Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Three Springs
SEQUEL YOUTH & FAMILY SERVICES acquires THREE SPRINGS
Ursus:
According to this Comment left for the above article, Lakeside Academy used to be called Lake Farm Boys' Home a half century ago:
Posted by wds37 | July 21, 2008, 8:40AM
To the Leadership of Lakeside Academy;
After several years of watching the Lakeside Academy struggle to develope a meaningful program that teaches young men the right way to be an active member of society, it appears that the board of directors have fulfilled their goal! You people are to be congratulated for continuing to provide these young men opportunities that even Pop Dooley would be proud to be associated with. Times change, but the need to give our young boys a helping had, will never change.
ThankGod there are places like Lakeside Academy! I was a young boy at Lakeside fron 1947 through 1954 when it was then called Lake Farm Boy's home. Keep going the way you are. Don't ever try to include girls in the facility. Like mixing oil with water, it just won't work.
Respectfully,
Wayne D. Shafer
Crown Point, IN
Ursus:
--- Quote ---In order to qualify for Lakeside rather than be sent to a correctional facility, potential residents are first recommended by the courts, then interviewed by Lakeside Executive Director Travis Faulds and Director of Support Services Thom Lattig. If an offender seems legitimately welcome to the opportunity of turning his life around, seems willing to follow the rules and programs at Lakeside, and there is room at the academy, he then qualifies for acceptance.
Residents then begin the process of retraining themselves. Anger management, peer pressure and decision-making are all part of the process.
--- End quote ---
Sometimes the psychosocial environment at Lakeside was not so healthy:
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Kalamazoo Gazette
Youth counselor charged in alleged assault at Lakeside
Friday, May 22, 2009
Kalamazoo
BY REX HALL JR. AND JULIE MACK
KALAMAZOO -- A former employee at a home for troubled youths has been charged with sexually assaulting one of its residents, authorities said Thursday.
Kimeon Tyrone Bolden, 27, who was a youth counselor at Lakeside Academy at 3921 Oakland Drive, was arraigned April 28 in Kalamazoo County District Court on three counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a court official said.
Police did not release information about the case until Thursday.
Investigators allege that Bolden sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy from the Detroit area who was a resident at the facility, Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Fink said.
Lakeside is a residential facility that serves about 72 boys, ages 12 to 18, who have been placed there by the courts for antisocial behaviors. The teen was a resident of Lakeside's unit for young sexual offenders.
Don Nitz, Lakeside's executive director, said the fact that the alleged offenses occurred in the sexual-offender unit makes the scenario even more "painful'' because it was perpetuating behavior that Lakeside is trying to address.
"We're trying to help kids, and then to have a staff member take advantage of a child, it's awful,'' Nitz said. "We take it very seriously.''
Three incidents involving sexual penetration between Bolden and the boy are alleged to have occurred from March 13 to March 15, Fink said.
The boy reported the incidents to the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety on March 15, and investigators submitted the case to Fink's office in April.
Detective Sgt. Karianne Thomas declined to release any details Thursday about the allegations in the case but did confirm the allegations involve oral sex.
Fink said his office authorized a warrant April 21 charging Bolden with the three counts of criminal sexual conduct.
Bolden, whose bond was set at $10,000 cash/surety following his arraignment in front of District Judge Richard A. Santoni, was released from the Kalamazoo County Jail on May 1 after posting the necessary 10 percent of the bond.
He is scheduled to be back in district court June 3 for a hearing on evidence against him in the case.
Andis Svikis, Bolden's court-appointed attorney, said he had no comment about the case when reached Thursday afternoon by the Kalamazoo Gazette.
Thomas said the teen has been transferred from Lakeside to a different facility on the east side of the state since the incident was reported.
The boy's family has hired a lawyer, Steven L. Schwartz, of Farmington Hills, who is planning to file a lawsuit against Lakeside on the boy's behalf.
"It's a family's worse nightmare,'' Schwartz said the alleged assault. "It's going to affect the family for years to come.''
However, Schwartz did praise the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety for its investigation. "The investigators did a wonderful job,'' Schwartz said.
Lakeside's response
Nitz said the investigation had the full cooperation of Lakeside staff, who promptly contacted police after the boy told a staff member about the alleged assault.
Bolden was immediately suspended and was fired once the police investigation appeared to confirm the allegations, Nitz said.
