Every Friday, at 1:53 p.m., Sha’Ron Kennedy helps his classmates at Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Langley K-8 prepare bags filled with food. First, he slips in some instant noodles, and then he adds green beans, corn and tomato sauce. Sometimes he also adds breakfast oatmeal and fruit. 

Once all bags are prepared, Kennedy leads the students to different classrooms. 

At each class, they knock on the door saying, “Blessings in a backpack!” then deliver the bags to other students. 

Kennedy is a seventh-grader in Langley’s autistic support class where he volunteers to work in the school’s Blessings in a Backpack program. The program is part of Langley’s community school model, providing food for students experiencing food insecurity. 

PPS Langley is one of nine schools in the district that are designated as community schools. Unlike traditional neighborhood public schools, the community public school model focuses on providing services that support the neighborhood’s needs by involving parents and other community members. They often partner with local businesses and organizations and have an integrated focus on learning opportunities, health and fulfilling basic needs. 

The pandemic reinforced the importance of community schools, when schools needed to meet a range of needs outside the classroom. The Coalition for Community Schools estimates there are about 5,000 community schools in the country. 

Outside the city, Communities in Schools of Pittsburgh-Allegheny County [CISPAC] is helping districts build community schools across the region. Last year, they began implementing the full-service community school model across eight school districts in Allegheny County. 

Community schools across Pittsburgh serve as hubs of the neighborhoods in which they operate. Many go far beyond delivering instruction and offer resources such as food, clothing and after-school programs with a focus on mental health and reducing violence in the community. 

A spreading model with federal friends

Although the model is relatively new for Pittsburgh-area schools, community schools have, over the past two decades, reported successes in states including Texas, Florida, Ohio, California, Maryland and Minnesota.

In Cincinnati for example, all schools became community schools following a policy passed in 2001. From 2006 to 2015, research showed that the achievement gap between Black and white students in the Cincinnati school district decreased from 14.5% to 4.5%. In the Minneapolis area, the Brooklyn Center Community Schools saw district-wide behavioral references cut in half in the first five years as a community school system.

On Nov. 28, the Biden-Harris Administration announced almost $74 million in grants for full-service community schools in Idaho, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio. The next day, senators from Ohio, Maryland, New York and New Mexico introduced The Full Service Community School Expansion Act of 2023, which is a comprehensive bill aimed at helping more public schools implement the wrap-around services of a full-service community school model. 

The long-term success of community schools depends on consistent funding, according to Jennifer Kotting, communications strategist for The Partnership for the Future of Learning, a national network dedicated to supporting public education.

“It’s really ongoing [funding] that is needed to maintain a really strong set of possibilities in each community school,” Kotting said. 

Duquesne: Reducing violence through conflict resolution

CISPAC’s full-service community school approach stands on four pillars: integrated student support, expanded and enriched learning opportunities, active family and community engagement and collaborative leadership.

School districts such as Sto-Rox, Duquesne and Pittsburgh are hoping the community schools model will help students deal with trauma stemming from violence in their neighborhoods.

Duquesne has partnered with the University of Pittsburgh’s Just Discipline Project [JDP] to reduce exclusionary discipline practices in schools. Instead of resorting to suspensions, which have been linked to the school-to-prison pipeline, the project aims to offer more holistic solutions.

For a school to be selected for the Just Discipline Project, it must show high disciplinary action numbers. 

Currently, JDP is partnered with 20 schools around the Pittsburgh area, including Sto-Rox and PPS Langley. At most schools, they employ a full-time restorative practice coordinator who is available all day, much like a traditional teacher. 

At Duquesne, Molly Means, a restorative practice coordinator, leads a classroom group of middle schoolers to become leaders in training. The students learn restorative justice ideas and lead healing circles in younger classrooms. 

She said Duquesne’s desire to increase restorative practices makes it a good fit for the project. 

“It’s a unique opportunity for kids in the school districts that we’re in to get to be part of a leadership program, to get to learn about mediations, to get to learn about community building from such a young age,” said Means. 

Dae-Mere Johnson, an eighth grader at Duquesne and part of Means’ group of Leaders in Training [LIT], said the violence and shootings around the community impact his mental health and that of his peers. 

Johnson said he feels he and his fellow LITs are helping other — especially younger — students by sharing the conflict resolution skills they’ve learned.

“Sometimes they need help,” Johnson said. “I feel like when we come into the classroom, it’s helpful. It calms them down.”

Whether through leading healing circles for younger classrooms or helping students resolve conflict at lunchtime, Duquesne Superintendent Sue Mariani said, the leaders in training are helping to shift the school’s culture from a punitive approach to a restorative one. 

Bridget Clement, executive director of CISPAC, said often there is tension in schools where there is a majority of economically disadvantaged, Black and brown students and mostly white administrators.

“We have teachers that are afraid of the students and administrators that are afraid, and this comes out a lot because they don’t understand how to best engage students that are traumatized,” she said.

To avoid overidentifying Black and brown students for discipline, Duquesne teachers present data on students displaying at-risk behaviors, such as attendance or discipline issues, to a team of school counselors, teachers and administrators who work together to determine the best course of action for a student, said middle school Principal George Little.

Duquesne’s community school model emphasizes student mental health supports, through an approach known as social and emotional learning. 

“We have students who experience significant trauma,” Mariani said. To address that, educators focus on “making sure a kid feels safe, whether it’s emotionally or physically before they can even learn.” 

Duquesne has a full-time therapist from Auberle, a social service agency, available to students during the day. 

Langley: Meeting community needs, addressing burnout

Other than a Family Dollar that sells eggs, milk and some dried goods, Sheraden, where Langley is located, does not have a grocery store. 

“It’s a food desert,” said Keysha Gomez, founder of H.O.P.E. for Tomorrow, a community partner at Langley. In addition to in-house programs such as Blessings in a Backpack, community partners including H.O.P.E. and 412 Food Rescue work together to send kids home with food every day after school. 

Gomez said because public schools lack resources, it falls on standalone organizations such as H.O.P.E. to raise money through grants and fund-raising.

“Finances are a big problem,” she said. 

Mike Dean, Langley’s community school site manager, said they try to provide basic necessities not only for students but for the community outside of the school. 

“If someone wanted to come out and needed something at that moment, it is the understanding that Langley is the hub for this community,” he said. 

Outside of the food pantry and a free clothing store, Langley also offers a boxing program, a dental cleaning and hygiene camp each fall and summer, and lifestyle classes. The school has also worked with the city to install a stop light on Sheraden Boulevard. 

