Group Aims to Reopen Rehab Center

A Studio City-based teen counseling group is working to reopen Ventura County’s only residential drug and alcohol treatment center for adolescents, hoping to fill what many say is a glaring void in services for the area’s troubled youth.

The Rainbow Recovery Youth Center for girls, which operated in a four-bedroom farmhouse on an avocado- and orange-tree orchard in Santa Paula, shut its doors in August because of lack of funding. It had six beds.

“Right now, these kids have nowhere to go,” said Cary Quashen, president of Action Parent & Teen Support Program and Family Counseling Centers, of Studio City. “It’s crazy, and I feel obligated to open some beds for them.”

Quashen has signed a lease with the owners of the Santa Paula house, but Action is awaiting final approval from the state to open the group home. The target date is late February.

The group also has been trying for four months to buy a 100-year-old farmhouse in Piru it hoped to convert into a 15-bed treatment center. That effort fell through last week, Quashen said, but he added that he is determined to find another location that will work.

It could not come soon enough, say those who work directly with the county’s drug-addicted teens.

“It’s painfully obvious that there is a severe lack of treatment in the county, and even one bed would help,” said Miles Weiss, head of the Ventura County district attorney’s office juvenile justice division. “It can literally mean losing a kid for the rest of his life or turning him around early, helping him stay out of the prison system.”

Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Donna Thonis, a juvenile drug court supervisor, said she has seen many teens who need the confines of a short-term, sober-living residential treatment home.

“If there were 100 beds in Ventura County for adolescents they would be filled and there would be a waiting list,” she said. “It’s difficult to describe how lacking the resources are to treat these kids and their families.”

Live-In Treatment Seen as More Effective

Traci Lewis, former program director at Rainbow who now works with Kids in Sobriety in Oxnard, agreed that residential treatment is a critical piece of the services a county should provide.

“Nothing comes close to that type of environment when you talk about treatment,” she said.

Though the county has several counseling services for teens, that approach does not work for many young people, Weiss said. According to the latest study evaluating Ventura County’s juvenile drug court program--the cornerstone of which is intensive outpatient treatment--about 67% of the teenagers did not graduate.

The benefit of a residential setting, officials said, is that it removes teenagers from lives that are often full of peer pressure and temptation.

“You let them clear their minds before you get them back home and in outpatient counseling,” Quashen said. “I have kids saying, ‘Please, get me away from this environment.’ ”

The Action Teen House would operate much in the way Rainbow Recovery ran the youth center, Quashen said, including 24-hour supervision and a strict schedule of school, chores, counseling and group meetings.

The idea, he said, is for kids to feel like they are at home and not a hospital or institution.

Pat Zimmerman, who owns the old Santa Paula farmhouse with her husband, Wade, said the surroundings seemed to work well for the Rainbow group. They would often see the young women pumping water from the well on the property or doing chores around the orchard.

Future Center Might Be Coed

“The whole atmosphere of the house is very serene, and it’s complementary to what they were trying to do,” she said.

Quashen hopes to make the Action treatment center coed, although it is still unclear whether such a mix will be possible. There has never been a residential treatment center for teenage boys in the county.

Three of the beds would be reserved for the drug court program and funded through Action’s contract with the county, Quashen said. The other three would be paid for privately, mostly through insurance companies, he said. Stays would range from 30 days to six months, depending on the case.

A key component will be involving the teens’ families in weekend barbecues and other events, which Quashen believes is crucial for success in kicking a drug habit. That kind of interaction is not possible now, as teens who need intensive treatment are often sent out of state.

Action plans to submit its paperwork to the state’s Department of Social Services by Jan. 1, and should get approval within 30 days of that date, said Vinny Cappello, Action’s executive vice president.

County officials said they are confident Action can make the Santa Paula house work.

“They have proved themselves as an entity that delivers treatment in an effective way,” Weiss said. “They’re trying very hard to provide treatment and help people.”