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BY GRETCHEN KEISER
Staff Writer
ATLANTA--The residential treatment program for troubled youth at the Village
of St. Joseph will close Aug. 31 and a redesigned service to reach families of
the archdiocese at the grassroots level is envisioned for the future.
The decision by Archbishop John F. Donoghue was made in consultation with
Betti Knott, Secretary for Catholic Charities, and the Council of Priests. The
Village’s board of directors was informed May 20 and staff and residents
were notified May 21.
Charles Bright, who has been director of the Village since 1990, will
continue as the director of Village of St. Joseph outreach services. The
45-acre campus on Butner Road in southwest Atlanta, which is also home to
Blessed Sacrament Parish and St. Joseph’s Place, a residence for the
elderly, will continue to be owned by the archdiocese.
“The Village will continue to do therapeutic outreach work with
children and adolescents in need of their services,” Knott said. “We
hope to set up a partnership with the Catholic school system and with the
parishes to provide support to families with troubled children. The effort will
be done on a local level. We will go to them.”
Knott said their hope is to intervene with children at an earlier point in a
non-institutional setting.
The Village of St. Joseph currently serves 40 youth from 11 to 17 years of
age, both male and female, who live in cottages on the campus and go to school
there. Thirty-seven have been referred from the state through Departments of
Family and Children’s Services or the juvenile justice system.
In 1985, by contrast, 85 percent of the residents at the Village had been
placed by parents and the remainder by other family members, Knott said.
The number of Catholics using Village services has also been diminishing to
fewer than three percent of youth served between 1996-98.
The Village, with a staff of 74 full- and part-time workers, was just
licensed by the state as a provider of intermediate level care to serve youth
needing more significant help. This made the Village eligible for more
placements and at a higher per diem reimbursement from the state.
However, the needs of the youth have proved to be incompatible with the
Village’s open campus and staffing, officials said.
“The diocese has been concerned about the increased level of risk to
the children at the Village,” said Knott. “The openness of the campus
doesn’t provide enough security to protect the children and the
adolescents.”
“Change is difficult,” she said. “I am sad society has
changed so much we can no longer provide the compassionate residential service
that has been a part of this archdiocese for so many years. On the other hand,
I am excited to provide a new kind of service to the people of the
archdiocese.”
Bright said the youth have more serious needs than in the past and often
have little or no family structure to involve in the counseling program. Some
have one or both parents in jail. Several have no family.
“We’ve had a significantly higher number of runaways and much
bolder runaways. We’ve had group runaways,” said Bright. “We are
not a locked facility. We are wide open. We have never wanted to be a locked
facility...We’ve also had more significant behaviors of aggression.”
The state’s intermediate level funding has at times been used up before
the end of the fiscal year, Bright added, placing the agency in the position of
refusing the child or making up the difference in expenses.
“I chose not to do that on an ethical basis,” he said. “I
think the state legislature needs to take another look at what Georgia is doing
for its children. They are putting too much money into building jails and not
enough into making it possible for places like the Village to operate.”
Although no one factor caused the decision by the archdiocese, Bright said,
“The church has felt that an awful lot of money was being spent for not a
whole lot of positive results.”
“The church is clearly making a drastic decision in closing the
Village,” Bright said. But residential services for troubled youth may not
be addressing the root problem, he added. “The problem is how to keep the
family from falling apart.”
One of the oldest Catholic institutions in the archdiocese, the Village
began in 1867 as an orphanage for boys in Washington, Ga., run by the Sisters
of St. Joseph. The Village moved to Atlanta in 1967 and reconfigured its
services as a residential facility for boys and girls with behavioral and
learning disorders. Children went home on weekends and family therapy was a
required part of the program. Sisters of St. Joseph were on the staff until
1990, when Bright, who had been associate director, became the first lay
administrator. All parishes hold special collections at Christmas and Easter to
benefit the Village.
“The Village of St. Joseph is loved by the clergy and the faithful of
the archdiocese and has a long and proud history,” said Msgr. Peter Dora,
vicar general.
At the Council of Priests, he said, discussion focused on the original
charism of the Village of serving children in special need and how that could
be continued realistically today.
“Rather than simply continuing with the past model, we need to
re-examine what we are doing and find ways to address this concern in
today’s circumstances,” Msgr. Dora said. “We are fortunate to
have in place a dedicated and committed board and a very capable administrator.
They will have much to contribute in fashioning a new structure.”
Joseph Ledlie, incoming chairman, said the board of directors “is
emphatic on a couple of points. We will continue to serve children through
families, as reflective of our namesake, and we will continue to be known as
the Village of St. Joseph.”
“The specifics have yet to be worked out, but the plan is to rely on
the board for the kind of strong support it has always demonstrated and to
invoke the help of the people of the archdiocese for our expanded
mission,” Ledlie said. “I think if anything the benefits will be more
apparent to the people who support it. It will become a neighborhood
service.”
The board, in conjunction with the staff and the archdiocese, tried a number
of scenarios in recent years to keep the residential campus open, he said,
including increased state funding and conversations with Boys Town.
The conclusion was reached that the Village is not well equipped to deal
with increasingly hardened cases of children in need, but should return to a
family-oriented mission.
“We are looking forward here,” Ledlie said. “We are not
looking back with regret.”
Bright said there is a great need for services to adolescents and their
families in the archdiocese, citing the possibility of in-home counseling,
after school programs and continuing services for older adolescents developing
skills to work and live independently. Services hopefully can be provided near
a cluster of parishes, he said.
“I am very, very fortunate to have from the archdiocese another
opportunity to be of service,” Bright said.
When he joined the staff 12 years ago, Sister Mary Frances Bruns, CSJ, was
the administrator, the last Religious to serve in that role.
“The whole back end was a convent when I got here,” he said.
“It was a very different environment. The sisters brought a Catholicity
and a comfort to the program. But that was a past era.”
On May 21, the day staff and residents were informed of the August closing,
Bright said he had a surprise visit from a woman who had spent some time as a
child at the Village and left in 1989. She informed him she had just finished
her master’s degree program at Clemson and is becoming a therapist.
“We needed that,” he said.
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