Nationwide, teachers have left the teaching profession and experienced higher levels of stress and lower morale after the pandemic, as reported by Chalkbeat. Former PPS teachers have said that burnout preceded the pandemic. 

Kathy Monti-Trievel, a Langley alumnus and now a teacher at the school, thinks that the shift to a community school model in 2017 has eased some of the burden. Having community partners bring in extra resources such as food and clothing — things teachers previously had to provide alone — has helped, she said. 

“I think community schools allow there to be healthy boundaries for teachers and staff to do their craft, which is to teach, deliver instruction,” said Sarah Armenti, a social worker and Langley’s family and community engagement coordinator. 

Sto-Rox: Expanding community, reducing absenteeism

Sto-Rox Superintendent Megan Marie Van Fossan said she would like to see more providers in their school buildings. She said the district is facing staffing challenges in teaching and health care services. Not having full-time nurses in the buildings also contributes to truancy issues in the schools, she said.

Fully 72.3% of students were chronically absent, missing more than two days of school a month for any reason, in the Sto-Rox Junior Senior High School in 2021-22. 

Van Fossan said the district is working on social-emotional skills and conflict resolution to solve violence issues that contribute to truancy and drop-out.

Duquesne’s Mariani said she believes the community school model has played a major role in supporting the return of eighth graders, who came back to the Mon Valley city in 2022 after almost a decade of being educated in neighboring districts. When it comes to the district’s goal to reopen the high school — closed in 2007— Mariani said she hopes to use a similar model. 

Sonya Gooden, a school board director for Duquesne and a family advocate at Duqusene’s Head Start program, said she feels the lack of a high school disrupts community bonds for older children.

“With the closing of the high school, bringing it back will again make a wholeness of the community because currently we’re split up between different cities,” Gooden said. “Once you get to 13, 14, you’re away from your friends and it takes away from the center of the community which the district represents.”

La’tresha Dean, the director of the Boys and Girls club at Duquesne and a parent in the district, said that while she believes the community school model at Duquesne is making a positive impact, its leadership and goals need to be consistent for community members to put their full trust into the school.

Building trust in the community

Many of Duquesne’s school staff are community members and alumni. Little said that established interpersonal relationships between staff and students give the district leaders a better understanding of students’ needs and help parents and families feel more comfortable confiding in staff and seeking out help.

“By having so many people from the community in the building it helps us understand what’s going on in the community … around guns, drugs, domestic issues — we hear about it,” Little said.

Clement said sometimes parents who have had bad experiences in school do not want to engage with their children’s school. CISPAC accordingly works to engage parents through their community school model. 

“We need to have more of that family infusion so that the teachers and the administrators who maybe aren’t on the ground have a better understanding of what the community is dealing with on a day-to-day basis,” she said. 

Another way Duquesne is keeping parents in the loop is through its Parents As Allies organization that focuses on supporting parent needs and engagement — both for their children and for themselves. Last year, Duquesne held a career and resource fair where parents could find mental health resources and professional development opportunities.

Through community and parent engagement, LaQuandra Bennet, Duquesne’s CISPAC site manager, says the long-term goal of the full-service community school model is to equip parents and the community with the resources to help their children on their own.

“We want to empower families when it comes to their student’s education,” Bennet said. “We want to make sure that … the things we’re bringing in are able to continue and that is going to be with the help of the families.” 

Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.

Tanya Babbar was an editorial intern at PublicSource and is a junior at the University of Pittsburgh.

This story was fact-checked by Erin Yudt. 

The post Going beyond instruction, community schools serve as ‘hubs in the community’ appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Lindsey Ramsey became an aide in an infant room at a child care facility as a 19-year-old single mom looking for work so she could afford diapers for her daughter. Never having thought about entering the sector, she learned how to care for children from a group of passionate caregivers.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” said Ramsey, 34, now the executive director of Shady Lane School in Point Breeze North. “But we had a wonderful group of educators who helped uplift new people entering the field … and they taught me how to change diapers and be a mom … I started to fall in love with early childhood education.”

The pandemic, though, exacerbated a multitude of underlying problems that had long haunted the care industry, such as high costs for parents and low wages for employees, according to child care advocates and providers. Now some child care practitioners are anticipating crisis.

While Congress injected $39 billion into child care through the American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA], it didn’t address underlying problems in child care infrastructure. 

More than half of that funding ended in September, igniting fears over a mass closure of child care facilities dubbed the “child care cliff.”

While the end of federal funds will not lead to wholesale closures, Cara Ciminillo, executive director of Trying Together, an Allegheny County-based child care advocacy group, said the decline of providers will continue if long term funding is not brought in.

Despite the mounting challenges, Ramsey said caring for the community and her love of childhood education keep her working in the field.

“I’m driven by equity, because it is so important that we are elevating those who don’t have the resources, who don’t have enough to be able to succeed and thrive in life,” Ramsey said. “Having access to early childhood [care] early on, is one of the leading contributing parts to human development. So I consider it to be a key component to equity, and that’s why I am rooted and stuck here.”

Ramsey is one of many child care providers in Allegheny County who shared concerns with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. They fear that affordable and accessible child care could take major hits without new funding and government resources. 

Pennsylvania shuttered 2,189 child care programs from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to June 2023, Emily Neff, Trying Together’s public policy director, said in an email. And even with new facilities opening, the net loss was 597.

Neff said 181 child care programs permanently closed in Allegheny County from 2019 through November of this year for a net loss of 18 in the county.

Diane Barber, executive director of the Pennsylvania Child Care Association, partly blames the closures on high operational costs of facilities and rapid staff turnover that occurred throughout the pandemic.

Barber said utility bills rose over the pandemic, compounding bills for child care providers and families. 

As the pandemic dragged on, employees at child care facilities across the state left for better-paying — and often easier — positions in public schools or even at retail locations, Barber said. And when the pandemic wound down, they didn’t return.

“I’ve heard this not once, I’ve heard this multiple times, that [a new child care staff worker] will show up and they’re gone by lunch because this is just not the job that they thought it was going to be,” Barber said. “They thought they were gonna play with kids and that’s not what it’s all about.”

Ramsey, who worked at Shady Lane as an educator before the arrival of COVID-19, returned as an administrator in the midst of the pandemic, while a budget deficit and record low enrollment prompted talk of closure.

Ramsey said Shady Lane received more than $200,000 in federal funds through the county to expand its programming for young children to accommodate eight new infants and 10 new toddlers. The grants sat on top of additional federal funds it used to subsidize employee wages.

“And that’s what really saved us,” Ramsey said of the Allegheny County grant. “We had a long infant-toddler waitlist. That gave us the ability to open more classrooms.”

