Closure of Sununu Youth Services Center behind schedule – New Hampshire Bulletin

The state seems more likely to miss the Legislature’s March 2023 deadline to shut the 144-bed Sununu Youth Companies Middle in Manchester – and is behind on its plans for a smaller different that emphasizes remedy and help over incarceration.

Lawmakers are struggling to search out consensus over how huge the brand new facility needs to be and who ought to function it: the state, which has been sued by a whole bunch of former residents alleging many years of abuse by workers, or a non-public firm.

Senate Invoice 458, as handed by the Senate in late March, would permit for as much as 18 beds, prolong the deadline by as much as 4 years, and put the state accountable for working it. Everyday, there are a mean of 12 juveniles on the Sununu Youth Companies Middle, in response to the Division of Well being and Human Companies.

However Rep. Kimberly Rice, a Hudson Republican, made a passionate plea to the Home Little one and Household Regulation Committee Tuesday to retain the brand new deadline however cap the brand new facility at six beds. The state will want fewer beds, she argued, given new insurance policies geared toward diverting youngsters from the courtroom system and laws handed by the Home this yr (Home Invoice 254) that might restrict the kinds of offenses that qualify for detention. 

“I strive to not get emotional over this, however I can’t assist however take into consideration all these instances of how many individuals whose lives had been ruined, ruined as a result of they had been positioned at Sununu,” she mentioned. “What number of of them died from suicide or drug overdoses as a result of they had been making an attempt to deal with what occurred to them. I don’t need that ever to occur once more. … We had been purported to be searching for them, and we failed tremendously.”

The committee voted, 13-1, in favor of Rice’s modification. It heads subsequent to the Home Finance Committee to resolve how a lot to spend on a brand new remedy facility. If the committee’s rewrite of the invoice clears the complete Home, it received’t get to the governor’s desk except the Senate agrees or can strike a compromise with the Home.

A smaller, state-run facility has the help of the Workplace of the Little one Advocate, a state company created by the Legislature 4 years in the past to supply oversight of New Hampshire’s Division for Kids, Youth, and Households. Different supporters embody New Hampshire Authorized Help and the Incapacity Rights Middle.

Michelle Wangerin, youth legislation challenge director for New Hampshire Authorized Help, additionally urged the committee to go away management of a brand new facility within the palms of Well being and Human Companies – regardless of the claims of sexual and bodily abuse by workers from greater than 450 former residents. A state-run facility, she mentioned, will permit the state to supervise and extra intently monitor the care of kids positioned there than it may if a non-public firm ran it.

“We’ve got gotten so a lot better and the state has gotten so a lot better,” she mentioned. “When the circumstances that existed in these lawsuits occurred, we had been in a special area. We didn’t have a system of care. We didn’t have a therapeutic mannequin, which we’re working in direction of and which this invoice mandates that we transfer in direction of … even earlier than the brand new facility is full. And we didn’t have the real-time oversight by the Workplace of the Little one Advocate.”

She added: “And so whereas we’re taking a look at a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of lawsuits as a result of we had a poorly managed system sooner or later previously, it doesn’t imply that we’re nonetheless there.”