model. In that setting, kids are always in a vulnerable position and at the hands of a power imbalance, Maughan said. Sometimes that imbalance becomes dangerous for everyone.

“When you go into work and you have the same youth try and punch you in the head and call you an asshole everyday for six months or so, there’s a good chance — and I’ve definitely seen it — staff will just snap,” Maughan said.

The harm is greater when the company running the facility is not held responsible.

“They are experts in deflecting accountability,” Maughan said.

Warn, the legal advocate for youth, agrees.

Rather than a privately run facility, Warn said he would prefer the state construct and run its own program, as it did with Woodside. As a guardian ad litem, he’s able to inspect any state and court records related to the youth he works with, but he cannot access records solely held by a private program like Sentinel.

Though he’s had a positive experience with Red Clover’s staff, he views reliance on any private provider as flawed.

“The fact that it exists is a big failure in our system,” Warn said.

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.