How one of the county’s youngest departments distributed ARPA funds 

Allegheny County allocated $20 million of its $380 million ARPA allotment to organizations providing or advocating for child care under the designation “Healthy Childhood Environments,” according to the county ARPA spending dashboard. 

The county established the Department of Children Initiatives and assigned it to administer ARPA funds in December of 2021 following the recommendations in a report from the Allegheny County Children Fund’s working group.

So far, the department has disbursed a little over $6.1 million across 25 child care providers, advocacy groups and a consultancy firm, according to Mathew Singer, the chief of staff at the Allegheny County Controller’s office.

Rebecca Mercatoris, the department’s executive director since its inception in 2021, said the first goal when allocating the money was to build the capacity of existing part-time and full-time child care providers. 

Federal spending deadlines stipulate the county needs to allocate the remaining $13.9 million to organizations during 2024 and distribute it within two years.

Mercatoris said since the department’s establishment, it’s focused on mapping out the problems impacting child care in Allegheny County. Now, it’s trying to solve them. 

Minimal funds and shrinking staff make a ‘bad combination’

Mercatoris said one of the biggest problems facing child care — one described by many providers and advocates — relates to its business model. Parents across demographics need affordable child care to get back to work, while private child care providers need to turn a profit to retain staff and keep slots for children open. 

“I think one of our largest challenges is around family access and affordability and being able to support families in meeting their child care needs while also ensuring providers have the funds they need to be able to hire great staff and be able to keep them with them,” Mercatoris said.

Despite a constant demand for child care, there’s not enough people staying or going into the workforce due to low wages. This, coupled with a lack of financial support on the county, state and federal level, makes for what Ramsey describes as a “bad combination” that providers can’t keep up with. 

“[Providers] don’t want to price gouge families because they know families can’t afford it,” Ramsey said. “So in turn, they are taking the loss and this loss has impacted the sector to the point where we’re at the brink of collapse.”

According to Ramsey, even after the mandatory shutdowns ended, many facilities couldn’t open because all of their staff either had left for higher paying jobs or their older staff couldn’t come back to work due to risk of exposure to COVID. 

“People started to realize that they had to increase their wages to get people to come back to work there,” Ramsey said. “So those mom and pop centers and nonprofits struggled financially because they were having to raise wages with money that they didn’t have.” 

The Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh [BCAP] provides free after-school programs to families and students in the Brentwood area, but had to close down a program it started in 2019 at Concord Elementary School.

Khara Timsina, BCAP’s executive director, said BCAP will need more funding to continue to operate its after-school and summer programs into next year.

Deborah Gallagher, the director of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center Early Head Start program, said it’s become increasingly hard to find people who are both interested and qualified to continue working in early child care facilities.

Gallagher oversees both COTRAIC’s Early Head Start program in Hazelwood and the partnerships the program has with several other day care centers.

According to Gallagher, Head Start and Early Head Start received ARPA funding in 2021 and 2022, some of which covered quarterly bonuses for staff. But when the bonuses stopped, Gallagher lost staff. Now she is paying “hefty substitute fees” for subs from a staffing company called Childcare Careers.  

“Parents can’t find care because we can’t find people,” said Gallagher, noting that if facilities had the funds to find and train people the industry would pick up. 

‘I’m just trying to get good care for my kid’

Parents said issues of affordability and long wait lists existed long before pandemic-era staffing shortages added to their woes..

For Shawna Ramsey, 28, of Baldwin Borough, the high cost of child care pushed her out of her career. 

A mother of three, Ramsey – who is not related to Lindsey Ramsey – said she had her first child while in college. In nursing school, she said she couldn’t find a child care facility with an open spot, let alone a facility that matched her budget stretched thin by student loan payments. 

She became a nurse, had another child and then a third — but her nursing salary remained the same. She carried a surrogate child to pay for her student loans, and ultimately decided to leave the nursing field to focus on motherhood.

“I think it’s really interesting that [child care] costs so much when workers get paid so little,” Ramsey said. “Private owners seem to be profiting off of people in need.”

The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, estimates that it costs the average family in Pennsylvania $987 monthly to keep one infant in child care. A median child care worker in Pennsylvania would have to spend more than half of their earnings to put their own child in infant care.

After serving in the Navy, Liz Sterrett, was wrapping up her degree and looking for a child care spot for her 3-year-old daughter. She found a facility that would let her do janitorial work in exchange for a spot, but after college she had to start paying $600 a month — a cost she can’t wrap her head around six years later.

“I’ve had to shape my life and career around the fact that I cannot afford child care by myself,” said Sterrett, 37, of Bellevue. “No matter how much I scream and shout and cry, it doesn’t become affordable.”

Sterrett’s current employer lets her work from home several days a week, saving her hundreds a month in child care. She said it’s not ideal, and her now 9-year-old daughter has “several meltdowns because I can’t give her my full attention,” but child care is still a luxury she can’t afford. 

“Access to child care is absolutely abhorrent,” Sterrett said. “There is no reason why I should be struggling … I am not living some fancy metropolitan lifestyle. I’m just trying to get good care for my kid.”

‘Band-Aid on a historical problem’

While funding initiatives like ARPA sought to help facilities that took a hit during the pandemic build back their staff and resources, providers point to broader inequities that contribute to the issues they are facing.

“[ARPA] was not enough, because it was a Band-Aid on a historical problem,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “The historical problem is that the field was never invested in enough because the work isn’t valued and that has further snowballed into an issue of staffing … of the field not looking attractive enough to join, of programs not being able to truly reflect the true costs of the work that they’re doing.” 

According to Ciminillo, the average hourly wage for a Pennsylvania child care employee is $12.43 — not enough, but hard to raise because doing so would increase the cost of tuition for parents.

“We’re competing for folks and we’re not being successful because we can’t get the wages up and it’s because we don’t have a larger government investment in the system,” Ciminillo said.

Ciminillo described the child care system as already “very fragile” prior to the pandemic given that providers were not compensated, valued, appreciated or invested in enough. 

Lindsey Ramsey added that historically women, especially women of color, are the ones who provide child care, which she said is likely the reason why there seems to be less focus on funding the field. 

Maria Manautou, a former worker at a child care center in Pittsburgh, said better pay would be the fast route to alleviating staffing issues.

“If you have two jobs, and the one offers you … $15 and you’re not having that kind of stress and then the one offers you $12 and you’re stressed all day, then you can see how people end up picking something different,” Manautou said.

Ciminillo said the federal government and local communities began to realize how much they needed child care once – after the initial weeks of shutdown in 2020 – essential workers needed to get back to work but couldn’t do so without care. 

