Group home employees cited for ‘neglect’

Group home employees cited for ‘neglect’
01:00 AM EDT on Friday, August 6, 2010
By Lynn Arditi

Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — State officials have cited three staff members at a Johnston group home with “institutional neglect” for confining a group of teenage boys to a poorly ventilated common room for nearly five hours during last month’s heat wave while a manager questioned the boys about the theft of some clothing.

“The children were exposed to conditions that were detrimental to their health and well-being because…of the excessive heat,” said Jorge Garcia, deputy director of the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families. Though the decision to confine the boys was made by the group home’s program manager, he said, the other two staff members “could have prevented it from happening” or reported the incident to the state’s child abuse and neglect hotline (1-800-RI CHILD).

The DCYF also cited the group home with 11 licensing violations, including a lockdown following the reported theft during which all but two newly arrived residents were not allowed to leave the property for eight days. The punishment, the agency reported, was “cruel, unusual and unnecessary.”

During the eight-day restriction, Garcia said, one of the seven boys living there was prevented from a scheduled visit home. State regulations require the operators of residential facilities to consult with the DCYF before restricting home visits.

The DCYF also cited the group home’s staff for several maintenance violations, including failure to report a broken water pump which limited toilet flushing and showers, and failure to properly clean and maintain the facility. The staff had been taking the boys to the local YMCA to shower.

The Johnston home, on Greenville Avenue, is owned and operated by the Windsor, Conn.-based nonprofit operation Community Solutions Inc. Community Solutions has a contract with one of the state’s leading child-welfare providers, Child & Family of Middletown, to run the group home in Johnston for teenage boys with behavioral problems.

Community Solutions’ chief executive, Robert D. Pidgeon, said Wednesday that he was prohibited by regulation from discussing details of the report.

The Johnston group home is one of 104 licensed residential-care facilities in Rhode Island.

In addition to the required annual licensing inspections, the DCYF has three program monitors –– down from six monitors a few years ago –– who are supposed to visit each residential-care facility in the state every three months. (Though no state law or regulation requires these visits, the DCYC has said they are “standard practice.”)

When the problems at the Johnston group home were discovered, the state program monitor hadn’t set foot in the facility in more than a year.

The problems surfaced after the state child advocate’s office –– an independent agency created to serve as a watchdog over the state child-welfare system –– received a call from a social worker who had a scheduled visit at the Johnston home. Two investigators from the child advocate’s office made an unannounced visit to the home on July 8. They reported that five boys had been confined to a sweltering common room earlier that week with no air conditioning for hours in an effort to get them to confess about the theft of some clothing.

On the day of the confinement — July 6 — temperatures climbed as high as 102 degrees, according to the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass.

The DCYF sent its own investigators to interview the children and staff and, on July 9, ordered the home shut down and the children moved to other facilities. The DCYF placed the group home’s license on probation pending a full investigation.

The agency confirmed that on July 6, five of the boys had been confined to a poorly ventilated common room in “excessive heat” for 4 hours and 45 minutes, Garcia said, while the director questioned the boys separately about the theft in her office. (State regulations have no requirement that common rooms be air-conditioned, only that they have adequate ventilation.)

The DCYF concluded this amounted to “institutional neglect” on the part of the director and the other two staff members. The finding, Garcia said, will become part of their permanent record in the state’s Child Abuse & Neglect Registry, which child-welfare agencies in other states can request when considering hiring. However, there is no penalty associated with the finding, he said, nor would it disqualify them from working in other childcare facilities.

Since the group home closed, the three staffers have remained on the payroll — cleaning, painting and repairing the Johnston house — but have not been working with children, said Pidgeon, the group home operator’s chief executive.

larditi@projo.com

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