Insider: Staffing Crisis, Failed Leadership Put SYSC Safety At Risk

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

Staff members at the Sununu Youth Services Center (SYSC) are burned out, concerned about their safety, and have lost trust in leadership to fix the problems, according to an insider’s report released this week.

The insider report, distributed to members of the legislative ad hoc committee investigating SYSC, shows that staff members do not trust the Division for Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) team put in place to address the deteriorating situation.

“There has been weak leadership at SYSC for years. Unqualified administrators who continue to fail the program, not hire qualified staff, and refuse to hold these juveniles accountable. They do not educate these juveniles, do not address Special Education Plans, and have failed to hire full-time certified teachers. Not only is the facility unsafe for both staff and the juveniles, we are also failing to educate the juveniles in the facility,” the insider wrote.

Under the current administrative structure, DCYF, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, oversees SYSC operations.

The SYSC insider claims current management is ignoring the facility’s clinical staff, leading to more violence and dysfunction at the juvenile detention center. Assistant Child Advocate Jason Taylor said the report illustrates why staff members feel unsafe and why the children are being failed.

“It takes a tremendous amount of energy, and I would point to the report that you got that shows that staff are extremely burnt out,” Taylor said.

A 13-year-old was viciously assaulted by an older teen last week, sending the victim to the hospital with a broken femur and other injuries. The assault came after the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office released a report clearing staff and administrators of wrongdoing but concluding that the facility’s management culture is contributing to dysfunction among staff.

Critics say the attorney general’s unsigned report is an attempt to whitewash the problems on their watch.

Sen. Victoria Sullivan (R-Manchester) said it is time to make real changes, starting with removing current DCYF leaders, including DCYF Director Marie Noonan and interim SYSC Chief Jen Ross-Ferguson.

“This isn’t just about the SYSC. I get more calls about DCYF than any other complaint. We have had children die on their watch while innocent families are ripped apart. DCYF and DHHS need a top-down overhaul. No more promoting from within. We need new leadership and a new approach,” Sullivan said.

DCYF has a grim history of failures going back decades, including its oversight of the Youth Development Center during decades of rampant physical and sexual abuse of children that was finally exposed in 2017. The department is also known for failures in its child protective services, including failing to stop the abuse of Harmony Montgomery before she was murdered in 2019 and failing to protect 3-year-old Brielle Gage before she was murdered in 2014.

“They cannot be trusted and failed as leaders,” Sullivan said.

Some of the SYSC insider’s claims could not be verified. In one instance, the insider alleged that a convicted sex offender was recently employed through a third-party contractor to work at SYSC and that administrators lied about the hire. But DHHS spokesman Jake Leon told NHJournal the allegation is false.

“DHHS has confirmed that the allegations that an SYSC contractor hired a sex offender who used an alias to work at the facility are untrue,” Leon said.

The insider’s allegation appears to be based partly on AI-generated information, and NHJournal was unable to find evidence to corroborate the claim.

However, the fact that staff members have so little confidence in management that they believe a sex offender was working at SYSC is another sign of the broken culture. Staff members no longer trust administrators to tell them the truth about critical safety issues.

Ross-Ferguson is working to recruit, train, and hire enough people to bring the facility up to full staffing levels. Until those employees are in place, SYSC will rely on third-party contractors and juvenile probation and parole officers to ensure the facility can operate safely, Leon said.

That also means current SYSC staff members and JPPOs will be required to work mandatory overtime, according to Leon. Exhausted and disgruntled employees are viewed as contributing to many of the facility’s operational and cultural problems.

Ad hoc committee member Rep. Kim Rice (R-Hudson) recently warned that overextended staff would lead to a safety failure. That was before the 13-year-old was assaulted.

“We’ve been warning people things like this were going to happen,” Rice said. “We are deeply concerned someone is going to end up dead.”

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.