 To build a sustainable future child care sector, Ramsey is calling for  a “change and shift in the narrative of how we are looking at the early childhood field.” 

“At a federal level, there needs to be policy put in place for true equitable wages that reflect the level and importance of the work that’s being done,” Ramsey said. 

Calling on Congress: Providers say short term funding is not enough

Barber said short-term funding initiatives like ARPA only address problems in the child care sector as they arise, failing to address the underlying problems.

She compares the influx of short-term funding to building with Jenga blocks that keep moving around.

“Then we know how that game ends, right?” Barber asked. “Everything falls apart.”

Ciminillo said Allegheny County needs to establish a recurring revenue stream to support early learning and out-of-school programming. And for that to happen, she said local officials must hear their constituents’ demands.

“Each of us, no matter our position, no matter our age, no matter whether we have children or not, play a role in affecting young children, their families, and their caregiver’s lives,” Ciminillo said. “So it’s just so important that everybody show up and use their sphere of influence in support of that.”

Democrats in Congress introduced legislation in September to supplement child care funding by distributing $80 billion over five years when ARPA expires.

According to a press release announcing the legislation, this funding request would support more than 220,000 child care providers nationally that serve a total of more than 10 million children. It has not yet received a vote.

U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, and U.S. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, a Democrat from Massachusetts, toured La Petite Academy, a new child care facility at Pittsburgh International Airport, earlier this month and spoke about the issues plaguing child care and what they deemed as largely partisan opposition to potential solutions.

Clark said that without Republican support, she’s “not very optimistic” Congress will be able to get the $16 billion in supplemental funding passed.

Deluzio, a father of three and member of the Congressional Dads Caucus, described the “death spiral” child care providers enter when they’re forced to increase rates to retain staff but, in turn, price out families, which lowers their revenues. It’s a problem, he said, that can only be resolved through federal support of the child care industry.

“This is about lowering costs. This is about giving folks the ability to work and earn and be part of society,” Deluzio said in regards to the $16 billion funding request, “The federal government’s got to be there to help strengthen [the child care sector], invest and ultimately bring down costs for people.”

Still, several child care advocates say even ambitious fixed-term funding initiatives won’t solve the structural problems plaguing the sector.

“This can’t be a one-time funding,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “This has to be funding that is ongoing [and] sustainable, that’s built into government policy.”

Correction: Shady Lane School is in Point Breeze North. An earlier version of this story included an incorrect neighborhood.

Betul Tuncer and James Paul are students at the University of Pittsburgh. They completed fall internships with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. Tanya Babbar, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, and Erin Yudt, a student at Point Park University, completed fall internships with PublicSource. Juliet Martinez is managing editor of The Homepage, a community newspaper serving Greater Hazelwood and surrounding neighborhoods.

The post ‘Band-Aid on a historical problem’: Child care providers expect slow collapse of sector without long-term aid appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Content warning: This story contains references to suicide.

If Khara Timsina showed signs of a mental health struggle in his country of origin, he could be called a “mad person.” 

“And people would fear talking to me, coming near me, and they would point fingers,” he said. “The type of stigma the community has, comes with the culture we had back in our country.”

While negative perceptions of those struggling with mental health exist everywhere, the stigma is particularly sharp for Bhutanese refugees, suggested Timsina, executive director of the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh [BCAP].

“People don’t like to be called, having mental health issues, so with that social taboo they are not open,” Timsina said.

He’s hoping Mental Health First Aid training might be a step toward addressing a problem that has sometimes manifested in suicides, especially among the men of the community.

BCAP offered the training last month, for the third time in eight years. Members of the Bhutanese community are hoping it has ripple effects, as the attendees share what they’ve learned with family and friends and slowly counter perceptions that make mental health challenges so hard to address, especially in a population that has had to overcome so many hardships.

A familiar problem for the community

Pittsburgh’s Bhutanese community are ethnic Nepalese who, starting in the 1990s, were forced out of their homeland after Bhutan’s government adopted stringent nationalist policies. Some spent as much as 20 years in refugee camps in Nepal after fleeing discrimination and violence in Bhutan. Refugees began arriving in Pittsburgh in 2008, and have since become one of the city’s largest immigrant groups. 

While Bhutanese immigrants in Pittsburgh have developed strong roots in areas along the Route 51 corridor in Carrick, Brentwood and Baldwin, their community has been facing mental health challenges consistent with findings that show a higher suicide rate in Bhutanese refugees across the United States. A 2012 report by the CDC shows that in the U.S., Bhutanese refugees have a suicide rate of 20.3 per 100,000, which is almost double that of the national suicide rate of 12.4 per 100,000. The study found the highest suicides rates in unemployed men who were not family providers. 

A 2019 study into the reasons behind their higher suicide rate found that societal pressures related to resettlement in a new country — including trouble finding employment — language barriers and financial stress, all contributed to feelings of distress in Bhutanese refugees. A community-wide tendency to avoid talking about mental health worsened feelings of distress, the study found.

In Timsina’s opinion, stigma around mental health in the Bhutanese community comes from deep-rooted cultural beliefs about people who exhibit signs of mental illness. This can make it hard for members of the Bhutanese community to seek help or verbalize their distress, which can worsen the problem.

“The type of stigma the community has comes with the culture we had back in our country,” Timsina said. “There weren’t any categories of mental health.”

Timsina continued: “The community still thinks that [mental health] is not an illness. It’s because of some superstitions, like something bad is acting on you.”

In his experience, Timsina has seen that when men fall victim to mental health stigma, they turn to destructive behaviors that not only cause further hurt to themselves, but to their families and wives, too. 

“It’s men’s inability to cope, or less capacity to cope with stress, and sometimes it begins from them, but the silent suffering is more on the women’s side. They bear it. They think they have to live for their kids,” Timsina said. 

Benu Rijal, BCAP’s health coordinator, said that she’s noticed the severity of the problem through her experiences leading a women’s group at BCAP. Whereas Rijal believes Bhutanese men often feel societal pressure to keep their emotional struggles to themselves, she has seen women be more comfortable expressing their problems. 

“I think men think they are more the boss of the family and they normally don’t come to share with us problems,” Rijal said. “I think the women are more open, and they cry and they talk to people. They want to feel relief and they share.”

Communication, transportation and mental health

Language challenges — most acute for adults — can make it harder to acclimate and to verbalize mental health struggles.

Not understanding English “is making someone homebound all the time,” Timsina said. 

Sabitra Kadariya, a Bhutanese mother living in Brentwood since 2010, added that many members of the community are further isolated because they can’t drive.  

