Why workers quit en masse at Youth Ranch’s Boise shelter: ‘toxic work environment’
Former workers at the state’s only shelter for homeless and runaway youths say top managers at the Idaho Youth Ranch ignored their longstanding concerns about safety and understaffing, prompting a mass exodus of staff last month that’s kept the shelter indefinitely closed.
Fourteen employees at Hays House in West Boise, including all five supervisors, quit since the end of July, according to the youth shelter’s former program manager and several other workers who resigned. Their departures left just four recent hires on the work schedule, forcing Hays House’s closure in mid-September.
Hays House has operated for 50 years as a short-term center for at-risk youths struggling with past traumas and other issues that could lead to potential homelessness. The shelter houses up to 18 vulnerable children facing medical and mental health challenges while they await foster care placements. Stays normally last up to a month, though children sometimes are there as long as a year.
Ann Burton, Hays House’s former program manager, led the program for two years and was one of the employees who resigned. She told the Idaho Statesman in an interview that the closure has left the state without a critical resource for youths who often have nowhere else to go. It also left more than a dozen workers still reeling after their sudden exits.
“It’s heartbreaking, because it’s the type of work you can see yourself retiring doing,” Burton said by phone. “More kids are going to be living on the street, and we’ll have more kids being trafficked, which is something we saw a lot of in Idaho. So without those resources, there will be more kids unfortunately dealing with this.”
Scott Curtis, CEO of the Youth Ranch, which operates Hays House and a network of more than 20 thrift stores throughout the state, denied that he and the nonprofit have mishandled operations at the Boise youth shelter, and disputed former employees’ claims. The safety and well-being of the shelter residents and staff have always been a priority, and worker complaints have been taken seriously, he said.
“But the staff were stretched and did not feel supported,” Curtis said in an interview outside of Hays House. “The staff was phenomenal, and that includes the people who left. These are really good people who care about kids.”
He said the coronavirus pandemic made it difficult to retain employees and replace those who left — the same obstacle now faced by hospitals and other health care providers.
Unlike the thrift stores and other Youth Ranch programs, however, workers from one store or program cannot be reassigned to fill in at Hays House, because of the specialized skills and training such work requires, he said.
“We had been working really hard to not turn youth away from the only program of its kind,” said Curtis, a licensed social worker since 2002. “In hindsight, we should have made the decision to pause and regroup and retrain more staff to provide the support the staff needed. … That’s what we take responsibility for.”
But some of the workers told the Statesman that years of what they described as mismanagement by the nonprofit’s executive team created a “toxic work environment” they could no longer overcome. They said they were disheartened at thinking they had no other option but to walk away from jobs most had worked for several years.
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Mariah May, a former program supervisor, said in a phone interview as she fought back tears. “That job, it wasn’t my job. It was my passion, it was my life. I spent more hours there and with those kids over the last six years than I did with my own kids half of the time. And I put my entire heart and soul into that house and worked long, tireless hours, and then watched it all crumble to the ground within 72 hours. It was just mind-blowing.”
History of serving at-risk youth
Hays House was founded in 1953 to provide a safe place for children ages 8 to 18. It serves youths who are runaways or homeless, or who have suffered from abuse, neglect or other traumas.
Idaho Youth Ranch underwent a major reorganization after a 2018 Statesman investigation into its operations.
The examination found that the nonprofit was struggling to serve the mental health needs of vulnerable local youths and their families. One former therapist said staffing was in such a tailspin that, for a time, the nonprofit could not provide any outpatient therapy to children or families.
Idaho Youth Ranch’s executive leaders at that time said they were aware of problems and were addressing them.
Curtis was hired in 2019. He came to the nonprofit after stints running the Caldwell YMCA and serving on the leadership team of the Treasure Valley Family YMCA in Boise. Before that, he was a social worker, and he still maintains his Idaho license.
Violent episode triggers staff exits
Lex Fanopoulos joined Hays House in September 2019, not long after Curtis started in his role. For more than a decade, Fanopoulos worked as a police officer outside Sacramento, California. He specialized in cases of endangered children.
After retiring because of a medical issue, Fanopoulos moved to Idaho and became a stay-at-home dad. He later enrolled in a graduate program in social work at Northwest Nazarene University and was hired at Hays House.
