Date Published: August 18, 2006
Umatilla high-security home racked up rocky record, officials say.
The state plans to shut down one of Central Florida's two high-security homes for teenage girls, following reports of mistreatment and neglect at Umatilla Academy for Girls.
A Department of Juvenile Justice review of the understaffed school's troubled first year found numerous failures to meet state standards, including:
Teens on suicide watch who were left unsupervised.
An incident in which an employee dragged one girl down a hallway by her ankles.
A case in which workers chose not to send a girl to the hospital after she had swallowed 2-inch nails.
And when one girl tried to kill herself by downing 10 doses of bipolar medication, a caretaker delayed calling for help, saying, "It's not up to me to call 911."
Academy directors said the girls sometimes lied. Yet the academy's treatment fell so far below state standards that state officials decided to close it five months after its first formal review.
"We won't wait for an incident to happen," Department of Juvenile Justice spokeswoman Cynthia Lorenzo said. "We're stepping in and shutting Umatilla down."
The president of the company running the school said closing it ignores progress made since the review in early March. Joshua Ford said evaluating the academy barely a year after it opened prevented his company, Diversified Behavioral Health Solutions, from working out "bumps in the road."
Some of those bumps included the facility's 124 police calls -- mainly for battery charges when girls beat one another or staff members. Problems were so common that Umatilla police Chief Doug Foster set up a booking station on site.
The academy, surrounded by prison fences, was under contract to rehabilitate up to 96 violent or mentally ill teens. The girls -- many were victims of abuse -- come from across Florida. Most have elementary-level educations. Some are drug abusers. All committed serious crimes before judges ruled them a high risk to public safety.
Neighbors, frightened by the ruckus coming from behind the academy's 12-foot fences, wanted the girls gone before they came.
"The name is a farce," said Gail Smith, whose yard faces the teens' recreation yard. "It is a prison, a high-security prison. A 17-year-old could come over here and stab me."
Problems began three weeks after the school opened at the old Florida Elks Children's Hospital site in March 2005. Three girls kicked out a window and escaped for hours. State officials began visiting and gathering evidence ultimately used to close it.
The state stopped sending girls to Umatilla in January, the same month academy worker Otis McDuffie was arrested, accused of dragging a resident down a hallway for refusing to go to her room. Surveillance cameras captured the episode, and McDuffie was fired.
The state did a final review July 19. Last week, state officials sent Ford a letter starting a 90-day shutdown process. It also terminates the contract with Ford and company CEO Bruce Manssuer to run another girls facility in Hardee County, in effect since 2001.
The 29 girls at the Umatilla facility will be transferred to one of five remaining high-risk juvenile women's programs in the state. Orange Intensive Halfway House in Orlando is Central Florida's only remaining high-risk girls program.
"By all means, we take full responsibility for our errors," Ford said. "It's been a tough road from the beginning."
Construction delays pushed back the academy's opening. Many trained employees quit. Directors struggled with chronic turnover, never reaching the planned full staff of 114.
The academy's first 20 students came from the scandal-ridden Florida Institute for Girls outside West Palm Beach, a maximum-security youth prison. The state shut down that facility because providers there failed to treat girls' emotional and psychological problems and didn't prevent sexual relationships with guards.
"A lot of them saw that program close and were gung-ho," Manssuer said. "[They said], 'We're going to close you down, too,' and their behavior reflected that."
The Umatilla Academy's review showed that employees cut corners by falsifying room checks or fudging records about CPR instruction and training in behavior control. During the review, one-third of employees had started work without undergoing criminal-background checks.
Ford and Manssuer said their program has done "an about face" since most of the deeply troubled girls moved on.
"This program was a horrific facility, but has changed as a whole," one young girl at the academy wrote in a letter provided to the Orlando Sentinel. "We have been through a lot in here to change this program and ourselves. We have done a fantastic job as a whole."
The day the department officially decided to close the Umatilla facility, it announced a new office to protect the safety of children in state care.
"There's no chance to continue waiting around and say, 'It'll get better,' " said Lorenzo, the department spokeswoman.
The closure may put stress on the school's girls, who usually have long histories of abuse, said Cassandra Jenkins of Children's Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Tallahassee.
"They're being shuttled from program to program, and it starts to seem like no one cares," Jenkins said.
By: Erin Cox
Orlando Sentinel
August 18, 2006
Erin Cox can be reached at ecox@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5926