“I think they have not enough financial support to buy a car, or to support their families and because of that, it’s the first thing that leads them to commit suicide,” said Kadariya.

In recent years, however, Kadariya has noticed a change: As more members of the Bhutanese community receive help accessing public resources, they help out others in turn. 

“I noticed that my family members or friends like to help other members of the family or close friends,” Kadariya said. “They pick them up and drop them from work to home, and then they know how to use public resources, like the buses. … So that will minimize, I think, the mental [health] issues.”

The combined power of peer-support and greater community resources is something that Timsina hopes to harness through Mental Health First Aid training. To help alleviate mental health crises, Mental Health First Aid training teaches ordinary people how to help those around them.

Mental Health First Aid training

For the third time since 2015, The Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh hosted Mental Health First Aid training for their community members on Oct. 14. About 30 men and women from the Bhutanese community gathered from early morning to late afternoon with coffee and snacks at the Intra-National Homecare building in Whitehall to learn what they could do to help their friends and family who are struggling with their mental health. 

“We are a large community here in Pittsburgh, and like suicidal thoughts, like people dying by suicide — we heard that every day in the news,” Kadariya said. “Because of that, I like to attend Mental Health First Aid training … and then export knowledge to my community.”

Mental Health First Aid Training [MHFA] teaches individuals how to help people struggling with mental illness or mental health crises. The point is not to make a community member into a clinician. Rather, MHFA teaches people how to be an informal, but vital, support for people struggling with mental health or experiencing a mental health crisis.

The 8-hour course, first introduced in the U.S. in 2008, has been proven to help immigrant and refugee populations like the Bhutanese community increase mental health literacy, reduce stigma and feel better equipped to notice signs of a mental health crisis and be a first line of support.

MHFA training includes an introduction to different mental health terms, lessons on how to recognize risk factors and warning signs of a mental health crisis, with video and text-based scenarios. Participants are also taught a step-by-step action plan for how they can help someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

Through open group discussions, Bhutanese community members brainstormed how they could use strategies like non-judgmental listening, creating safe spaces, being aware of body language and avoiding dismissive statements when approaching a person about their mental health.

Following the training, attendees shared that they wanted to see additional MHFA training offered in the Bhutanese community so that more people can support mental health awareness.

Tulashi Adhikari, of South Park, said he heard about the MHFA training on BCAP’s Facebook page and thought it would be a valuable way to learn more about a problem he sees affecting many of his friends and neighbors.

“Today our trainer did the training for more than 30 people, so at least 30 people can tell at least one or two people, then it will increase day by day,” Adhikari said.

 “This is a great opportunity to have this kind of training in our community so that we can know what is going on, what the causes are and how we can solve the problem,” Adhikari added.

For Tika Sapkota, a Jefferson Hills resident and a peer support specialist for the Squirrel Hill Health Center, the recent MHFA training was not his first, but he noted that it was for a lot of attendees. While Sapkota said he felt this training will help community members start more conversations around mental health, he hopes for more.

“We have a big community … so getting this much training is not enough,” Sapkota said. “If there can be more of these trainings regularly, [community members] may understand more and help more.”

Timsina said one of the goals of doing the MHFA training is to reduce the cultural stigmas around people who struggle with mental health. While many community members do notice those around them struggling, lack of education on mental health and negative cultural perceptions make it difficult for them to know where to begin when it comes to helping, or even speaking out.

Through MHFA training, Timsina said he hopes his community will begin to see mental health as an important piece of overall health.

“The kind of education we want to provide is that it’s okay to feel bad. It’s okay to feel some kind of mental pressure — everybody else feels it,” Timsina said. “But like you have a stomach ache or a headache, you tend to go to a doctor. There is treatment for how you feel, too.” 

BCAP staff can only do so much

Sapkota notes that one of the greatest impacts of mental health education in the Bhutanese community is simply giving mental health language to community members that can help them verbalize their struggles. 

“Culturally, our people don’t want to express even to the family members,” Sapkota said. “We don’t express bad things.”

“When it gets too bad, and they see their primary doctor, the doctor will ask how long this has been going on, and they’ll say a long time,” Sapkota continued. 

Bishnu Timsina, a former BCAP board member and the wife of Khara Timsina, who has provided support to parents and families in the Bhutanese community since 2010, said in her experience, stigma plays a large role in these communication issues.

“Where we come from, traditionally mental health was not really seen as mental health — it was seen as like a different planet thing,” she said. “So, it was not easy to work with any families or parents.”

In a 2015 study done on the effectiveness of MHFA training for the Bhutanese community at Temple University, researchers found that participants in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Harrisburg scored higher on their ability to recognize signs of depression and provide first aid responses based on the “ALGEE” plan after the training.

The study did not find a significant change in the part of the assessment that screened for “stigmatizing attitudes.” The authors, however, noted that might have been caused by the MHFA training instructors not being from the Bhutanese community, and suggested the training could be culturally adapted.

At the training BCAP hosted this October, the instructor was a member of the Bhutanese community and the instruction and conversations were done primarily in Nepali, allowing community members and the instructor to joke around and talk freely in their first language.

In Kadariya’s opinion, adapting mental health education to the language needs of the Bhutanese community, especially for elders, can help bridge this gap.

“Our moms, our dads – they don’t speak English — but we can explain them in Nepali what is mental health, how it disrupts the families, and how we have to help each other in our communities,” Kadariya said. 

Kadariya said this education can catalyze the way she believes the community members already lean on one another.

“They definitely support one another, but due to lack of some knowledge, some people are not helpful,” Kadariya said. “But we can talk to them about what mental health is, so we can educate the people about this, and then definitely, they can help each other.”

For Bishnu Timisina, the eagerness community members have begun to express for more MHFA training and to start spreading what they’ve learned is an exciting prospect — both for the future health of the community and for the reach of Bhutanese community workers. 

“If we do this to more people … I think there will be less victims, because there will be more people to get help from,” Timsina said.

Katie Mirr, BCAP’s youth and families coordinator, said the organization’s five staff can only do so much. “Those people that may have been on the fence are, when they’re seeing their friends or family members talk about [MHFA] and promote it, that might help them as well because they’re seeing like, ‘It’s coming from BCAP, but it’s also coming from my brother and my cousin,’” Mirr said. “Building it up that way, I think, is the only way that it’s going to work.”

A model for community mental health

The power that peer support can have on community mental health is something that Joni Schwager, executive director of the Staunton Farm Foundation*, one of the funders of BCAP’s MHFA training, sees as a great lift for the Bhutanese community.

“We believe that they [the Bhutanese community] are the best equipped to offer and train people from their community as opposed to anybody else because they know their community,” Schwager said. 