He said it was a dream job that utilized his unique set of skills.
“I have extensive experience working with at-risk, vulnerable teens, and kids and families,” Fanopoulos said by phone. “I wanted to work even closer with families and communities.”
Fanopoulos, now 43, started off on the shelter’s floor, working directly with youths. He was later promoted to case manager and family community specialist.
Fanopoulos said the type of training he and other Hays House workers received was put to the test in late July, when three fellow employees were working and a child who had just been admitted lashed out and became violent.
The child had been denied placement by Hays House leadership earlier in the day because of a history of behavioral problems, including extreme aggression and mental health issues, Fanopoulos, Burton and three other former employees told the Statesman. But members of Idaho Youth Ranch’s executive team stepped in and overrode their decision, forcing Hays House to accept the child, they said.
Within two hours of arriving, the child grew upset and ran away from the unlocked residential facility, the three former staffers who worked that evening said. The child returned shortly after and initially smashed an outside window with a flower pot.
“He proceeded to break out multiple windows inside the shelter in front of other youth, in front of staff,” said Fanopoulos, who reviewed video as part of the critical incident team that examined what happened and the staff’s response. “There was one point where the youth grabbed a shard of glass and postured and approached one of the staff members.”
The other eight youths staying at the shelter were taken to safety down a hallway in a conference room, Curtis said.
A staff member called 911 to have Boise police regain control of the situation, the former employees said. A Boise police spokesperson confirmed a call for service concerning a juvenile to the Hays House property at 6:30 p.m. July 30. BPD denied a Statesman request under the Idaho Public Records Act seeking the police report from the incident, citing an active criminal case.
Youth admissions called into question
Burton, who has more than 20 years of experience in the field across three states, said the decision to admit the child was part of a growing pattern among members of Idaho Youth Ranch’s executive team. She said it showed they were more concerned about fulfilling contractual obligations with agencies like the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare than the staff and Hays House’s residents.
“They didn’t care if we didn’t have enough staff for a shift or if the youth was dangerous, because the contract was more important than us and our safety,” Burton said.
Curtis said Hays House staffers approved the child’s admission, and members of the Youth Ranch’s executive team were not involved. He allowed Statesman reporters to review redacted intake records showing that staff members signed off on placement of the child, as well as another in dispute from earlier in the month.
“Admission decisions for Hays House are made by the Hays House leadership team, including the Hays House therapist,” he said.
Hays House’s lone in-house therapist worked at the shelter for three years and was among the group of employees who quit at the end of August. She requested that her name not be included in this story for fear of reprisal in her current job.
She told the Statesman that she was in agreement on denying admission to the child involved in the violent episode in July, in addition to the child earlier that month whose health needs were beyond the staff’s comfort level. Burton said the intake records produced by Curtis show that staff was forced to sign-off on admitting the children once the Youth Ranch’s executive team overruled them.
Facilities such as Hays House can refuse an admission if they do not have the staff or resources to properly care for a child, and such a response is not unusual, Niki Forbing-Orr, Health and Welfare spokesperson, said by email. The department, however, could not provide the Statesman with copies of Hays House admission denials requested under the Idaho Public Records Act, because Health and Welfare said it does not maintain a list of such records.
Curtis defended admitting both children, including the one from the July incident. He said that anger issues are common among the youths for whom Hays House provides shelter.
“That’s part of the reason this place is here,” he said. “When you’re in an environment like this, some of the kids you get act out. But if you started eliminating every kid with anger issues or with background stuff, you wouldn’t be helping the kids.”
Employees concerned about their safety
Nonetheless, the July incident resurfaced past objections among Hays House staff about their personal safety.
“Instead of having our backs and trusting our judgment … they’d say you guys need to accept this kid,” said May, the former program supervisor. “Senior management would say: ‘It doesn’t matter what kinds of kids, we need to be accepting the kids, no matter how high risk. The house needs to be as full as it can be,’ despite having one staff on shift. Safety to them is not a concern.”
No workers or other youth residents were injured during the violent episode, but staff reported feeling physically threatened by the child.
