PROGRAMS

Evaluators find juvenile center is run too loosely

Teenage prisoner Kyle Kirchner was rushed to the hospital in October after an attack by fellow inmates at the Woodland Hills Youth Development Center in Nashville left him bloodied and with two teeth protruding through his lower lip.

Days later, the attackers used a fire drill to slip out of a secure area in an effort to get at Kirchner again, his parents said. The assailants were on the other side of a locked door as Kirchner, 17, placed a panicked phone call to his parents pleading for help.

His parents called security at the Department of Children's Services-run the facility, and security staff were sent to thwart the attack.

But the episode left Kirchner's parents, Dawn and Jerry Mitchell, questioning whether DCS is capable of protecting the children in its custody.

"There was a truly serious lapse in security," Dawn Mitchell said.

The Nashville family is not alone in its concerns about Woodland Hills, one of five juvenile detention facilities in Tennessee that house some of the state's most dangerous young offenders.

DCS officials refused to release reports detailing the Oct. 29 attack on Kirchner. But two months earlier, a state oversight agency found many problems during an August visit to Woodland Hills, ranging from poorly trained staff and gang issues to a lack of security and a generally chaotic atmosphere.

The draft report, compiled by the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, paints a picture of a poorly supervised facility where apathetic and untrained staff members impose little order and at times interact unprofessionally with kids. The oversight group also cited concerns that vulnerable kids were "not consistently adequately protected from more aggressive youth."

"There are substantial concerns about safety and security issues at WHYDC," the draft report states. "Insufficient staffing, poor staffing patterns, poor supervision and inadequate staff training contributed to inadequate programming and safety conditions for children."

DCS officials have strongly disagreed with some of the findings in the report. Some of the issues raised have been remedied, while others are being addressed, DCS officials said.

"The part we most take issue with are these observations that it is chaotic and unsafe," DCS spokesman Rob Johnson said. "You have to remember, these aren't kindergartners. These are adolescents, and they can be impulsive."

DCS officials also disagree with assertions that Woodland Hills staff are ill prepared to perform their difficult jobs.

"We're always looking to improve the training, but we think we have a good training program," Johnson said. He noted that staff spend 160 hours training before being allowed to work with kids and an additional 40 hours a year in continuing training.

In 2004, Metro police responded to Woodland Hills in riot gear after more than a dozen youth, some armed with broom handles, made an escape attempt that left 16 staff members injured.

After the attack on Kirchner, Jerry Mitchell said he demanded that DCS officials move his stepson elsewhere because he felt Woodland Hills staff were not in control.

"I said, 'You all aren't running the facility,' " Jerry Mitchell said. " 'It's the kids that are running this facility.' "

Kirchner, who had a history of running away from other facilities and had been in trouble for a drug addiction and for stealing and wrecking his parents' car, was allowed to move to a less-secure facility. He has since been released from state custody.

DCS moved the two kids suspected in his assault to a youth development center in East Tennessee. An internal investigation of the incident is being made.

Some of the problems alleged by Kirchner's family also were perceived by the oversight agency during its August visit.

"There appeared to be, and reports verified, little order in the facility, almost chaos, in terms of appropriate structure regarding student dress, language/cursing, yelling, fighting (sometimes with slow response time from staff), student movement, etc," the report states.

The oversight group also found significant gang problems at Woodland Hills.

"There is no program to deal with gang activity, but there were serious concerns about the level of gang activity reported and observed, including open gang clothing and signage, extortion, level of fighting, etc., and concerns that serious disruptions in the facility are possible," the report states.

In recent months, DCS has beefed up its treatment staff at Woodland Hills, department officials said. A new security manager was assigned to Woodland Hills, and the number in the facility has been reduced from 144 to about 120 while the staffing level has remained the same, Johnson said.

"But for the most part, we think that the environment out there is as safe as it is in any public school," the DCS spokesman said.

Some observers familiar with DCS and Woodland Hills scoffed at the comparison.

"The kids in Woodland Hills have all shown by their behavior that they can't operate successfully in the community," said Metro Juvenile Court Judge Betty Adams Green. " They would not be there if that were the case. I think they've staffed it like a high school. Maybe that's the problem."

Green said the report is reflective of a juvenile justice system that is suffering from years of neglect.

"I'm not surprised at all by any of these findings," the judge said.

DCS has been accused in recent years of mismanaging its foster-care system and of mishandling cases of abused or neglected kids, some of which resulted in serious injuries and deaths.

Earlier this year, the Tennessean reported that kids in DCS custody had been allowed to escape or walk away from facilities thousands of times during the past five years.

Some judges and state legislators mounted an effort to create a separate juvenile justice system, apart from DCS. In response, DCS Commissioner Viola Miller hired former Juvenile Court Judge Steve Hornsby to reform and oversee juvenile justice.

In an interview, Hornsby said he didn't like what he saw in the "loosey-goosey" atmosphere at Woodland Hills when he visited in November and told staff that order needed to be restored.

One of the changes Hornsby has made is to begin tracking violent and other serious incidents in comprehensive reports at all five youth development centers across the state, something that had not been done previously.

He vowed that the department's internal affairs investigators would find out what happened in the Kirchner incident.

"I've got tremendous confidence in their ability to ferret out the truth and find out what happened," he said. "And if there were policy violations, there will be discipline. There's no question about that."

Officials with the Commission on Children and Youth, which issued the report, said they have noted recent improvements at Woodland Hills but acknowledged that some of the problems, particularly those involving quality of staff, defy quick remedies.

"It is a large facility," said Linda O'Neal, executive director of the Commission on Children and Youth. "It has a lot of staff who are undereducated, underpaid and under-trained for the things they need to do. And that's a problem throughout much of state government. We get what we pay for."

O'Neal noted that Woodland Hills has improved since the findings. After a Tennessean reporter requested a copy of the draft report, the Commission on Children and Youth went back to the center briefly and found what they described as a less chaotic facility.

"In part, some of this was a wake-up call, and the good news is they're responding."

Sheila Burke
2 January 2006

http://www.ashlandcitytimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060102/NEWS03/601020349/1291/MTCN01