Boys' School dealing with more mental health issues

WORLAND — Despite recent criticism of a rise in the use of restraints and detention rooms over the past few years, Wyoming Boys’ School (WBS) Superintendent Dale Weber maintains that the school is one of the safest environments some of the young boys have ever encountered.

Weber noted there has been a significant decline in restraints and secured detention this year.

HISTORY

According to a history reported in the Northern Wyoming Daily News on Aug. 26, 1947, The Wyoming Industrial Institute, located six miles southwest of Worland, was started as a prison farm for adults in April of 1915. The farm consisted of 960 acres, most of it under irrigation. At that time the main building (Old Main), power plant, laundry, shop and horse barn were erected.

“During this time boys and adults were both sentenced to the institution. Later the prison farm for adults was moved to Riverton and since then the institution at Worland has handled only boys ranging in ages from 10 to 21.”

Currently the Wyoming Boys School houses boys from 12 to 21 with Weber saying the average ages are 14 to 18.

According to Wyoming State Statute 7-13-101 — Sentencing of minors to boys’ school upon first conviction of felony; term; parole — “upon his first conviction of a felony, any male offender under the age of 18 years may be sentenced to imprisonment in the Wyoming boys’ school. In imposing a sentence under this section the court shall not fix a definite or minimum term of confinement in the boys’ school but shall fix a maximum term which shall not exceed the maximum term provided for the statute violated. The Department of Family Services may at any time grant to a person sentenced under this section a parole from the boys’ school even though the person has not served a fixed minimum sentence.”

Wyoming’s juvenile justice system is handled through the Wyoming Department of Health’s Department of Family Services. Neighboring states including Utah and Colorado also have their juvenile justice systems and corrections facilities handled through their DFS equivalent.

Other states, including Montana and Nebraska have their Department of Corrections oversee their juvenile facilities, North Dakota has a Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that oversees the facilities and Idaho has a specific Department of Juvenile Corrections.

ISSUES

In an interview with the Joint Judiciary Committee in the fall of 2021, Weber said, “We’re not a prison, we don’t have fences with razor wire, we don’t have guards, we don’t have cells with bars. We are the highest level secure placement for adolescent males.” He added that that they do have locked facilities.

“We are not a treatment facility,” he said but added that Boys’ School is “the end of the line in corrections for adolescent males in the state.”

At that time Weber was the deputy superintendent. He moved up to superintendent in January 2022, after Gary Gilmore retired.

During the hearing Rep. Karlee Provenza of Albany County had asked about violent incidents at the school and was told that the information is confidential.

The committee later came forward with a bill that passed the 2022 Wyoming Legislature to improve juvenile justice system data reporting. While juvenile justice falls under DFS, prior to the 2022 change in statute, data reporting duties were the responsibility of the Department of Corrections.

The committee’s work and questions sparked a two-part investigative piece into the Wyoming Boys’ School by WyoFile, which were published earlier this month.

In an interview with the Northern Wyoming News last week, Weber said the only reason restraints are used is if a student is demonstrating that he “is unsafe to himself or someone else. That’s it. We don’t use physical restraints, we don’t use solitary confinement as a means of influencing behavior. We don’t punish them by doing those things. The real reason that we would ever use those is that they are either hurting themselves, or they are hurting someone else or they are destroying property.”

“We have a good oversight system with regard to our physical management of students,” he said.

“We also have that backed up with video evidence because most of our areas are on video,” Weber said. He said the video is only kept for so long but if there is a significant restraint incident the video will be burned to a CD or copied to a more permanent file.

“We can demonstrate the why of any type of physical restraint and demonstrate that it is always because of safety,” Weber said.

He said it is documented every time a staff member has to touch a kid and what led up to that. “We review every single physical restraint incident,” Weber said. He said there is a debriefing by the management team, review of the video and the security supervisor reviews and critiques the techniques used with the Right Response Training that each staff member undergoes when they are hired.

He said sometimes students are hurting themselves or trying to break a window, or they go after a student or staff member.

“The reality is that some of the students have the capability and desire to hurt other people at times, and a demonstrated history of it,” Weber said.

“We can’t use some of the techniques that law enforcement uses,” Weber said, “nor would we want to.”

State statute specifies that discipline must be reformatory in nature.

“We have no other way to keep kids safe here other than putting hands on (to place a student in restraints),” Weber said.

He added that if the student demonstrates that he is continuing to be a danger then they must be placed in a secure detention room so they do not have access to students and staff or have access to things to harm themselves.

He said how long a student is in the secured detention room depends on the behavior of the student. The student is given classwork and meals, along with programmatic work if they are in there for a longer period of time.

“If they demonstrate through their words and their actions that they are willing to be safe then they can come out. There is no standard of time that they have to stay in there,” Weber said. He said generally the staff works to make the stay under 24 hours, some stays can be as short as 20 minutes.

Weber said that the data shows there was a recent rise in the number of times restraints have had to be used from 2017 to 2021, and he feels there are number of contributing factors.

There has been a shift in placement options for kids over the past six to seven years.

While the WBS has gotten students with mental health issues in the past it used to be relatively simple to move them on to a more appropriate facility.

