Youth center school changes recommended

AUGUSTA – The Maine Youth Center school that lost its accreditation needs more staff with better pay and a program that focuses more on therapeutic needs than academics, according to a legislative report that will be made public soon.

The report’s recommendations will test the Legislature’s commitment to juvenile corrections at a time when dollars are expected to be short, said Rep. Shirley Richard, D-Madison, co-chairman of the special legislative study committee.

“There’s not much money around this year. We want this to work as a school, and not just a holding tank,” Richard said.

Problems at the Maine Youth Center, the state’s primary juvenile detention facility, have been of concern to the Legislature since 1999, when a consultant described it as a prisonlike institution whose residents were returning to their communities in worse shape than when they arrived.

Richard’s committee was an outgrowth of a task force named later that year. She said there has been considerable improvement to the school during the time she has been studying it.

“If this was a perfect world, I would say that the progress was too slow,” she said. “[But] people who work there are working very hard to improve things, and as long as they continue to do that, I’m happy.”

Change is not coming fast enough, said House Speaker Michael Saxl, D-Portland, who has called for the creation of a joint committee on at-risk youth that will propose reforms for the institution.

The youth center’s recidivism rate is still too high, and the school has lost its accreditation. The state does not do enough to fund alternative sentencing programs or services for residents and their families after they are released.

State Rep. Michael Quint, D-Portland, who is a youth center volunteer and critic of its administration, agrees with Saxl.

“To some people it looks like we’ve come an awful long way,” he said, “but we have so far to go and people are losing sight of that.”

The education committee’s report calls for a program tailored to the special circumstances of the youth center’s residents. Among the committee’s findings: 43 percent of the residents have a prescription for psychotropic drugs.

Most residents have a history of substance abuse and many report having been victims of physical, emotional or sexual trauma. And the majority of residents have been identified as having special education needs.

Because many students have not been attending school regularly before being committed to the youth center, a traditional public school model won’t work, according to Richard. Her committee recommends involving substance abuse and other counseling with the education program and focusing more on student needs than academic performance.

Many of the reforms already are under way, said Daniel Reardon, president of the youth center’s board of visitors. Reardon also is a longtime volunteer who has been one of its biggest critics.

“There has been more accomplished in the last 90 days than there has been in the past five years,” he said. “The biggest [challenge] we have is not to think that we are there. We still have miles to go.”