The lives of four children, each tormented by a cycle of neglect and abuse that seems to foretell tragedy, converged last month near railroad tracks in Des Plaines.
What happened there–the alleged rape of an 11-year-old girl from Maryville Academy by at least two boys from that residential facility–has shaken Illinois’ child-welfare system and called into question the wisdom of placing profoundly troubled wards of the state into relatively unstructured residential facilities.
The life stories of those involved in the alleged rape, all of whom have problematic sexual histories documented in volumes of confidential records examined by the Tribune, inform the latest debate over whether Illinois has adequate facilities for housing severely troubled youths. Though some state officials and child-welfare advocates say the children’s placement at Maryville was appropriate, others think it was a disservice with devastating effects.
With an IQ of 62, a history of substance abuse and a long list of medications prescribed to control his mood and behavior, the oldest of the boys posed “a considerable risk of harm, both to himself and possibly to others,” a psychologist wrote to the boy’s state caseworker last summer. The psychologist recommended “admitting him to a residential treatment center, not a group home, in order to provide him with intensive treatment.”
Instead the boy ended up at Maryville, a sprawling campus of group homes in Des Plaines and the state’s largest residential facility, after a short hospital stay. At issue is whether the tall 12-year-old had any other options. His mother had been dead seven years, his father was nowhere to be found and his grandmother had given up on him, at least for the time being.
“The grandparents are afraid he’ll harm himself and do not want him in their home,” the psychologist wrote in her report in June, which is contained in the child’s bulky case file. “They believe he needs to be placed in a controlled setting.”
The psychologist agreed, writing that the boy “requires a contained and structured environment.”
A downward spiral
A doctor at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago had summarized the child’s downward spiral since the age of 6, saying the boy had been “increasingly out of control.” It was the fourth time in less than three years he had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons.
“Last year he went to live with his dad, who stopped all his medication and left him in the care of his girlfriend,” who allegedly hit the boy with an extension cord.
The boy told the doctor, “I cry a lot when I think about my mother.”
He told the doctor his three wishes were to be a rapper “right now”; to have a big house; and to have a swimming pool.
He reported having nightmares in which he was “going around shooting people.”
“The problem is we don’t have enough in the way of treatment alternatives or residential alternatives for troubled kids,” said Bruce Boyer, head of the Child Law Clinic at Loyola University’s law school.
Though the state has psychiatric hospitals and residential facilities, which are more secure than foster homes, there are not sufficient options in between, said Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy.
That leaves few choices in cases like that of the 12-year-old boy, Murphy said.
“The words [in the psychologist’s report] are `structured and contained’ and Maryville is neither,” Murphy said.
“He never should have been placed in Maryville,” Murphy said.
Another of the alleged assailants in last month’s incident, an 11-year-old boy who frequently threatens to commit suicide and once shut a school bus window on his head, has lived in 16 different places, including eight foster homes. He has been hospitalized four times since 1999.
A third boy, also 11, allegedly had sex for money with a 13-year-old boy at a diagnostic home when he was 9.
The alleged victim of the attack is a girl who came to the attention of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services in August 1999, when she was 8, through a hotline report alleging that her mother had hit her in the face.
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The mother has a history of substance abuse and has been diagnosed with major depression. According to the case file, she needed domestic-violence counseling, parenting classes and classes for parents of sexually abused children. In 2000, DCFS took protective custody of the girl.
The girl, with multiple psychiatric diagnoses, also had a history of sexual abuse. According to state records, her older brother assaulted her for years. She, in turn, did the same to her younger brother, the report said. The night of the alleged rape, an unusual incident report says, she had run away and missed her medication.
The alleged rape was the latest incident to bring the 120-year-old Maryville facility under scrutiny. In February a 14-year-old ward hanged herself from a bathroom sprinkler, and officials later discovered that reports of the incident had been altered.