Investigators found that no other students appeared to have been assaulted, Nitz said.
"This was an isolated incident involving one student,'' Nitz said. "I can state that as fact.''
Bolden had been working for Lakeside for about a year as a youth counselor, which is the term that Lakeside uses for its direct-care staff members.
Nitz said that Lakeside conducts state and national background checks on its employees before they are hired, including checking their names against a central registry for adults who have had inappropriate contact or behavior with youths. Nitz said there were "no red flags'' involving Bolden.
In the wake of the alleged assault, Nitz said, Lakeside is installing more security cameras and is increasing the number of staff during the evenings and overnight, so that there is not a lone staff member overseeing a unit alone.
Troubled history
The charges against Bolden come at a time when Lakeside appeared to have regained its footing after several years of turmoil.
Founded as an orphanage in 1907, the residential facility switched its focus to caring for abused and neglected children in the 1950s.
By 2004, the facility was licensed to care for both boys and girls who came for a variety of reasons, including youths with mental-health issues, those abandoned or neglected by their parents, and juvenile delinquents.
Staff had difficulty dealing with the range of problems among their clients, and the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety was being constantly called to the facility because residents were hurting themselves or others.
A report released in May 2004 by the Michigan Family Independence Agency detailed a chaotic environment where residents were "out of control'' and residents and staff had been injured. There was a 40-hour riot at the facility in April 2003. After the 2004 report, the state shut down Lakeside and moved its residents to other facilities.
Lakeside reopened six months later with a new program model and staff. Nitz, retired superintendent of the Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home, became executive director in February 2006. The facility closed again in August 2006 so the board could "refocus its mission and identify sustainable sources of funding.''
In July 2007, Lakeside reopened once again. This time, the board decided to stick to a specific type of client: boys who need residential treatment for antisocial behavior. Lakeside's board also signed a contract with Sequel Youth and Family Services, a private company that runs similar facilities in Iowa, Arizona and Wyoming, to use Sequel's program model and manage the facility. Bolden was a Sequel employee, although Lakeside's board retains oversight over the facility, Nitz said.
Nitz said the facility has improved considerably under the new management.
"Everything has been running swell, except for this incident,'' Nitz said. "My guess is that courts are placing kids here because they like what they see.''
In the wake of the alleged assault, Nitz said, the judges who place youths at Lakeside "have been extremely supportive, and they understand that these incidents can happen.''
Unlike 2004, when police were being constantly called to Lakeside, "now the police contact us to see if we're still open,'' Nitz said. "It's been a true turnaround.''
© 2009 Michigan Live LLC.
Hedge:
http://http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/wyoming-facility-restrained-youth-at-high-rate/article_c8dbe11b-9f9c-5309-aa4b-126a75b334ef.html
Wyoming facility restrained youth at high rate
Posted: Thursday, June 25, 2009
CHEYENNE - Youth at a Sheridan juvenile facility were physically restrained far more often than youth at similar institutions before the facility lost its state contract in March, according to documents from the Wyoming Department of Family Services.
The documents, obtained by The Associated Press through Wyoming's open records laws, show department concern that youth were being restrained 10 times as often at Normative Services, Inc., than they were at other facilities.
Department Director Tony Lewis said the problem has been corrected, and the department plans to reinstate Normative Services' contract as a state youth placement option in a week or so.
"To their credit, they've agreed to all these monitoring steps that we've taken, or we intend to take," Lewis said Wednesday.
Department officials haven't given a reason for pulling the contract. The previous contract with Normative Services allowed the department to withdraw from the agreement without offering a reason, and department officials have said giving a reason would violate those terms.
But the high number of restraints might be an answer to the question.
Normative Services is a non-confinement, residential facility for boys and girls ages 14 to 18. Judges place children there because of behavior problems or because of abuse or neglect. The facility had about 150 youth before losing its state contract, but has only about 50 now.
The private facility is one of five nationwide owned by Sequel Youth and Family Services.
Documents requested by AP included all reports of incidents at Normative Services over the year before the Department of Family Services withdrew from its contract with the facility March 18. The department provided 247 incident reports, including 216 that involved confrontations ending in staff pinning youths belly-down, face-up, standing, or in sitting positions.
Of the reports that involved physical restraint, 122 happened from March 18 through Oct. 20, when a department official raised concern about the high number of restraints in a letter to Normative Services Director Bud Patterson.
