How one agency built a multi-million dollar business in migrant children (NY Times)
By Liz Robbins
July 31, 2018
When 17-year-old Destani Williams ran away from an upstate New York residential treatment program in May 2017 and was found dead a week later, it was but the latest in a string of troubling incidents at Cayuga Centers, a 166-year-old child-welfare agency.
In the year leading up to her death, three workers were arrested on charges of abuse, and the agency was sued for negligence as a result. The local police in Auburn, N.Y., complained about hundreds of emergency calls to deal with runaway residents and violent incidents on the campus, which included residents injuring police officers, throwing chairs through windows and wielding shards of glass to cut staff members.
“It seems that Cayuga Centers has evolved into a business whose priority is making money as opposed to a family service that helps youth meet the challenges of life,” Officer Joseph Villano, the president of the local police union, wrote in August 2017 to the agency’s board of trustees in a letter that was made public.
But by then, Cayuga Centers was far along in its transition from a modest nonprofit specializing in residential programs in the Finger Lakes region, first into an agency providing foster care services in New York City and beyond, and then into the country’s largest provider of foster care homes for unaccompanied minors — migrant children who had come to the U.S. border alone.
More at NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/nyregion/cayuga-centers-immigration-separated-children.html?hpw&rref=nyregion&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
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