The problems that made possible last month’s incident in Des Plaines are systemic and difficult, but they aren’t Maryville’s fault, said Margaret Berglind, chief executive officer of Child Care Association of Illinois.
“One of the things I’ve heard is that, somehow, the kids shouldn’t be going to these facilities,” Berglind said.
“Well, yes they should–that’s what they’re there for.”
Lack of funding
The problem, experts say, is a lack of state funding and resources for helping group homes keep up with the changing climate of child care in Illinois.
Since 1998 the number of children who are wards of the state had dropped from about 52,000 to about 22,000, said Thomas Vanden Berk, co-chairman of Child Welfare Advisory Committee to DCFS. That’s the good news.
The bad is that the group that’s left has a much higher concentration of severely troubled children; about 1,800 currently are in residential treatment facilities, Vanden Berk said.
“It’s an overwhelmed and underfunded system,” he said.
While the state has done well to place so many children in permanent homes, it hasn’t done enough to meet the needs of emotionally troubled children, Vanden Berk said.
Before managed health care, many of those children could be found in the psychiatric wards of hospitals. Then they were shipped to residential treatment centers out of state. Since they were brought back starting in 1995, many of them are living at group homes like Maryville.
In a statement Thursday, Maryville’s executive director, Rev. John P. Smyth, and chairman of the board, John Madden, said Maryville has done its best to keep up with the times.
They said the state’s budget problem “does not lend itself to affording to service-care providers such as Maryville the much needed funding necessary to respond to the unique demands of an ever-changing youth population.”
“There is a tremendous shortage in resources for mentally ill children,” Smyth said in an interview later. “It makes it harder on everybody else. We are in the business to help children and many times you don’t know the problems of the child until you take them in.”
He added: “Illinois is great at closing places for mental health but they don’t replace them with any adequate care.”
The children involved in the alleged attack should have been at Maryville, Smyth said, though he added that recently he had asked that the girl be moved so she would not be under the boys’ influence.
“I’m very upset. I’m very disappointed, and I’m going to deal with it, as therapeutically and as honestly as possible,” Smyth said. “We are in definite control. I took care of 16,500 children last year–one thing happened. That’s pretty good control … We’ve helped out a tremendous amount of them.”
Boyer, of the Child Law Clinic, said Maryville had been “willing to take in kids no one else was willing to take in.”
DCFS Director Jess McDonald agreed: “Maryville did diagnostic work with [the girl]. Other agencies had said no to her. And everyone was working to try and find another location. This is a young kid with multiple problems and significant trauma. It’s not like you have many programs out there to respond.”
As the debate rages, three of the four children involved in the alleged rape spend their days in a hospital undergoing observation while one remains on the campus.
“You could hold the individuals responsible,” Boyer said, “but that really doesn’t address the more fundamental problems of how you prevent something like that from happening.”
UIC alternative
Among the few alternatives to residential care for the system’s most troubled children is a diagnostic program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which has about a dozen beds for the entire state, McDonald said.
The four involved in the alleged rape are “appropriate for residential care,” he said.
“It’s not necessary to go to a special facility. You have to customize programs. We expect individual responses to kids. That’s what Maryville has tried to do,” McDonald said.
Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, ranked Illinois’ child-welfare system among the nation’s top four, saying it has fewer children in foster care than the national average. But because of the situation at Maryville, Wexler considers the state a work in progress; Illinois needs more alternatives in housing and care for wards of the state.
Some child welfare experts argue that higher-end treatment, even though available to children at some residential facilities, lacks clinical focus and expert training.
“If you’ve only got 23,000 children, who’s going to be placed at Maryville?” he said. “If all of the easier kids are now back in their own homes or in foster homes or in what are called treatment foster homes, then the only kids left for the taking are the ones foster parents won’t take.
“So yeah, Father Smyth took them, but there is no one else to take.”
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Maryville, a former orphanage, has no choice but to change its mission, Wexler said.
“Its original mission is obsolete.”