“That was the last straw there,” Burton said of the incident, and the subsequent treatment she said she witnessed by the Youth Ranch’s executive team of the floor supervisor. “The director of HR, the first thing she asked was, ‘How did she let this happen?’ That really angered me, to put it back on staff like it was their fault. The next day came, there was no conversation of, ‘How is she doing? How are kids doing?’ None of that.”
The floor supervisor the night of the incident later expressed ongoing concerns for her safety, but was expected back the next week to work her scheduled shifts. This despite experiencing what two of her Hays House superiors labeled adverse and ongoing responses following the episode.
“I was expected to go back to work in the exact same conditions that led to that event, two days later — no staffing changes, no changes in policy, no changes in procedure,” said the former floor supervisor, who requested not to be named out of concerns for her safety and current job security. “Whenever management would come in and talk to us, they would act like they were surprised there was only one person on a shift. It’s like, ‘We’ve been telling you for months, but you’re neglecting to hear it.’ It didn’t seem very important to them.”
Curtis said privacy rules prohibit him from sharing what steps were taken to address the trauma suffered by the employee.
“All I will say is that if an employee that went through that didn’t feel supported, then we should have done more. If she felt unsupported, we should have done more,” he said.
Staffing problems at Hays House were amplified when the floor supervisor submitted her resignation less than two weeks after the incident.
All the while, staff vacations already had to be taken in truncated spurts because there weren’t enough workers to cover others’ scheduled time off, former employees said. Curtis disputed that, saying that during July and August, 12 Hays House workers took 379 hours of vacation, an average of more than 31 hours apiece.
The employees said they were frequently asked to work consecutive days of double shifts to ensure the 1-to-8 staff-to-resident ratio required for state licensure was maintained; were alternatively obligated to remain on-call several evenings and overnights in a row; and often forced to work alone, consistently pulling 10- to 12-hour shifts without bathroom breaks, out of concern of leaving the group of vulnerable children alone and unsupervised for even a few minutes.
“There toward the end, I was just mentally exhausted,” May said. “Some days, I knew there was no coverage no matter what I did, because I made the schedule. I just had to suck it up and work it. Nobody in senior management wants to hear about how to fix it. They just want it to be fixed without you bothering them about it.
“They knew. They just chose to keep ignoring it,” she said.
In addition, salaried managers did not receive additional pay despite sometimes working 60 hours or more per week, four former employees told the Statesman. Pay discrepancies were common, they said, with inconsistencies among hourly wage workers, who were already paid very little, they said.
“They’re offering pay levels for people working at Target, but people at Target aren’t getting attacked by children,” the former floor supervisor said.
Curtis acknowledged that salaried supervisors worked a lot of hours.
“But it’s no different than most frontline workers right now, whether in health care, mental health care,” Curtis said. “Those struggles are consistent.”
Curtis provided the Statesman with records showing that hourly floor workers, who were not identified by name in the report, averaged about 3½ hours of overtime per month between March and September. One worker who Curtis said volunteered to work overtime amassed nearly half of the hours over those seven months — more than 100 hours out of the 216 total OT hours.
The other hourly workers averaged just over an hour of overtime per month, the records indicated.
The goal at Hays House was to not turn away any youths who needed help, he said.
Former Hays House employees who spoke to the Statesman took issue with this, noting that short-staffing prevented them from accepting more challenging cases due to being stretched so thin. Also, existing staffing did not include a nurse or anyone with a medical background for overseeing acute health needs, they said.
Children with histories of aggressive or violent behavior are better suited for staff trained to manage such outbursts at lockdown facilities, they said. Hays House does not lock youths in.
“Hays is not that type of facility. Hays is basically a short-term shelter for kids who need placement,” said Michelle Cluff, Hays House’s other former case manager who handled intakes. “Parents know that if there’s a behavioral issue, we’ll call to have them discharged.”
Hays House workers quit en masse
Eleven staff members gave notice of their resignations in just over a month beginning Aug. 11, with three others leaving before that time. That led Idaho Youth Ranch officials to have Hays House pause accepting new children and to shut down the shelter.
