The greenery lining the winding western reaches of Colonel Glenn Road is plump and shaggy from the spring rain.
On the far outskirts of Little Rock, just as the road seems about to run out of emerald twists and turns, sits Youth Home, an orderly collection of buildings where a more controlled but equally verdant growth project is underway.
Inside a classroom adjoining the Youth Home gym, a group of elementary school students under the direction of recreational therapist Shelly Zellner are in the process of germinating seeds in wet paper towels.
As one eager young man volunteers to explain, the moisture will make the seeds sprout, then they will be carried across the campus lawn to a cluster of recently constructed boxes for transplanting and, hopefully, full growth as the year progresses.
The gardening project is the result of recent grant funding obtained for Youth Home projects and improvements. The children will check the progress of their plants daily, just as their teachers and mentors on the Youth Home team will check the progress of the children — Youth Home’s real growth project. “I want to teach the kids how to have fun,” Zellner says. “They just don’t know how to be kiddos.”
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Youth Home Inc. is a private nonprofit mental health provider that offers a variety of services. While it is known for its focus on children with behavioral, psychological and adjustment difficulties, Youth Home has expanded its services and facilities over the years.
“A lot of people don’t realize that we are more than just this campus,” says Youth Home CEO David Napier. Among other things, services include adolescent, residential and community-based treatment, day treatment, school-based services and adolescent and young adult addiction counseling and outpatient services — for all ages — at Youth Home’s satellite Behavioral Health Services of Arkansas. “They just need help, and they’re great kids,” Napier says.
Kalea Carter was battling depression and behavior problems when she arrived at Youth Home after a suicide attempt on Christmas Eve 2013.
“I was very selfish, I wanted to do everything my way,” Kalea says of her difficulties relating to her divorced parents, stepmother and other adults trying to provide guidance.
Kalea’s father, Mark Carter, struggled with his decision and could barely tolerate the idea of leaving his daughter at Youth Home for six months. “That was my little girl,” Carter says. “I couldn’t speak. I had to just swallow my pride. Hug her and march out. I was in shambles — I had nothing left, so it was tough. But that was the beginning.”
But it was a rocky beginning. For close to four months Kalea resisted the help and guidance the Youth Home team offered.“I was like, ‘I don’t deserve to be here. There’s nothing wrong with me,’” she says.
The Good Kids
Youth Home’s primary services are the aforementioned Behavioral Health Services of Arkansas — which was formerly the Youth Home Family Therapy Services — in west Little Rock; the on-campus Siebert Education Center for classroom instruction; day treatment for youths who live at home but require specialized academic and psychiatric help; community residential treatment offering emotional therapy for girls ages 12-17 who are in Department of Children and Family Services custody; and the Intensive Psychiatric Residential Program for the treatment of emotional and behavioral health for youth ages 12-17.
The Youth Home complex on Colonel Glenn includes three residential homes for boys and three for girls — plus the separate residence for girls in the foster system — totaling 70 beds with an average daily occupancy rate of 93-94 percent.
“‘Oh, you’re where they send the bad kids,’” says Napier, repeating a common misconception he hears from outsiders. “And nothing could be further from the truth.” Napier tells a story about a boy who was going through the day treatment program and was given a new jacket to replace the raggedy one he was wearing. But the boy kept returning to Youth Home in his tattered jacket and was asked what happened to his new one. “I gave it to my little brother; he doesn’t have one,” the boy answered.
Youth Home kicked off its 50th anniversary festivities with the annual Eggshibition, one of the area’s more popular charity events, which has raised close to $25 million for Youth Home over the past 25 years.
One of several fundraisers benefiting Youth Home throughout the year, it takes on an added significance when one considers that the residential program, funded through Medicaid, had a state cap placed on its consumer price index in 2001. That means that Youth Home has for 15 years operated under a funding increase rate capped at 2001 figures. “That’s made the funds we raise more important each passing year,” says Napier.
In 1966, social worker Carol Burns Smelley founded Youth Home, banding together with a group of concerned citizens who, like her, recognized the need for residential mental health care for the state’s emotionally troubled adolescents.
As the first executive director, Smelley locked in Youth Home’s vision of helping kids and their families overcome challenges and return to their communities as full, contributing members.
To this day, Napier says, Youth Home exists “to give a hand up to young people, for those young people who need a little bit of help dealing with emotional and psychological difficulties they may have.”
Kids are either referred to Youth Home by the courts, come from other therapeutic environments or are enrolled by schools — Youth Home contracts with three state districts, parents or other concerned family members. The average length of stay for the residential programs is 6½ months, though each child proceeds at a different pace, with four levels of transition in which the kids earn privileges at each level.
A state board-approved school is on site to meet the children’s educational needs.
Children come from “deplorable” at-risk situations, says Napier, recalling one child whose mother’s boyfriend locked him in a cabinet on weekends, or they can come from outwardly average families and are dealing with bipolar disorder, depression or some triggering episode like a major change within the family.
