By age 13, Kenny R. had packed enough trouble into his short life to make Illinois child welfare workers deem him dangerous enough to ship out to other states where laws allowed children like him to be locked up.
“I got into trouble in school by getting into fights, I ran away from my foster home and I hit a police officer,” said Kenny, now 15.
As part of a cost-saving experiment, though, Kenny is back in Illinois, living at an Englewood child welfare facility where the doors remain unlocked, because state law still requires it.
To the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, Kenny represents part of a success story, involving the formation of a policy designed to improve care while saving money, and then slashing through the bureaucracy to get it rolling.
To the proliferating number of private treatment centers in Illinois, Kenny also represents their financial future.
Wearing the Solace Place treatment center uniform–a turquoise polo shirt and pressed slacks–Kenny is too shy for much eye contact but can easily tick off the many rules that now govern his life and the goals that carry him forward.
He could run away if he wanted. Some of his 27 fellow residents, ages 15 to 21, have. Occasionally Kenny has gotten into fights, and just last week was restrained face-down on the floor when he gave lip to one of his youth counselors.
But overall, he is learning to control his anger and seems to be making other progress as he moves through the structured hours of each day at the Englewood neighborhood facility: dress, hygiene, school, study, dinner, quiet time, chores. He has behaved well enough to go on unsupervised outings on Saturdays and collect a $10-a-week allowance.
The Department of Children and Family Services and the Child Care Association of Illinois, along with a coalition of private child-welfare providers, last winter decided to accelerate the process of returning children like Kenny, who had been sent to faraway centers.
In May 1995, there were 792 youths in out-of-state facilities from San Marcos, Texas, where Kenny was living, to Provo, Utah. There were 250 of them still in out-of-state centers as of last Friday.
“The one thing I can say applies to all out-of-state placements is, out of sight, out of mind,” said DCFS director Jess McDonald. “The states they’re in don’t pay close attention to them, and it’s a lot harder for caseworkers here to monitor a kid who’s a very long distance away.”
Though McDonald talks about improving care, another motivating force behind returning the youth is economics. It costs an average $211 a day to keep a child in out-of-state care, compared with about $175 per child in Illinois. The money stays here in Illinois, rather than going outside its borders, a bit of rhetoric that sits well with tax-minded legislators.
But the state’s main problem has been finding enough in-state facilities able and willing to take such children, considered among the most troubled in Illinois.
There are now about 200 such facilities in Illinois. Solace Place recently doubled its residential capacity to 28 beds from 14 to accommodate youngsters thought by some to be too volatile, too old and too impervious to change.
On Wednesday, Chicago Archbishop Francis George formally dedicated the expanded non-profit center that operates out of a former convent at the corner of Sangamon and 62nd Streets.
Solace Place’s decision to take in difficult children had as much to do with business savvy as with fulfilling its mission to care for the most severely disadvantaged.
“Some of the agencies that aren’t dealing with the highest risk populations, they’re going out of business,” said Michael Oliver, vice president of policy and planning for Solace Place.
A series of factors converged to push such kids out of state in the first place dating back more than three decades ago.
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The primary reason was that it was easier to get rid of them than find proper care here.
But there was also the growing public frustration with the ever-escalating violence displayed by a group of young people labeled by some as “super-predators”–so hardened by family and community dysfunction as to be beyond help.
Their problems involved using drugs, setting fires, frequently getting into fights and having cognitive disabilities. But their problems with the law occurred before they could legally be treated as adults.
Since DCFS started bringing them back, none of the youngsters has been involved in major incidents of violence, according to agency officials. Ron Davidson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry who has studied both in-state and out-of-state facilities, also downplayed the danger they pose to local neighborhoods.
“If anybody tells you we’re bringing back a horde of ravaging savages who are going to terrorize the state of Illinois, that’s just a crock,” Davidson said. “Most of the kids we’re talking about just have very troubled histories of emotional disturbance, some have very serious mental disorders or are seriously depressed.”
Most of the children who have been identified as sexual offenders or otherwise abusive, he added, will be kept in reputable out-of-state facilities that have special treatment programs. The state Department of Corrections currently has a maximum security facility for juveniles in Joliet and plans to construct a 400-bed medium security center to handle children who commit felonies and are considered somewhat dangerous.
Davidson added that any child who commits serious acts of violence should be dealt with by the Department of Corrections. “DCFS is not in the business of making excuses for thugs,” he said.