Plans for a locked facility for justice-involved youths are on hold after the state withdrew a zoning request last month to build the so-called Green Mountain Youth Campus on state-owned land in Vergennes.
The facility — slated to include an eight-bed crisis stabilization program and a six-bed treatment program — was intended to replace the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, a 30-bed facility in Essex that closed in 2020 amid allegations that children were abused by staff. But after a year of intermittent talks with Vergennes community leaders, Buildings and General Services Commissioner Wanda Minoli wrote to city officials on June 12 withdrawing the state’s request to build the campus on a plot of land off Comfort Hill Road.
“While we’ve made good-faith efforts to collaborate with the City of Vergennes, it has proven difficult to align the necessary local, state, and stakeholder processes in a timely and mutually beneficial way,” Arykah Radke, a Department for Children and Families deputy commissioner, wrote in a statement explaining the decision. Radke noted that “navigating competing priorities, political dynamics, and procedural complexities has made progress challenging.”
In March 2024, the state shelved a similar plan to build a secure youth facility in Newbury, following strong opposition by residents there.
Despite the more recent setback, Radke said the state has no plans to change the scope of the project and still intends to move forward with building the facility as soon as a viable location can be found either in Vergennes or elsewhere.
“Given the critical timeline for this project and the state’s responsibility to address urgent needs in our youth justice system, we’re now focused on exploring sites that are already more appropriately zoned or where land use pathways are clearer and more predictable,” Radke wrote.
The state agency also plans to maintain its contract with the Sentinel Group, the private company hired to help design and run the center.
But Vermont child, youth and family advocate Matthew Bernstein and deputy advocate Lauren Higbee — state employees who operate independently from DCF — said the collapse of the Vergennes plan poses an opportunity to reconsider whether building the Green Mountain Youth Center is the best solution for the state.
“Rather than continuing to believe that a new facility is the answer, what if we began with a more fundamental question: What supports do children, youth and families need to stay in their communities?” Bernstein and Higbee wrote in a statement shared with Seven Days.
The Green Mountain Youth Campus is anticipated to cost between $21 million and $25 million to build; the state has hired ReArch Construction to lead the project. DCF has not said what it would cost to house youths in a new facility but acknowledged that it will be more expensive than Woodside. In 2020, Woodside’s last year in operation, the state spent $528,000 for each youth placed there, according to the Office of the Child, Youth and Family Advocate’s 2024 annual report.
Bernstein and Higbee suggested that the millions being funneled into the Green Mountain Youth Center could be better spent on initiatives such as “intensive in-home wraparound services.”
“An increased focus on upstream services is not only the right thing to do for children, youth and families,” they wrote, “but it is also more cost-effective for the state.”
In testimony to the Vermont legislature in January, Bernstein and Higbee pointed to research showing that youth incarceration does not reduce delinquent behavior and instead does lasting damage to young people’s health and well-being. Furthermore, they testified, physical and sexual abuse are commonplace at juvenile facilities.
The state is currently paying Sentinel, a private contractor, around $343,500 per month to run the Red Clover Treatment Center, a four-bed “crisis stabilization program” in Middlesex that has been serving justice-involved youths since October 2024 as a stopgap measure until a new facility is built. Since Red Clover opened, 18 youths have been served by the program; all four beds were occupied last month, according to information provided by DCF. Radke wrote in her statement that the facility is providing “high quality services to youth in care.” Sentinel’s contract to operate Red Clover runs through the end of 2026 and may be extended through 2028, according to Radke. She said the state anticipates continuing to contract with Sentinel to run Red Clover until the Green Mountain Youth Campus is operational.
Sentinel was founded by Jeff Caron, who also operates the Vermont School for Girls in Bennington and Mount Prospect Academy in New Hampshire. Those two nonprofits have come under scrutiny because of criminal charges filed against several former staffers and dozens of lawsuits alleging sexual, physical and mental abuse. Caron and other Sentinel staff are being paid up to $250 an hour in consulting fees to help design the new youth treatment center, according a state contract obtained by Seven Days through a public records request.
Seven Days wrote about Caron and his ventures in an April story that detailed lawsuits involving the other programs. On the day the story was published, an ad hoc committee that was formed to represent Vergennes met with state officials to talk about the project, according to the committee’s chair, Mark Koenig.
During their discussion, meeting minutes show, Vergennes Police Chief Jason Ouellette raised concerns to DCF Commissioner Chris Winters about the police involvement he anticipated would be needed if the facility were built. Winters reassured the chief and members of the committee that the contractor running the facility — Sentinel — would be overseeing day-to-day operations and “would handle any possible problems in a professional and competent manner.”
Koenig said in an interview that he was surprised that Winters had not mentioned any of Caron’s facilities’ past issues to the ad hoc committee.
“This is why we have a hard time trusting the state,” Koenig said. “[They] are not telling us the full story.”
Since the state announced plans to build a youth facility in Vergennes in May 2024, Koenig said the ad hoc committee met with officials from DCF and the Department of Buildings and General Services four or five times in an attempt to figure out how to get community buy-in. The committee floated a number of ideas, Koenig said, including having the state transfer land to the city so it could build much-needed housing. He got the impression that state officials weren’t particularly interested in the committee’s ideas.
Koenig said he had a difficult time reconciling the urgency that the state has expressed at times about building a new youth facility with the more sporadic, circumspect manner in which state officials engaged with the city of Vergennes on the project.
Still, the state maintains that the development of the Green Mountain Youth Campus is a top priority.
The center will improve services for a variety of young people, Deputy Commissioner Radke wrote in a June 24 statement, including “youth with persistent behavioral challenges that are currently served in out of state treatment settings, youth in crisis that present public safety issues, youth with existing legal challenges needing service coordination to return to other states, and youth with criminal (adult) charges who cannot integrate with adult populations in a correctional setting,”
“Green Mountain Youth Campus represents an important layer to Vermont’s treatment array,” Radke’s statement continued, “and another step to fortifying the system of care for the most vulnerable youth in our state.”
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.
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