Schwager believes that the type of peer support MHFA providers do will work well for the Bhutanese community because those in it understand the nuances in culture, attitudes toward mental health and the experiences of immigrants and refugees that all play into the mental health experiences of Bhutanese people living in the U.S. 

“It’s a lot easier to talk to somebody who you know has had that experience as opposed to somebody who has a degree next to their name,” Schwager said.

To Schwager, MHFA in the Bhutanese community represents a significant shift in the way communities can address public mental health. 

“I think that we are in a period now where we’re realizing the power of communities and things like Mental Health First Aid equip a community to be able to reach out to their own friends, neighbors and loved ones in a way that if you don’t have the right training, you wouldn’t feel as comfortable doing.”

The greater level of comfort — both to be vulnerable in sharing and in learning — that peer support models like MHFA create, is something that Bishnu Timsina said she has noticed take root in the Bhutanese community. 

“I have seen more people coming out and seeking help. Families used to keep it within the family in the past, but they’re coming out now, and seeking help,” Timsina said. “This stigma is loosening.”

* PublicSource receives support from the Staunton Farm Foundation.

Tanya Babbar is an editorial intern at PublicSource and a junior at the University of Pittsburgh. She can be reached at tanya@publicsource.org. 

This story was fact-checked by Erin Yudt.

The Jewish Healthcare Foundation has contributed funding to PublicSource’s healthcare reporting.

The post In Pittsburgh’s Bhutanese community, ‘first aid’ for the struggle with mental health stigma appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Update (11/13/23): Allegheny County Executive-elect Sara Innamorato today called news of lawsuits against Adelphoi — the private, nonprofit contractor hired to run the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center — “deeply concerning,” calling transparency in youth detention “a main priority for our administration.”

“This sets off alarm bells,” Innamorato said when asked about PublicSource’s reporting on Adelphoi and the recent complaints filed against it in federal courts.

“I want to understand more of what’s going on and what we’re looking at,” Innamorato said, “and ultimately that’s why above all else, as we open up a detention facility, we have to make sure that there is public oversight like the Jail Oversight Board, that there’s community voice there, that we are investing in a way as a county so there is enough capacity there for highly trained staff, that there’s resource providers that have access — there’s just a lot of sunshine on that facility.”

Prior to Shuman’s 2021 closure, the county operated a Juvenile Detention Board of Advisors.

“The unfortunate reality is our history of administering Shuman isn’t a great record either,” Innamorato noted.

She stopped short of suggesting a reversal of the county’s contract with Adelphoi.

“We are going to look at the terms and see what we are bound to and what best serves the needs of the young people who are caught up in this system at the moment,” she said, adding that there are now “kids in the county jail and we want to make sure that we can get those kids out of that facility and into one that is specialized and geared toward the young people who are there.”

Allegheny County’s pick to run Shuman hit with negligence lawsuits

Reported 11/9/23: When Allegheny County announced in September that it would reopen its youth detention center, it praised the private contractor hired to operate it. 

“Adelphoi has a proven track record as a leading and highly respected agency” in caring for “delinquent and dependent children,” said President Judge Kim Berkeley Clark, of the Court of Common Pleas, in a press release. “This is a crucial step toward creating a safer and more supportive environment for juveniles in the county.”

That record includes accusations of failing to protect children from abuse, according to two civil lawsuits filed just days after Adelphoi Western Region signed a $73 million contract to hold arrested youth at the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center.   

One is a class-action complaint filed in federal court in Philadelphia, accusing Adelphoi USA — one of seven affiliated nonprofits based in Latrobe — of a broad pattern of “negligent staffing” and failing “to enact safety measures and other policies to protect the children.” As a result, according to the complaint, “vulnerable youth … were exposed to predators and abusers.”

The other complaint, filed in federal court in Harrisburg, seeks civil damages for the survivor of former Adelphoi Services employee Tabitha Dunn, who pleaded guilty to corruption of minors and endangering the welfare of children in relation to her work with a minor to whom she was assigned as an in-home worker. 

The attorneys who filed the suits told PublicSource their clients experienced severe trauma while in Adelphoi’s care and allege that some of the entities are responsible for failing to protect them from harm. 

It’s important that “the institutions harboring these abusers” are held accountable, said Renee Franchi, an attorney representing the young male in the case against Adelphoi Services.  

David Wesley Cornish, a Philadelphia attorney, filed the class-action suit on behalf of eight plaintiffs who allege they were abused by staff at Adelphoi facilities throughout the state. 

“It’s not just one or two people … that are saying this,” said Cornish. He said his clients “had never met each other,” but made similar accusations of mistreatment by Adelphoi staffers. 

The lawsuits — and another filed last year against Adelphoi Village in Westmoreland County court — raise questions about the plan for Shuman and speak to broader concerns about youth incarceration, which some advocates say exposes children to physical and mental harm and the risk of abuse.

Adelphoi said it can’t comment on pending civil complaints, but takes “extensive steps” to protect the children in its care, including training and supervising its staff and reporting incidents to Pennsylvania State Police and ChildLine, the state’s call center for reporting child abuse.  

“We remain committed to providing a safe and nurturing environment for every child under our care,” said Karyn Pratt, Adelphoi’s vice president of marketing and strategy development, in an email. 

Clark announced in September that Shuman — which closed in 2021 after the state revoked its license — will reopen under Adelphoi management. County and court officials signed a contract with Adelphoi that month. The center could begin holding youth again as soon as this winter if renovations to the facility are completed on schedule. 

Amie Downs, a spokesperson for the county, referred all questions about Adelphoi to the county’s court system. Joseph Asturi, a spokesperson for the county’s Court of Common Pleas, declined to answer questions, including how civil complaints might inform the court’s monitoring of Adelphoi’s work. 

How Adelphoi landed a $73 million contract to operate Shuman

Shuman first opened in 1974 in a brick building near the Allegheny riverfront in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar. The county managed it for decades until the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services revoked its license for multiple violations. 

Walter Harris was 14 years old when he was first held there in the mid-1980s. He was growing up in Section 8 housing in the Hill District, and stole clothes and nice things he couldn’t afford. He was caught in a Sears store after closing time and charged with theft and trespassing. 

The idea of being locked up scared him, but he calmed down after arriving at Shuman and bonding with other kids. He was sent there about a dozen more times until he turned 18 in 1988. “After that, you’re prepared,” he said, describing youth detention as an onramp to his time in state and federal prisons as an adult. 

Harris’s experience gets to the core of a debate about how to help youth who’ve been arrested — and whether detention is the right approach. 

