Despite changes, Excelsior pursues mandate to help troubled youth

Carson fled in the middle of the night, bringing only her phone, charger, earphones and a hooded sweatshirt, which she stuffed into a backpack.

After she slipped out the door of Excelsior Youth Center, a staff member caught up to her in the courtyard, pleading. If you run, the staff member told the 17-year-old, the center will have to alert police.

“I said, ‘Watch me,’ and I ran across the street,” Carson said in a recent interview. “Out of sight.”

That night, about a month ago, she met up with her boyfriend and some other teens and got high by swallowing eight tabs of cough-and-cold medicine.

“Triple Cs,” she called them. “The little red pills.”

Runaways are a routine challenge for Excelsior, a nonprofit facility in Spokane’s Indian Trail neighborhood that contracts with the state to provide foster care as well as outpatient treatment for mental health and substance abuse.

Excelsior houses some of Washington’s most vulnerable children and teens, often ones that no other facility will accept because of their behavioral issues. But under state law, the doors must remain unlocked. Excelsior staff are powerless to stop kids from running away.

“We are not able to put our hands on them and drag them back to their program,” said Connie Lambert-Eckel, the director of field operations for the state Children’s Administration, a division of the Department of Social and Health Services. Doing so, she said, would infringe on their “constitutional right to freedom.”

Excelsior’s role in the lives of foster kids, and its location in a suburban neighborhood, have been cause for controversy in recent years. Excelsior youth have been blamed for property crimes in the area, and city officials once identified the facility as a top consumer of police resources.

Some shocking stories have emerged, too. In December, a 10-year-old girl left the facility and reported being raped, twice, by a 13-year-old boy in a nearby vacant home. And in May, five youths were arrested after a brawl in Excelsior’s gym. Police said the kids assaulted seven staff members and a responding police officer.

Excelsior’s executive director, Andrew Hill, does not take those incidents lightly. But he insists that the disruptive youths are a minority of those in Excelsior’s care. And he says some neighbors and local media outlets have failed to recognize the positive work that happens within the facility.

Lambert-Eckel agreed, noting that many of the children who live at Excelsior are victims of abuse or neglect. Some simply won’t trust their caretakers or accept treatment. Volatile behavior, she said, is predictable.

“You have to reflect on what you’re asking this program to do,” she said. “It’s not like kids walk through the door and suddenly everything goes away, all the issues and the cumulative trauma that they’ve experienced just dissolves.

“It’s not easy,” she continued. “It’s not a light switch. There is no magic wand. It is just hard, persistent, dedicated work.”

A changing model

Excelsior is one of only three facilities in the state that offer the highest level of care for foster kids – what the state calls behavioral rehabilitative services or BRS. The other facility-based BRS providers are Ryther and Navos, both in the Seattle area.

“They tend to represent what we consider the most restrictive placement environment,” Lambert-Eckel said. “This program is very structured. There’s a high staffing ratio. There’s a lot of structure to the day. There are a lot of expectations of young people to keep their behavior well supported.”

Nearly 1,000 youths are placed with BRS providers each year, but the wait for an available bed can stretch up to two months, according to a 2016 report by DSHS. And state funding for such programs has become scarce since a round of budget cuts in 2010.

“Many BRS placement providers stepped up their efforts to meet the placement need, but the combination of low rates, children with increasingly severe behavioral and mental health challenges, and mixed messages from (the Children’s Administration) resulted in a loss of confidence in CA by providers,” the report states.

Excelsior recently decided to scale down its residential child welfare and substance abuse programs and expand its outpatient programs.

Hill said Excelsior would provide more “brief interventions” in which the center would house kids for up to 72 hours while working to stabilize their home environments. Excelsior also is preparing to build a new 16-bed unit for older teens who are “aging out” of the foster care system.

Early last year, the center had about 100 clients ages 10 to 21. About half were residents of the facility, and the other half attended the center for outpatient services. Today the center serves more than 210 clients, but only about two dozen are residents.

Chief program officer Ryan Kiely said Excelsior has more than tripled its annual operating budget over the past four years. It’s now more than $10 million, a combination of state and regional grants and contract funding.

Kiely said he’s proud of the “continuum of care” that Excelsior offers. In addition to its growing outpatient programs, the center offers its own accredited middle and high school courses in conjunction with Spokane Public Schools.

“We have much more robust services than what’s required,” Kiely said.

But he expressed concern that reducing the number of BRS beds would lead to more kids being sent out of state or living in hotel rooms with their social workers while waiting for beds to open up.

“My concern is about the system at large,” he said.

DSHS says the whole foster care system is strained due to budget cuts and a dwindling number of licensed foster homes. While the changes at Excelsior may create additional challenges, Lambert-Eckel said the center needed to make “some hard decisions.”