"Normative Services has had approximately 200 physical restraints so far this year. In comparison, the next two largest facilities in Wyoming have had less than 20 restraints combined," wrote John Kiedrowski, the state youth licensing program manager.
Kiedrowski wrote that he was concerned about a procedure called "touch for attention" - placing a hand on disobedient youth as a pre-restraint warning. The touch for attention, he wrote, "may trigger aggression instead of de-escalating it."
Normative Services staff wrote the incident reports on a Department of Family Services form. The reports documented much fewer pre-restraint warnings after the letter.
They also documented fewer cases of girls being restrained: 74 cases in the seven months before the letter and just five in the five months between the letter and the contract termination. Reports of boys being restrained increased significantly, however, from 53 to 89.
It's difficult to gauge how frequently youth were hurt by being restrained. Six reports documented minor injuries, including one youth with bleeding in his ear. Most reports were heavily redacted, however, and department spokeswoman Juliette Rule said the redacted information included follow-up medical treatment.
The 31 reports that didn't mention restraint documented a variety of incidents including youths running away and minor injuries. Rule said only a handful of reports - no more than five - were withheld because they documented abuse or neglect, and Wyoming law does not allow the release of such information.
Rule said it was possible the abuse or neglect didn't happen at Normative Services and the reports documented what children told staff had happened to them elsewhere.
Adam Shapiro, chief executive officer of Sequel Youth and Family Services, said Normative Services has made a number of improvements.
"We have made a lot of management changes, we have made some changes in our training, we have tremendously increased the amount of training, we've brought in some staff from our other programs from throughout the country to help stabilize the culture," he said.
"It's ongoing, it's a constant monitoring that we have to do of ourselves and that they have to do."
Lewis said the state will monitor who is admitted at Normative Services. A big problem, he said, was that Normative Services was accepting tough kids - gang members from large California cities -and putting them in with youngsters who weren't serious troublemakers.
"The reason that you can end up restraining a lot of kids in an institution is because you have an inappropriate mix of high and low risk kids," Lewis said. "When you have that kind of a mix, you have more management problems."
Lewis said Normative Services also has agreed to rely less on youth policing each other.
Sequel Youth and Family Services also owns four other similar residential facilities in Woodward, Iowa; Clarinda, Iowa; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Prescott Valley, Ariz.
Read more: http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-a ... z1p1lKEbSs
Che Gookin:
--- Quote ---Adam Shapiro
--- End quote ---
Holy @#$#!!!!
So Three Springs never really died.
:ftard:
Hedge:
Sure seems that way.
Some more Google searching about the specific Three Springs facility where I was abused came up with:
--- Quote ---Information on SEQUEL TSI OF ALABAMA, LLC OWENS
NPI Number: 1114295326
State Identifier(s)
Group Name
SEQUEL TSI OF ALABAMA, LLC OWENS
Doing business as SEQUEL OF OWENS CROSS ROADS
Credentials
- Lic #: ()
Mailing Address
Confidential
Business Address
318 HAMER RD
OWENS CROSS ROADS, AL 35763-9612
Phone (256) 725-7170
Name
KENNY ROBERTS - (VP OF AL OPERATIONS)
Primary Specialty
Residential Treatment Facilities / Substance Abuse Treatment, Children
Additional Specialties
Last Modified
12/02/2011
View the Data Dissemination Notice from the CMS regarding the information that is being displayed on this site.
--- End quote ---
This information is from http://npidb.org/organizations/resident ... 95326.aspx
This is Kenny Roberts's information from the Sequel, TSI website:
--- Quote ---Kenny Roberts
Vice President of Alabama Operations
Mr. Roberts, MA, Vice President of Alabama Operations, is responsible for supervision of the Executive Directors, program oversight, and advocating of program needs to the Vice President and COO. Mr. Roberts has more than 17 years working in the field in multiple capacities and in an array of program settings to include sex offender population, residential, outdoor wilderness and group home. He has spent 11 of this 17 years supervising intensive juvenile justice programming. Mr. Roberts serves as the contact for all state-level communications regarding contracting and operations of programming.
Contact Information
Phone: 256-426-4434
Email: http://www.sequelyouthservices.com/html ... berts.html
I wonder who Kenny Roberts is. Anybody recognize this name? Eleven years of "juvenile justice programming" means he must have had some experience in some of these other places.
--- End quote ---
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