A New Door Opens to Treat Troubled Children

It was the kind of walk-through inspection that every owner of a brand-new home takes before the carpenters pack up and leave.

Except that Gerald Zaslaw wasn’t looking for normal construction defects as he went room-to-room through his new $3.5-million place in West Los Angeles the other day.

He was looking for doors that open too conveniently. For lighting fixtures that are just too readily accessible. For interior furnishings that are too easy to rearrange.

Zaslaw is head of Vista del Mar Child and Family Services. And he was making a last-minute check of California’s first high-security residential psychiatric treatment center for children.

State and local mental health and child welfare experts will attend today’s 11:30 a.m. dedication of the Joyce and Stanley Black Family Special Care Facility on the 17-acre Vista del Mar grounds at 3200 Motor Ave.

The privately built treatment center will house 24 severely mentally ill and emotionally disturbed children and teenagers who have failed in other group-home and foster-family settings.

Long-term psychiatric lock-down facilities for minors have been unavailable in California since many of the state’s mental hospitals were closed. That has forced parents and child welfare workers to send California’s most troubled youngsters to residential treatment centers elsewhere, including Oregon, Washington and Utah.

Experts say secured facilities are necessary for the safety of severely disturbed children and adolescents--those who endanger themselves by repeatedly running away or engaging in such behavior as self-mutilation.

That’s why Vista del Mar’s new center has been built from the ground up. And designed so it doesn’t look like a jail.

The 14,500-square-foot, Y-shaped complex features three living areas with eight bedrooms each that can be constantly monitored by child psychiatrists and psychologists with direct views or video cameras. School classrooms operated by special education teachers are in an attached building. A fenced-in outdoor recreation area is next to them.

The two dozen private bedrooms feature built-in shelves, desks and beds that are virtually indestructible. Comfortable common areas outside the bedrooms have high, vandal-proof ceilings, shatter-resistant windows and heavy-duty furniture that is too big to be picked up and thrown by a child in an uncontrollable rage.

During his walk-through, Zaslaw found one classroom door not yet equipped with the sophisticated magnetic locking system used by the center. He noticed an outdoor planter that would have to be removed because it could be used by children trying to climb onto the roof.

In the three living areas, stylish wooden acoustic baffles suspended from the ceiling over carpeted conversation pit areas drew Zaslaw’s attention.

“The wood slats will eventually have to come out of them,” he told Jayne Rothblatt, Vista del Mar’s director of development. “That’s where the kids will be tossing their tennis shoes.”

Zaslaw knows. Before coming to Vista del Mar 13 years ago he ran pioneering adolescent lock-down facilities in Oregon and Washington. Here, he joined others in pressing for a secured residential area for his current organization, which was started nearly 100 years ago as a home for Jewish orphans. The Vista del Mar campus now houses 88 emotionally troubled youngsters, of various ethnic backgrounds, in facilities that aren’t locked. It also offers such services to the public as adoption counseling, parental education and assistance for the disabled.

“There will be damage--we know that,” Zaslaw said of the new locked center. “These are destructive kids--they’ve had so many failures that they think there’s no one who can help them. They’ve been kicked out of every other program.”

In recent years, California has been forced to send about 250 youngsters a year out of state for individualized, long-term therapeutic care in locked facilities. Mental health experts have complained that such distant facilities deny children access to badly needed emotional support from their families.

Until 1997, California law allowed locked facilities for juvenile mental health patients only in psychiatric hospitals where stays were limited.

Legislation enacted that year created a new social services licensing category called “community treatment facility,” paving the way for private centers such as Vista del Mar’s.

“It’s a very important new treatment regimen,” said Carole Hood, executive director of the California Alliance of Child and Family Services, a statewide organization of about 200 agencies. “Vista del Mar is the first. Another dozen are being planned.”

No public funding has been allocated for the construction of community treatment facilities, however. The Vista del Mar center was launched with a $1-million donation from the family of Beverly Hills developer Stanley Black.

Officials say youngsters 8 through 17 years old will be placed in the new center through referrals by the county’s Mental Health and Children and Family Services departments or by private physicians, schools or families. Unlike juvenile hall lockups, it won’t take youths ordered there by the juvenile probation department.

All referrals will be reviewed by a multidisciplinary placement committee of mental health professionals to make certain the treatment is appropriate for the child, officials say. Additionally, children 14 and older will go through court proceedings before placement if they have not voluntarily agreed to move into the center.

The average stay is expected to be about 120 days and the projected $350-per-day cost will be covered by private insurance and state and federal funding.

The center will begin accepting referrals next month, although Zaslaw said 60 referral inquiries have already been received.

While the Vista del Mar residence is not totally escape-proof, officials say a 2-1 ration of children to professional staffers will allow tight supervision.

The lock-down center concept is long overdue for California, according to those who have sent their children to out-of-state psychiatric facilities.

“If, a year ago, this had been here, it would have been so wonderful,” said parent Linda Taylor, a Glendale resident whose 18-year-old daughter on Wednesday completed a year at a secured treatment center in Englewood, Colo.

Taylor said she turned to the Colorado facility after her daughter repeatedly ran away from a conventional, open treatment center in the Los Angeles area. She said she learned about the out-of-state lock-down program by accident--from someone she encountered in a hospital emergency room when her daughter was getting her stomach pumped after a suicide attempt.

Before she heard about the out-of-state treatment centers, the only local locked facilities Taylor found were juvenile detention centers that are part of the criminal justice system.

“They were punitive facilities, where most residents were there for criminal offenses. I wasn’t going to put her in a setting that would make her worse,” Taylor said.

“The one at Vista del Mar isn’t going to be like that.”