This Colorado School Offers Troubled Girls a Last Chance to Grow Up

Liz, a 17-year-old with a string of drug arrests, lit a cigarette and summed up her 10 months in Colorado with the bored look of a graduating senior.

“I grew up,” she said.

She had not wanted to come to Excelsior Youth Centers and was more than ready to go home. But she said the school finally helped her escape the revolving door of juvenile courts and group homes she had been stuck in for years in Indiana.

Excelsior, a place for troubled girls perched on the high plains southeast of Denver, consists of a junior and senior high school and Residential Child Care Facility.

Excelsior is one of a few such schools for girls in the country and draws students from 17 states.

For many girls, the school represents one last chance before they are locked up or placed in a hospital.

Help From Many Quarters

“You have to put up with the girls, with their smart mouths and their attitudes and their moods,” says Liz, which is not her real name. “But you get the support of the girls too, and of the staff and the therapist.”

She came to Excelsior on the recommendation of a caseworker in Gary, Ind., after five previous placements had failed to improve her behavior.

“At first I was just really upset because I was getting sent away from my family,” she says. Then she started working at a nearby clothing store, saving money, making friends and continuing to work with a therapist. Things got better.

“They make you deal with your issues--you just have to be willing to deal with your issues,” she says.

The “issues” for Excelsior’s 130 girls, ages 12 to 18, range from incest and abuse to murder, prostitution and, often, depression.

There is 13-year-old Jackie, found by social service workers in a run-down shack in rural Wyoming, unable to speak after years of sexual and emotional abuse. When she arrived at Excelsior, she would hoard pieces of metal in her clothes and try to kill herself with them, school officials said.

There is Laura, who will stay at Excelsior until she recovers from the shock of losing two family members to violent deaths, and Tracy, who arrived after frequent encounters with the juvenile system in Los Angeles for prostitution and drug abuse.

Better-Known Graduate

One of the school’s better-known graduates is Deborah Jahnke, the Wyoming teen-ager who was convicted with her younger brother, Richard, in the November, 1982, shooting death of their abusive father. Deborah Jahnke’s prison sentence was commuted, and she spent 1 1/2 years at Excelsior undergoing psychiatric evaluation and awaiting court rulings.

“These are students they can’t educate in the public school system . . . kids with severe emotional and behavioral problems who would otherwise probably be in a psychiatric hospital,” says Excelsior Director William C. Gregory, known to the girls as “Mr. Bill.”

When Gregory walks through the halls during a typical school day, he is greeted with hellos and hugs.

In one room a class is making sushi and Mr. Bill is invited to test it. In another room, a chorus of girls is preparing for a concert. They ask him if he’ll come to see it.

The cottages where the girls live look out on the Rockies. They resemble college dormitories more than a reform school. The girls’ rooms are plastered with posters of animals, rock stars, the Denver Broncos and inspirational quotations. Gregory says he can tell how well a girl has adjusted by how much she has plastered on her wall.

Previous Institutions

Gregory said Excelsior girls have had an average of eight previous placements in institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, halfway houses and foster and group homes. The majority come out of locked institutions.

Most referrals to Excelsior come from county social workers and school districts. A few wealthier students are placed privately by their parents.

The average stay at the school is 13 months, and there is a long waiting list.

Excelsior, a private association run by an 11-member board, is funded mainly by counties, which pay a fee for each child placed at the school. The fee for both treatment and school comes to about $2,700 per month per student, which Gregory says is cheaper than psychiatric hospitalization.

“In effect what we’re doing is taking kids who’ve been in the system for a long time. We’re putting kids out of the system.”

While residential child-care facilities are numerous, there are only about 15 girls’ schools in the country that offer the broad program Excelsior does, Gregory says.

State Freezes Payments

Excelsior began its operation here in 1973 and runs on an annual budget of $4.5 million, derived from the fees paid by counties and from contributions. Because the state has imposed a three-year freeze on county payments for child-care facilities, Excelsior has been seeking more out-of-state students.

It needs more help from the state, Gregory says, with the number of disturbed adolescents and teen suicides rising. Meantime, fund raising and a bond issue are expected to finance a new $700,000 building that will include a 12-bed treatment unit.

Originally isolated, the 33-acre campus now is surrounded by homes and shopping centers. Neighbors have never complained about the school, Gregory says.

An accredited junior and senior high school, Excelsior offers a licensed school of cosmetology and fields basketball, volleyball and softball teams calling themselves the Eagles.

Four ‘Incidents’ a Month

It also has a Treatment and Learning Center that can handle severely disturbed students. Gregory says there are three or four “incidents” a month. There have been no suicides, “but we’ve come close.”

The school’s 170 employees include therapists, medical personnel, teachers and counselors who live with groups of students in cottages.

Gregory calls the treatment “re-parenting.”

“A lot of these kids missed good parenting in their important, developmental needs,” he says. “We don’t focus exclusively on the psyche. We take care of the total child--training in hygiene, social skills.

“We as adults are in charge, and these types of kids need good healthy authority. It’s not a punitive authority but a strong, nurturing, parenting kind of authority.”

Excelsior also emphasizes family therapy, sometimes flying child and therapist to the parents’ home in an effort to get the girl back into her family.

85% Allowed to Function

Gregory says about 85% of the girls who leave Excelsior have completed treatment and are able to function independently.