“They needed to look hard at kids with known run histories, and they needed to look hard at how they can best manage the population that’s placed there,” she said. “I respect those decisions. I understand them. I certainly, on the flip side of that coin, would really love to have the capacity back, because we certainly have the need.”

When the melee in the gym and the alleged rape made headlines, Hill said he worried not only about how Excelsior’s youth were stigmatized, but also about their safety.

“I’m not making this up,” he said. “As soon as these articles around Excelsior started to hit the news, we had people knocking on the doors saying they were Jimmy’s uncle, Jimmy’s grandpa. We had freaky people showing up here because the vulnerable kids are here. We had people parked down the street waiting for kids to run. We had girls solicited as they ran away. We had homeless people on our property.”

A debate over group homes

The average youth in Excelsior’s residential child welfare program bounced between 14 different homes before arriving at the center. Such instability only exacerbates the trauma that many of those kids live with.

Child welfare experts agree the best place for a child is a parent’s or relative’s home – as long as there are appropriate support systems in place.

“Just like everybody in the system, we want to see kids and families or foster families in the least restrictive place possible and the most opportunities for success,” Kiely said.

More than 46 percent of kids who enter the state’s care are placed with family members, “which is an extraordinarily successful outcome,” Lambert-Eckel said.

Washington, she said, “is among the most successful states in that regard.”

Michelle Ressa, a Spokane County court commissioner who presides over child custody cases, said she believes the system is moving in the right direction, but she’s not convinced that group homes, such as Excelsior, provide a helpful, therapeutic environment.

“They don’t go into group homes without problems, that’s for sure. But sometimes those problems are exacerbated in the group home,” Ressa said. “I unfortunately have seen too many kids start their offender history in group homes.”

Some in the juvenile justice system contend that group homes encourage criminal behavior.

In April, the Inlander reported that 44 different Excelsior kids had been sent to Spokane County juvenile detention during the previous 12 months, and public defenders said many of those charges stemmed from the kids’ time in the facility.

According to DSHS, one out of three youths spend time in juvenile detention while placed at residential treatment facilities.

Ressa cautioned that she can’t derive a cause-and-effect relationship between group homes and criminal behavior. “But that’s where it starts,” she said. “We’re congregating our highest-needs kids with the most issues together, and they learn from each other.”

Group homes are required to call law enforcement when youths run away, and nearly half of those in BRS placements do run at some point, according to DSHS. Hill said about 80 percent of Excelsior’s runaways come back within 24 hours.

Ressa suggested group home employees also are more likely than parents to call police when youth act out.

“It’s unlikely that if you throw food at the house that your mom is going to call the police, or your dad,” she said. “Kids who are part of the foster care system … come into the juvenile justice system differently.”

Kiely said it’s extremely difficult to place some of Excelsior’s kids with their families.

“There are some kids that have families that are trying to reunify at this point,” he said. “But at this high-end level of service, we do see less of that.”

During a recent interview at Excelsior, a 13-year-old girl named Jasmine said she hoped to reunite with her mother, even though she had beaten her and forced her to eat dish soap.

“I love her because she’s my mother,” Jasmine said.

A boy named Evan said he had lived at Excelsior for more than two years and was waiting for his mother to secure an apartment, but he wasn’t getting his hopes up. A third teen living at Excelsior said he had twice been sent to live far away from his home state, in Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Hill said group homes are a reasonable option for housing kids with no other place to go in the crowded system. He said the health care and criminal justice systems need to be reformed in conjunction with foster care.

“Why is that person in a state hospital? Why is that person homeless? Why is that person in jail?” he asked. “It’s because our system responds to the needs of people with punitive, reactionary ways to solve the problem, instead of looking at the person and saying, ‘What are their needs?’ ”

The road back

Carson has lived at Excelsior for a little more than a year. Unlike most of the youths who live there, it’s the first foster placement she remembers. The only other time she was in foster care, she was an infant, she said.

Carson said her mother abandoned her at a young age and she was raised by her grandmother, Alice Lemley, on the South Hill. But several years ago, Carson said, her mother returned and demanded custody.

“Emotionally she was really damaged,” Lemley said of her granddaughter. “From the very beginning, she did not want to be there (with her mother). She would call me at school during lunch and say, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ ”

As the custody battle unfolded in Kalispel tribal court, Carson said she became depressed and started cutting herself in the seventh grade. Over the years, she ran away several times, got into drugs and alcohol, had some run-ins with law enforcement and was committed to the psych ward at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. Her father drank and gambled and was absent for a time, too.

Carson didn’t run from Excelsior until that night about a month ago. She finally did it because some other youths were spreading lies about her and she was angry, she said.

She has run away twice since then. But now, she said, she is ready to get back on track. She’s working part-time at a pizza restaurant and plans to go back to high school. She wants to don a cap and gown like some of her cousins did recently.

Given the circumstances, Carson’s grandmother said Excelsior has been a good fit for her.

“I can’t say enough good things about Excelsior,” Lemley said.