The stigmas of guilt, failure and shame within families dealing with their children’s challenges can be most difficult to overcome, explains Napier, and Youth Home is planning a promotional campaign to attack such stigmas.
“They still feel guilty about this, and that has been an issue. They don’t need to,” Napier says.
“It really wasn’t clear,” Mark Carter continues, “until we came here, where it was more stable, and we started thinking, ‘Three months? She’s going to be here three months?’ They went, ‘Oh yeah. She’ll be here at least three months, probably six.’ I was ready to walk out. I said ‘No, no, no, no, no. Hold on.’ I was afraid. But I just had to put it in my heart and have faith it was for the best.”
Teamwork
Napier, 60, was a self-described “beach boy” growing up in Pensacola, Fla. He worked for a time in his dad’s building and development business, but says he always had more of a heart for people and chose to enter the ministry. He wound up in Arkansas and spent 19 years at Emmanuel Baptist in Little Rock. He joined the Youth Home board in 1992.
He functioned first as chief operating officer and co-executive director before becoming executive director on Jan. 1, 2009. “It often felt more like the ministry than anything I did in the church,” he explains.
After taking the reins, Napier mandated the term “team” be applied to Youth Home’s roster of teachers, clinicians, therapists and other professionals. A tour around the campus emphasizes the point. Each professional has a different responsibility — some supervise the kids’ educational needs, some oversee their domestic life — but all share the team goal of getting the young people back to their families and restoring a full and healthy life experience.
Standing in the gym after showing off her students’ gardening project, Zellner talks about the wealth of recreational activities — from art to summer volunteering to the equine care program at a horse ranch in Hot Springs — that teach concepts like communication skills, etiquette, morals, values, restraint, interaction and cooperation versus competition.
In the education building, Education Services Director Ann Greiman shows off the smart TVs in each room, the computer lab and library stocked with help from book fairs and Title I funds. Behavior makes up 25 percent of the students’ grades, classroom occupancy is limited to no more than 10 at a time and Youth Home contracts on-site therapists for speech and occupational therapy as well as the occasional physical therapy needs.
At Mabee House for girls, Unit Manager Liz Floyd discusses the system of posted chore schedules and weekly goals that reinforce a sense of organization and responsibility. She shows off the kitchen, open area, family and recreation rooms. In each two-person bedroom the girls’ beds are neatly made, and stuffed animals and other mementos from home adorn the beds and nightstands.
The residences are staffed around the clock, with a 1 to 4 staff-to-student ratio, and safety searches are conducted daily.
Mabee House also has a “Good and Bad” room to separate out students who have reached Level 4 and earned some additional privacy or are dealing with problems that can range, but are not limited to, theft or sexual acting out.
A seclusion room for those exhibiting more aggressive behavior sits as a “last resort,” Floyd says, but kids are never confined without some form of observation and with de-escalation training. Youth Home is trying to move away from seclusion as much as possible.
At each stop the team members make it clear that, across the board, Youth Home is always ready to try new methods and phase out out-dated practices. Mechanical restraints have been done away with and chemical restraint is barely used, says Jennifer Beck, a licensed clinical social worker who has been on the Youth Home team for 6½ years. “We just do our best to keep the kids safe and the staff safe,” Beck says.
At some point around her fourth month, Kalea experienced a breakthrough in a group therapy session. She realized she was with the only people who could truly understand what she was experiencing and realized she was among some of the best friends she would ever find.
“When you come you bond and have relationships with people you cannot find anywhere else,” she says. “I can never just go find the best friend that I found in here because here we’re open with our problems and when we’re crying in session you only have these 11 other girls to hold you and hug you and talk about their problems and relate to you with.”
Now reunited with her family, Kalea and Mark have shared their story on camera, and the film was among those shown at Eggshibition to reinforce Youth Home’s mission and its success in helping to put fractured families back to together.
“If you’re struggling like I was,” says Kalea in the film, her eyes shining, “or if you’re stuck in a place where you think killing yourself is a resort, you obviously deserve — you need to be — in a place like this to learn how to cope and deal with the normal things that you’re going to deal with every day when you’re an adult and learn how to deal and cope with whatever problems you have going on at home.
“You can’t just face them on your own. I think Youth Home has brought me from what I was way down here,” she gestures to the floor with her hand, “to all the way up here” she says, bringing her hand up to head level. “With any other facility I wouldn’t have been like this.”
Concluding the guided tour, Beck stops outside the main administration building with some final thoughts about Youth Home’s mission and success stories like Kalea’s. The afternoon’s intermittent, light rain begins to fall again, but it feels less like an inconvenience and more like a baptism. All umbrellas remain closed.
Beck notes there are several veteran team members like herself who have spent years at the home — unusual in a profession that sees a lot of turnover. “This is the only place for me,” she says, her eyes taking in the Youth Home campus and grounds. Across the lawn, near the education building, the new plant boxes sit silently, full of earth and promise.
