A group-home agency that has housed some of Ontario's most disturbed teenagers for more than a decade is under investigation by police after an official report alleged poor conditions, inadequate supervision and sexual impropriety by staff.
The Peterborough Lakefield Police Service has watched Mitchell Group Homes, which runs 21 group homes in the Peterborough area, for months. In December, an investigation by Ontario's Office of Child and Family Service Advocacy into the private, for-profit company's affairs revealed a litany of serious allegations: slack supervision of an untrained staff, filth and ill repair in some of the houses, whitewashed incident reports, the placement of known predators in homes with abuse victims and sexual improprieties by workers.
Sources say the houses were dirty, holes in the walls were left unrepaired, youngsters were sleeping on mattresses on the floor and residents spent most of their time watching television because they had no programs. Some children were in unlicensed homes, and ratios of staff to residents in contracts signed with children's aid societies were being violated.
Since the advocate's report, CAS bodies have increased monitoring of the group homes. The Children's Aid Society of Toronto, the agency's biggest customer with 21 children in its care until recently, sends a worker to inspect the group homes at least once a week.
"If we felt the safety of the kids was not secure, we would not have left them there. Absolutely not," said Mary McConville, executive director with the Catholic Children's Aid Society of Toronto. "By the same token, we want to see the problems resolved."
Mitchell Group Homes grew quickly as it tapped into a booming market of providing homes for troubled children. Children's aid societies had 17,463 children in their care as of last September, a 55-per-cent jump from five years earlier, when the Ontario government began an overhaul of the child-welfare system that lowered the bar for taking youngsters into care.
The Kawartha-Haliburton CAS investigated Mitchell last fall and pulled its children from its homes.
"Until the issues are addressed that the children's advocate raised, and until all these investigations are over, we've decided not to place kids there," executive director Hugh Nicholson said.
The Toronto CAS conducted its own investigation of Mitchell in 2001 and discovered houses in poor repair, haphazard reporting of serious occurrences and a lack of programs. But the problems were not considered serious enough to imperil children.
While the province licenses all group-home agencies and many of the homes each year, the standards for a licence relate to record-keeping and safety rather than staffing and programs. Homes are rarely inspected once the licence is issued. Smaller homes -- those with fewer than three children -- are not licensed at all.
Mitchell takes the toughest children: hormone-charged teenagers with autism, serious mental illnesses and histories of physical and sexual abuse who are sometimes violent or prone to harming themselves. It has often taken children that other group-home operators and mental-health centres have shunned.
"With some of these children, we approached 20 to 30 resources that were not prepared to take them," said Bruce Rivers, executive director of the Toronto CAS. Now some CASs say the disruption of moving them would be more traumatic than fixing the Mitchell agency's problems.
Mitchell receives at least $110 a day for every child, but often collects more. Among those in its care from the Children's Aid Society of Toronto are deeply disturbed youngsters whose fees, shared by the CAS and the province, are about $500 a day.
But sources are critical of its inexperienced staff. Some are recent high-school graduates with no training or experience with troubled children. The agency's workers include university and college students working part time.
"It's a transient work force," said Terry Baxter, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union staff representative at Mitchell. Many of the staff are paid about $12 an hour, about half the salary of a child and youth worker in a CAS group home.
One mental-health professional whose agency frequently works with disturbed teenagers said he and his colleagues have encountered problems with Mitchell Group Homes, especially since its rapid growth.
"There's a disorganization and a kind of flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants sort of feeling that makes you very nervous with some of these high-risk kids."
In her letter to children's aid societies outlining problems with Mitchell Group Homes, Child Advocate Judy Finlay alleged that children who were victims of sexual abuse were being placed in the same homes as predators.
When they investigated, the societies were told that the accusation stems from a single incident when a teenager offered another teen $5 to perform fellatio. But one worker at Mitchell said he stayed awake through his night-time sleep shift, fearing the consequences of leaving a sexually aggressive teenager unsupervised in a house of other children.
"Why we didn't have 24-7 monitoring in our houses, I don't know," he said. "But there was a call from the advocate. And after that call came, [company owner]Steve Mitchell called and said, 'Okay, we're invoking awake hours.' I was already doing it for free."
Since the investigations, Mitchell has run at about 60 per cent of its capacity. More workers have been assigned; managers have been hired, and some training for staff made available.
The company declined to comment.