After Shuman closed, law enforcement leaders complained they had no place to put youth they deemed too dangerous to be released. Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey even partly blamed spikes in gun violence — without citing evidence — on Shuman’s closure. “We should have never closed Shuman without a plan,” he told reporters after a triple homicide on the North Side. 

Advocates, on the other hand, pushed for approaches outside the carceral system, which disproportionately locks up Black people.  

“I don’t think there is any benefit or value in incarcerating children,” said Muhammad Ali Nasir, who goes by his emcee name, MAN-E, and is the advocacy, policy and civic engagement coordinator at 1Hood Media. The county should invest in non-carceral approaches, such as working to end poverty and investing in schools instead of reopening Shuman, he said. 

Under pressure from judges, law enforcement and other public officials, the county searched for a private operator to take over the site. It had “a strong preference” for one that would run a youth detention center, according to a request for proposals released last year.       

Enter Adelphoi, one of the largest youth service providers in the Pittsburgh region. It submitted a proposal to reopen and provide detention services at Shuman. The county accepted the bid and drew up a contract to pay Adelphoi $73 million over five years — an annual cost that’s 40% higher than what it paid to run the facility itself.     

Under the contract, Shuman will hold youth aged 10 to 20 who are from or found in the county. They may have been charged with serious offenses, deemed aggressive or at risk of leaving an unsecured facility, adjudicated delinquent or some combination of those. 

Read more about Adelphoi’s pledges to Allegheny County

County Council sued to block the plan, asserting its authority to approve or deny the use of county property. And advocates criticized the high price tag — which they said could instead go toward non-carceral programs — and lack of public oversight over the decision to reopen Shuman.     

“I don’t think that taxpayers have had enough input [and] I don’t think the kids who have gone through the juvenile legal system have had any input,” said Tanisha Long, Allegheny County community organizer for the Abolitionist Law Center. “This decision was made in the dark by the courts and [County Executive] Rich Fitzgerald.”

The county’s announcement stirred “mixed emotions” in Harris, now 52 and a member of the Elsinore Bennu Think Tank for Restorative Justice. He tries to help the youth of today by volunteering for ALC Court Watch, a team that observes court proceedings, including decertification hearings. And he’ll soon launch the Pittsburgh location of Fathers on the Move, a mentorship program for youth involved in the criminal justice system.   

“My mission is to make youth incarceration so rare that I have to find a new career,” he said. 

Though he believes Shuman should be reopened, he can’t be sure a private contractor who’s “out to make money” shares his mission.

“Who are they?” he asked about Adelphoi. “And what is their track record?” 

Who is Adelphoi and what is its track record? 

The Adelphoi nonprofits operate in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Delaware. They’ve served youth in the Pittsburgh region for more than 50 years. 

Based in Latrobe, Adelphoi provides foster care, education, in-home services and youth detention to nearly all counties in the state. Across its seven entities, Adelphoi made over $68 million in total revenue in fiscal 2022, with its largest arm, Adelphoi Village, a group home business, pulling in about $44 million. Combined, the Adelphoi entities employ around 600, according to Pratt. More than 1,000 youth receive its services every day. 

Adelphoi declined a PublicSource request to tour one of its detention centers and did not make an executive available for an interview. Pratt, the group’s marketing executive, answered detailed questions via email.  

She said Adelphoi isn’t new to the county. It serves about 60 youth per year here, including those who need shelter or are in the foster care system. After Shuman closed, the county placed youth it wanted to detain in Adelphoi facilities in nearby counties, including group homes in Westmoreland County, she added. 

Pratt called the lack of available beds a “detention crisis” in the region. She drew a straight line between the closure of Shuman and an uptick in youth fleeing Adelphoi’s group homes. She said non-secure group homes provide “an inappropriate level of care” for some youth, which is why a detention center is badly needed.    

At least one longtime advocate for incarcerated people agrees. 

Richard Garland is desperate to keep kids out of adult prisons, which he said is where some will end up if they don’t receive services while they’re in the more rehabilitative juvenile justice system. There were 25 children in the Allegheny County Jail on Nov. 8. 

Garland, the executive director of Reimagine Reentry, which provides services to formerly incarcerated people, said Adelphoi is a “tried and tested” provider of therapy and other supportive services. He described having good experiences with them that date back to the 1990s, when he first started his violence prevention work.     

But he was alarmed by the allegations in the civil complaints, which PublicSource shared with him during a recent interview. “That sends up a real big red flag for me,” he said. 

Adelphoi’s care for ‘vulnerable’ children questioned

Franchi’s client — anonymized as A.M.M. in the civil complaint — was a child in the Bradford County foster care system when he encountered Dunn, an Adelphoi in-home worker at the time. The complaint alleges she groomed him via phone messages and during trips to his foster home. She was soon barred from contacting him by a Protection From Abuse order. 

“Adelphoi knew or should have known that Dunn had inappropriate contact” with the minor, according to the complaint, and the firm “did not take steps to intervene or protect” him.

The complaint says she eventually kidnapped him, withheld food and water from him, and repeatedly sexually and physically abused him. When Dunn let him drive, it alleges, he sped on a highway to try to get pulled over by police, leading to Dunn’s arrest.

Dunn’s attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The suit seeks damages from Bradford County, a county caseworker and Adelphoi Services for being “indifferent to the risk of sexual victimization to children in county custody.”

Pratt said Adelphoi reported the abuse to state police and ChildLine, and was “wholly supportive of the legal process and consequences” imposed in the criminal case.  

The separate class-action lawsuit alleges a longstanding pattern of “negligent staffing” and cases of abuse dating to 1998. The class of the suit includes current or former residents of any Adelphoi juvenile facility who “were subjected to either physical, mental, and/or sexual abuse by any [Adelphoi] staff members … and/or either had their educational opportunities deprived,” according to the complaint.

It accuses Adelphoi USA, the parent organization, of failing to properly screen, train and supervise its employees, some of whom sexually and physically abused the plaintiffs. “Many of the children who were abused at Adelphoi USA were vulnerable, intellectually disabled, and already fleeing from abuse,” according to the complaint. The nonprofit’s staff “took advantage of children who had already been victims of sexual abuse and were at Adelphoi USA to seek healing.”

The complaint alleges Adelphoi USA also misrepresented the abuse as part of plaintiffs’ treatment. The abuse often took place during “therapeutic sessions,” which made the plaintiffs believe it was “normal” and “medically necessary,” the complaint says.

The complaint argues that attempts to deceive plaintiffs toll the statute of limitations to file claims for physical and sexual abuse.     