“In hindsight, we would have made the decision to stop taking new youths a number of months earlier, before it reached this point,” Curtis said. “Stopping to get fully staffed and fully trained as a team would have helped the staff we had, and, most likely, retained many more of them.”
Hiring has been a top priority since February, Curtis told the Statesman. But with the current challenges of filling open positions, in addition to people quitting, he said Hays House could not stay ahead of the number of staff members needed to adequately run the shelter. Though, he added, Hays at one point maintained a higher ratio of staff to youth — one worker for every three children — than required by the state.
“Although staff knew that we were short-staffed according to our design, we were not short-staffed according to licensure requirements and care for the kids,” Curtis said.
When Hays House prepared to close, former workers said five children remained in the home and were left in the lurch. Their parents were notified that the youths unexpectedly had to go elsewhere. Cluff said another youth scheduled to enter the shelter the day it closed had to be turned away.
Curtis said Hays House followed its planned discharge of the five youths and did not order them to leave ahead of that time. After Idaho Youth Ranch planned to keep the shelter open in a limited capacity following the resignations, the Department of Health and Welfare worked to help Youth Ranch staff scramble over four days to find new placements for the remaining children, said Forbing-Orr, the Health and Welfare spokesperson.
Four of the children were sent to foster homes and another was released to family, Curtis said. Foster placements take time and could not have been arranged that quickly if the youths had been forced out of Hays House, he said.
In a Sept. 30 news release, the nonprofit cited the “staffing crisis across the nation” during the coronavirus pandemic as the reason it “significantly reduced services” at Hays House. The shelter had by that time been closed for more than two weeks.
Fanopoulos filed a complaint with the Idaho Children’s Residential Licensing Board concerning conditions at Hays House. He also filed a complaint with the Idaho Division of Occupational and Profession Licenses to look into whether Curtis violated any regulations, which, if found liable, could cost him his license.
Burton filed a complaint with the Idaho Department of Labor about several female workers reporting repeat instances of sexual harassment by a male co-worker — an incident she and two other former employees told the Statesman was mishandled by Curtis and other executives.
Curtis acknowledged that several complaints about the employee had been lodged over a year, but that an investigation found the man’s behavior did not rise to a level of sexual harassment. “There were issues identified regarding this individual’s personal boundaries, such as oversharing of personal information,” he said.
The Department of Health and Welfare has not received any complaints regarding the operation of Hays House, according to Forbing-Orr. A department audit of Hays House in February found two deficiencies, neither of which involved employee safety.
The federal Family Youth Services Bureau, which also provides oversight of Hays House, did not return a Statesman inquiry seeking comment.
Regardless, today Hays House sits empty. Even if the Idaho Youth Ranch attracts strong job candidates and completes their training, the soonest the nonprofit believes it can reopen the shelter is the end of the year.
“Our hope is two to three months,” Curtis said. ”But it all depends on finding those applicants and hiring them. It’s actually easier to train right now because we don’t have youth here, so we can put them all through training fairly quickly.”
Once Hays House reopens — whenever that may be — Idaho Youth Ranch said it is committed to preventing such a situation with workers from ever happening again.
“Any time when you have disruptions, there’s things that you can learn from them,” Jeff Myers, Idaho Youth Ranch’s vice president of marketing and communications, said. “So this will really be a great opportunity for us to reset things … and say, ‘All right, how do we build this back in such a way that going forward, we don’t have staff that are feeling this way?’ That will all be in place before we open.”
Meanwhile, the Youth Ranch is in the midst of building a new long-term residential treatment center with 64 beds in Canyon County to serve more than 100 youths each year. The nonprofit said the center will allow it to expand the mission of serving the mental health needs of young people and their families. So far, the nonprofit has raised almost $26 million toward the nearly $28 million center, Myers said.
The new ranch and residential treatment center is being built outside of Caldwell, next to the Hands of Promise campus, a horse park that opened in 2019. The center will be located on an old tree farm and is expected to be completed by the end of next year, with plans to begin accepting children in spring 2023, Myers said.
This story was originally published October 23, 2021 at 4:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to show that Lex Fanopoulos, a former Hays House case manager, was not present during an incident involving a child who became violent. He was part of the critical incident team that reviewed video of what happened and examined the staff’s response.
