Teens Removed From Valley Group Home

Los Angeles County officials have removed 68 troubled teenagers from a group home, saying the emotionally disturbed clientele was poorly supervised and that counseling, recreation and other services were lacking.

County probation and child-welfare authorities removed the teens from Pride House group home on Saticoy Street, completing the transfers last Friday after repeated reports that the 85-member staff could not control the youths.

Pride House still has its state-issued license, though it is effectively out of business as long as the county refuses to place youths in the group home, officials said.

“The problem was the level of supervision,” said Amaryllis Watkins, an administrator who oversees children’s homes for the county Department of Children and Family Services. “We want these acting-out teenagers supervised and not just wandering around. We want them to have good treatment.”

Clemente Sainten, president of the parent company that oversees Pride House, said he was baffled by the action. He said administrators there had been working diligently to correct the facility’s purported shortcomings.

“I am very upset about this,” Sainten said. “We displace these kids and keep displacing them and put them under this bureaucratic umbrella. If they had talked to the kids they would see what is really going on.”

A June audit report by the county children’s agency indicates that officials had been concerned with far more than supervision of the Pride House teenage charges, most of whom were placed in the home after being taken from abusive or neglectful parents.

According to the June audit, Pride House was paid $3,245 a month for each child the facility provided care. But the audit said the facility and its staff members:

* Sometimes used threats, humiliation or intimidation--including telling teens they would be sent to a psychiatric hospital or Juvenile Hall--if they did not follow house rules.

* Violated some clients’ rights by preventing them from visiting their families or blocking their participation in outside activities.

* Failed to provide proper counseling, recreation and school activities. “Group therapy” often consisted merely of a discussion of household chores to be completed, the teens complained to auditors.

* Shortchanged residents by skimping on clothing purchases, allowances and toiletries.

The home is situated in a mostly industrial area of Van Nuys, behind an office building in a compound surrounded by a fence with locked gates, and next to a bagel bakery and a carwash.

Sgt. Adam Bercovici of the LAPD Van Nuys Division said he was unfamiliar with the details of all police calls to the house, but recalled one incident about two months ago when officers responded to a complaint by neighbors who reported fighting in the home.

“I think the counselors lost control,” he said. “It was kind of crowd control the officers performed.”

Neighbors said the home was the scene of frequent fights, with residents of Pride House jumping the fences and police and ambulances showing up several times a week.

“There’s always choppers and ambulances,” said Nelson Lopez, 17, who visits his girlfriend, Melisa Flores, 16, at her house directly across from Pride House. “Whenever there’s a problem, [police] always go straight there.”

Melisa said police or ambulances were often at the house twice a week.

She said in one incident a boy who appeared to be about 12 seemed to be running away from the house and was chased by a counselor. She said the counselor tackled the boy in her frontyard and carried him on his shoulders back to the group home.

“We always see them running and running,” Flores said. “Then the police come and they’re always chasing someone in there.”

Flores said the teens often climbed over a fence when the front gate to the group home was locked or congregated on the roof of the facility.

“I think sometimes they let them out” to visit a local convenience store, she said. “I used to see them walking that way.”

Maria Guzman, 65, said that about two weeks ago there was a big fight involving three of the teens.

“It seemed like they were on drugs,” she said. “Two fell on one and then three men in ties came and took them.”

She said that one night several teens were outside her house, next to her neighbor’s van, when she heard one of the boys urge another to “break the window, break the window.”

But she said no damage was done to the van.

Sainten said employees who had been accused of intimidating or threatening teenage residents were fired, though he could not recall the details of the terminations. He denied that residents had gone without appropriate therapy or clothing, allowances and other necessities.

The audit by county authorities, however, said seven of 10 residents of the home who were interviewed said the staff members seemed preoccupied with discipline and did not give them positive attention. Most of the residents said harsh disciplinary policies prevented them from visiting their families, and several said they had gone months without making a single official field trip off the “campus.”

These policies left many of the residents claiming they felt “like criminals in Juvenile Hall,” the audit said.

The audit also found that the Department of Children and Family Services did not always serve the youths well. In half of the 10 cases reviewed by auditors, the report said the department failed to provide the facility with reports on the adolescents’ needs and plans for treatment.

Watkins said the facility seemed to be making some improvements, but the lack of supervision was confirmed, in part, by two incidents this month.

In one, several youths were chased back to the campus by the LAPD for leaving without permission. Some of the residents angrily confronted the officers and made obscene gestures, leading to the arrest of one, Watkins said.

In a second incident Oct. 21, a young woman sneaking out of the facility fell from a second-story window and fractured a vertebrae, he said.

Sainten said many of the youths at the home arrived with histories of bad behavior and that Pride House should not be blamed for all the youths’ problems.

It was two days after the injury to the teenager that the county ordered 48 youths under its supervision removed from the facility. Most of the teens went home--either to other family foster homes or to group homes--but five were unaccounted for and reported “absent without leave.”

The county Probation Department, which places teens with minor nonviolent criminal records in the home, said it ordered 20 youthful offenders pulled out of the facility last week.

“We got a report that the kids were not participating in school. The police told us that in the middle of the day kids would be out without supervision, just loitering or hanging out,” said Joe Estrada, director of placement for the Los Angeles County Probation Department.

Estrada said the action was unusual and that his agency had only moved young offenders out of one other facility in the past 2 1/2 years.