The man overseeing Nebraska’s state-run youth facilities is out of a job as the ripples of a sex abuse scandal at its Kearney center reached the highest level yet.
Four former state employees have been arrested on allegations they sexually abused teens at the Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Center in Kearney. In at least two teens’ cases, staff knew about the allegations for months but didn’t tell key figures in their juvenile court cases.
The Department of Health and Human Services fired YRTC-Kearney’s top administrator in March. Now, DHHS has ousted her former boss.
The department announced on Wednesday that it had made “a leadership change,” installing a new senior administrator to oversee its Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Centers in Kearney, Hastings and Lincoln.
“As the department continues implementing significant operational improvements across its youth facilities, DHHS determined the new leadership is necessary to help advance these efforts and lead the next phase,” its press release reads.
The position previously belonged to Mark LaBouchardiere, who had already seen a job shift amid the mounting scandal.
Until earlier this year, LaBouchardiere served as director of facilities — overseeing the state’s three youth treatment centers, its two regional centers for adults, a psychiatric center for teen boys in Lincoln and a center for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Beatrice. But DHHS restructured its leadership in recent months so that LaBouchardiere oversaw solely the YRTCs.
Now, YRTC-Hastings administrator Camella Jacobe is serving as interim youth facilities administrator. The department will start a “nationwide search” for a permanent hire soon, according to DHHS.
A spokesperson on Thursday confirmed that LaBouchardiere no longer works for DHHS. LaBouchardiere could not be immediately reached for comment Thursday.
The department also pointed to a long list of “operational improvements” that DHHS said it made across its YRTCs. Changes include a standardized operating procedure for incident reporting that includes expanded monthly progress reports to the courts.
Among other changes: more unannounced inspections, a clear bag policy for staff, a new “probation line” for youth that’s free and not recorded and more staff training on professional boundaries.
“These changes reflect DHHS’s commitment to continuous improvement and its responsibility to provide safe and secure facilities for Nebraska youth,” DHHS CEO Steve Corsi said in a statement. “These actions represent a comprehensive effort to strengthen operational excellence and ensure the highest standards of care for youth entrusted to the state’s custody.”
The changes follow an internal report from last October that Flatwater obtained via public records request. In it, DHHS determined there was no systemic issue at YRTC-Kearney.
And it comes ahead of a completed independent investigation that could recommend systemic reform. The Inspector General for Child Welfare said in recent weeks that her office’s investigation is nearing its end.
2 Comments
Thanks for continuing to report on this and helping to create accountability!
This is a good article. It’s brief, yet informative. It sticks to the facts and reveals new information. And best of all, there was apparently no need to lead into the story with an emotional anecdote about some random person. Its just the facts, nothing but the facts, and straight to the point.
The last several articles that Flatwater has published about this specific topic (the YRTC scandal) have all been in this same vein. No fluff, no emotional rhetoric, no political agenda, just a straight reporting of the facts.
But this is completely the opposite of how the overwhelming majority of Flatwater articles are written. There seems to be some sort of ‘style guide’ that Flatwater follows which involves opening every article with an emotional anecdote, following that with some (often political) rhetoric, perhaps near the middle of the article citing a few bare-bones facts to prop up the narrative, then cycling back to anecdotes before closing the article with a seemingly witty quip meant to drive home the agenda (such as a shallow invocation of what Jesus would allegedly do). Nearly every article predictably follows this same pattern, to the point where I could select almost any article on this site at random and break it down into those predictable pieces.
So my question is this: Why the difference?
I know it isn’t the authors of the articles, because there is variance even between the same authors. Sara Gentzler who wrote this good article has also written several catastrophically bad ones, such as the time she wrote about a lawsuit alleging that a prison inmate wasn’t breaking the rules by posting content on the internet… only for the inmate to break the rules by posting in the comments section of the article itself! In that article Gentzler delved into a long anecdote about how a Canadian woman decided to marry an American prison inmate as the outcome of a drinking game. So clearly even with articles this specific author has written, we can see the difference between one like this that delivers just the facts, and one that emphasizes emotional anecdotes over the facts.
Perhaps Flatwater believes that the majority of their readers prefer the… more ‘colorful’ articles. But even in that case, why not remain consistent and write all of the articles in that format? Why the swap in formats for only certain topics? Whats the difference between a scandal at YRTC and a prison inmate who wants to post on the internet? What process does Flatwater use to decide that one article will be written one way, while an article on a different topic will be written the other way?