It was “almost impossible” for children to stop the abuse or get help because Adelphoi USA limited their phone usage and cut off their contact with the outside world, according to the complaint.  

Some amount of violence and abuse “is almost inevitable when you lock people up,” said Sara Goodkind, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work. She added that some facilities are better-managed than others. 

“We’ve heard really concerning things about Adelphoi,” said Jessica Feierman, senior managing director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. But “those kinds of stories” aren’t unique to them and happen in public and private facilities across the state and country.  

How will Adelphoi operate Shuman?

Shuman has a long history of failing to protect young people from harm, according to a report, co-authored by Goodkind, that explored ways to end youth incarceration in the county after Shuman closed. 

The researchers interviewed young people — ranging in age from 14 to 27 — who were held at Shuman. They described moldy food, inadequate medical care and unsanitary conditions there. Many said staffers were abusive and predatory, though a few were helpful and supportive. One described Shuman as a place that “grooms kids for crime, not healing.” 

PublicSource asked Adelphoi if it believes it can do better. 

Pratt said Adelphoi “maintains the highest standards of care” across all its programs, including detention. Its management of Shuman will be trauma-informed, she said, though she didn’t specify what that will look like. 

Adelphoi will bring in UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to provide nursing care and manage medication, which is a condition of its contract with the county. Medication errors were among the violations that led to the revocation of Shuman’s license.

The lawsuits raise questions about how Adelphoi will screen candidates for jobs at Shuman.   

Pratt said Adelphoi has already begun interviewing candidates for 25 open positions at Shuman. They’ll be screened via child abuse and criminal history checks, and their fingerprints will be run through the FBI database.  

She didn’t answer a question about how much Adelphoi will pay workers at all levels at Shuman, though she said wages would be competitive in the local market.

Goodkind said the least qualified and trained workers in a detention center tend to work undesirable shifts and often aren’t paid “more than you might get … for working at Target.” While all staff are capable of abuse, the risks are elevated with low-paid, undertrained “line staff,” she said.    

Adelphoi faced a labor shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic that forced it to scale back services and ask staff to work overtime, according to its most recent annual report.  

A civil complaint filed last year in the Westmoreland County Court of Common Pleas by plaintiff Timothy Rice alleges that insufficient staffing contributed to Adelphoi’s failure to protect him from a stabbing attack by three other residents when he was placed at Adelphoi Village in Latrobe.

“At the time of the stabbing, it is believed there was only one member on staff in the facility which is against standard policy,” said the complaint. 

The complaint alleges that proper Adelphoi policy requires at least two staff members to be on duty at all times to ensure the safety of residents. It also alleges that failures, including understaffing, allowed Rice’s attackers to possess a weapon despite one of them having a known violent past, and slowed the response to the attack. 

Rice’s attorney, Daniel Soom, declined to comment. 

Pratt said Adelphoi’s staffing issues have eased; it has seen a 65% decrease in open positions over the past four months. 

The county is paying Adelphoi a flat fee of $7,800 per day for 12 beds, with the goal of expanding to 60 beds for $39,000 per day. Pratt said that should reassure community members who are concerned about incentives for “maximizing the number of youth in the program.” 

Incentives to fill beds have backfired before in Pennsylvania: Luzerne County judges sent children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks in the notorious “Kids for Cash” scandal, which didn’t involve Adelphoi. 

While a flat fee is good, it could still incentivize judges and other stakeholders to send more kids to Shuman, said Jeffrey Shook, a professor at Pitt’s School of Social Work. 

They could say, “We’re paying for it, we’ve got to move kids into this system,” he said, warning that “the deeper kids get into a system, the more likely they are to stay in a system and go into the adult system.”

Goodkind said it’s important to understand that detention facilities typically house young people for short periods of time before they’re adjudicated or found delinquent. That means many will be held at Shuman before it’s been determined that they’re guilty of an offense. 

She added it’s a common misconception in the community, and even among some political candidates, that detention centers provide long-term rehabilitative services. The average stay at Shuman was around 12 days when it closed, according to the county.  

Pratt said Adelphoi’s goal is to “minimize as much as possible” the amount of time youth spend in detention. That way, they’ll be placed into treatment plans that “most align with their unique needs.”  

But Long isn’t buying it.  

No matter how private detention contractors market themselves, she believes they will always “default” to a carceral approach. If they really wanted to help kids, they would do it “without the requirement of incarceration.”  

Harris said he recidivated after his time at Shuman because he was sent back to his traumatic home life with no support. He’d like to see a program for incarcerated youth “whose goal is to put themselves out of business.” If the county tried hard enough, it could work toward that goal, he said.  

“But a corporation can’t have it because they’re trying to make money.” 

Correction: The complaint filed by A.M.M. names as defendants Adelphoi Services Inc., Bradford County and a county caseworker. An editing error in an earlier version of this story indicated another defendant.

Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org.

Tanya Babbar is an editorial intern at PublicSource and a junior at the University of Pittsburgh. She can be reached at tanya@publicsource.org. 

Charlie Wolfson contributed.

This story was fact-checked by Jack Troy.

This reporting has been made possible through the Staunton Farm Mental Health Reporting Fellowship and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.

Adelphoi’s pledges

Key points in the nonprofit firm’s role with, and promise to, Allegheny County, expressed in its contract and in responses to questions from PublicSource:  

• Adelphoi said it has an “impeccable” licensing history with the Pennsylvania Department of Education and Department of Human Services. It’s accredited by The Joint Commission, the nation’s oldest and largest independent healthcare accreditor.  
• About 79% of youth placed at Adelphoi facilities completed its programs in 2022 and 80% remained out of care one year after they were discharged.
• Adelphoi said it will provide youth held at Shuman with education, medical and dental care, mental health services, recreational opportunities and spirituality services. 
• Adelphoi’s contract with the county allows it to use “physical techniques” to manage crises at Shuman. Staff are trained to use “alternatives to restraint” first, but will use “passive restraint” in situations that pose “imminent danger to oneself or others,” according to Karyn Pratt, Adelphoi’s vice president of marketing and strategy development. All restraints are recorded via camera systems and reported to the placing agency.   
• Adelphoi will influence how courts and probation officers make decisions about youth in the criminal justice system. It will provide those stakeholders with a “high-level view of all clinical and assessment information” about a child. It will also provide that information to the treatment provider that a court or probation office selects for that child. 
• Elizabeth Miller is Adelphoi’s medical director and is responsible for clinical practice and overall care at Adelphoi facilities. She is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, and is chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

The post Updated: Innamorato hears ‘alarm bells’ in lawsuits against Adelphoi, picked to run Shuman appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.