He said they used to be able to move them within the first month or two when they realized the student would not benefit by the programs provided at WBS. The shift began in 2017 and 2018.

The facilities were full, but also Medicare reimbursement is lower in Wyoming than other states, so out-of-state facilities prefer to take students from other states.

He added that while there are some options in Wyoming, many of the students who arrive at the Boys’ School have already been to those facilities.

Right before the COVID pandemic he saw that what used to take a month or two to move a student was now taking five to six months or at times they were unable to find any placement.

“Then you have a significant mental health issue in a student, when they normally would only be here a month or two, now they are staying the full seven months (average stay), in a setting that really is not appropriate for them and not equipped to manage their issues, through no fault of the staff here. This has never been a mental health facility,” he said.

Then the COVID-pandemic hit and they could not place students anywhere else as things were locked down.

Regarding mental health issues, Weber said they are seeing more kids with autism spectrum disorders. He said it is “documented” that corrections programs do not work well with those with autism spectrum disorders because it is hard for them to assimilate into a facility with a lot of structure.

The Boys’ School also kept students in the dorm, isolating from other students to help prevent anyone from getting COVID or preventing the spread of COVID.

“What we saw almost immediately was an increase in behaviors, because now you have a bunch of criminally-minded or mental health juvenile males, cooped up all day, every day for months,” Weber said.

He said it is important for them to get physical activity and there was a decrease in activity under COVID protocols.

CHANGES

This year, with things opening back up, Weber said there has been a significant decrease in the number of times restraints have been used. Per WBS data, physical restraint use dropped from 10 in the fiscal year 2021 to 3 in the 2022 fiscal year. Other restraints including mechanical — handcuffs, leg restraints or belly chain, chemical restraint and a restraint chair also declined.

Weber did note that several of the restraint issues last year came from behavior from one student who continually confronted staff members and used tactics to encourage other students to misbehave.

The number of times a student has been in secured detention has also dropped significantly.

“We are getting the kids a lot more activity,” Weber said, noting that COVID solidified what they already knew, teenage boys need to be active.

This year they have brought in a painter for a painting class, pottery class, trip for ice fishing, trip to the fish hatchery, setting up a garden, resumed the community softball game with the Kiwanis Club and started equine therapy again.

He noted that the painting and pottery classes and the garden were all spearheaded by a dorm employee at the Boys School.

They resumed on-campus visits this year and began the trauma-informed training.

“We’ve always gotten students with a lot of trauma,” Weber said, so the new training helps address that.

He said staff will do the second phase of the training – trauma informed effective reinforcement starting Nov. 29. “That’s going to give us the meat and potatoes of what we’re going to start implementing as our culture here.”

“We have to take any kid that is court-ordered. We want to be more effective with the kids who traditionally we’ve been able to move on to more appropriate placement. We want to be better for them,” Weber said.

He said they will continue to do what he feels the staff does best, and that is developing relationships with the boys. He said some students contact staff members after they leave because of those relationships. “They understand that staff don’t judge them, they don’t resent them that they were invested in trying to help them.”

While they have to maintain specific structure, Weber said they have also realized that they may have to adjust some of that structure to meet the needs of students with specific mental health issues. They did that recently and the student has responded well.

Weber said the policies and procedures are reviewed every three years for the school to be accredited through the Prison Rape Elimination Act. In the spring of 2023, he said the Boys’ School will be evaluated by consultants from the Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators, who will evaluate the programs for an accreditation.

STAFF

When a new staff member is hired they go through training including a two day Right Response Training that focuses on de-escalation and physical management. There is also ongoing training throughout the year.

Right Response Training must be completed before a staff member ever begins to work with students.

“We need to develop more skillsets to work with a more diverse juvenile population,” Weber said. “We’ve identified we have to diversify what we are doing and that’s what we are [working on doing].”

“It doesn’t matter how great we are at developing relationships with these kids and how great our programming is to help them with their issues, the fact remains there are sometimes young men who come in who are willing to do the things that they do and violence can be inevitable.

“Having said that we always want to get better at what we do. Of course, we want to try and help every single kid to learn to not do those things. I believe every kid does have the ability to change. I don’t think any of us would be doing what we do if we didn’t believe we could help each kid that comes in here,” Weber said.

“It takes a special person to work in an environment in which sometimes you are putting so much effort into somebody who at any second could [attack you in some way] and yet you still have to come right back and say ‘it’s not OK that you did that but I don’t resent you for it, let’s work through it,’” Weber said.

Regarding staffing, Weber said they are down about seven staff members that they would like to fill, along with his former position — deputy superintendent/clinical director. He said he hopes to be able to fill the administrative position soon.

“The Boys’ School has done an amazing job with these young men for decades and decades. They have a great track record for last 30 years-plus of taking these young men in here, trying to help them, keeping them safe, keeping other people safe; and then the boys going back out into their communities better prepared to be in society than they were before they came here,” Weber said.

“What the Boys School has always done isn’t broken. The world’s changing. Juvenile corrections is changing and we just want to be able to stay closer to best practices. What’s everybody else doing that’s really successful?”