The state Youth Services Division director's five-year, six-pronged plan to attack chronic problems of understaffing, poorly trained workers and lack of comprehensive treatment for child criminals will be reviewed Wednesday by two legislative committees.
Members of the House Interim Committee on Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs and the Senate Interim Committee on Children and Youth will hear a presentation from Director Russell Rigsby. A public comment period will be held after Rigsby's report at the meeting to begin at 10 a.m. in Room 130 of the state Capitol.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last month published a three-day series of articles detailing problems in the division of the Department of Human Services and Rigsby's plan for making improvements. The plan costs $9.9 million and calls for eliminating 38 positions to be replaced by 45 positions requiring different qualifications.
The first two years of the plan have been funded. Rigsby plans to lobby the Legislature in 2001 for money to complete the plan.
The plan, which began this year, includes:
- Reshaping five regional juvenile camps around the state into comprehensive treatment complexes at Alexander, Mansfield, Harrisburg, Lewisville and Dumas;
- Tearing down antiquated dormitories at the Alexander campus and the Mansfield wilderness camp and replacing them with modern, high-security structures;
- Reorganizing the Alexander staff and hiring more highly skilled workers and paying them more;
- Creating a major complex at Dermott to house 18- to 21-year-olds and to separate more violent offenders from the general population;
- Hiring 14 more staff monitors to travel to every Youth Services Division facility and evaluate the care of children each month, which would bring the monitoring staff up to 20; and
- Adding hundreds of slots for children in the treatment programs.