Five years after Vermont closed its only secure facility for troubled youths, the state agency charged with protecting children is still struggling to come to grips with the role it played in their systematic abuse.
The revelations that led the Department for Children and Families to shutter the 30-bed Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in 2020 — and additional accounts of abuse that have emerged since — continue to reverberate.
“The closure of Woodside left this huge hole,” DCF Commissioner Chris Winters said last week. “It also left a lot of damage in its wake.”
To address the fallout from the accounts of abuse, including a searing 2023 exposé in Seven Days, the department in January hired a team of consultants to conduct a multiyear “restorative process” for current and former staff, as well as others who worked at Woodside. Their work, which will cost the state $150,000, began in earnest over the summer.
The process is confidential and only for staff. People who were detained at Woodside and their families are not included, though Winter did not rule out involving them down the road.
“We’re not there yet. We’re working on ourselves first,” Winters said.
That logic sounds flawed to some people familiar with the problems at the former Essex facility.
Marshall Pahl, a deputy in the Office of the Defender General who represented youths at Woodside, said he doesn’t doubt that DCF needs to address the fallout. He has his own questions about what happened there and why.
“But I don’t think the process can be called ‘restorative’ if the victims are not included in it,” Pahl told Seven Days.
“If you’re doing anything restorative about Woodside, you have to be victim-centered and you have to put the kids first.”
Lindsey Owen
Lindsey Owen, executive director of Disability Rights Vermont, called the process disappointing and said it was offensive to exclude the true victims. Disability Rights filed a federal lawsuit that helped lead to the facility’s closure.
“If you’re doing anything restorative about Woodside, you have to be victim-centered and you have to put the kids first,” she said.
To merely hold a “kumbaya moment” for staff that avoids any true accountability is “setting the process up for failure,” she added.
The legacy of abuse at Woodside and sharp divisions over who was responsible for it have hung over the department since the facility closed, according to Winters, who was tapped to lead DCF in early 2023. The pall has impeded efforts to design, locate and build a long-promised replacement facility. Proposals for Newbury and Vergennes fell through in the face of local opposition.
Finding a new campus won’t be Winters’ responsibility for much longer, however. Last Friday, the governor’s office announced that Winters is leaving his DCF post on September 22 to become deputy commissioner for the Department of Labor. Sandi Hoffman, the deputy commissioner of the Department of Vermont Health Access, will become DCF’s interim leader.
A DCF spokesperson said Winters’ departure was not related to the struggle to replace Woodside.
DCF is one of the largest departments in state government. It is responsible for child protective services; foster care and adoption programs; childcare regulation; and economic support programs such as 3SquaresVT, fuel assistance and the motel program for homeless people.
The goal of the restorative process is to help current and former DCF employees air their concerns and present their insights about what happened at Woodside, Winters said.
“We had to address that elephant in the room and confront it if we are ever going to move forward,” he said.
The process invites current and former staff at Woodside “to engage in dialogues around their experiences, impacts, learning, repair, and accountability,” according to an email from one of the consultants, Kim Friedman of Newfane. She declined an interview request.
“The closure of Woodside left this huge hole. It also left a lot of damage in its wake.”
Chris Winters
The people expected to participate include former staff who had positive experiences with youths at the facility and DCF caseworkers — both former and current — who were mortified to hear about the “horrific things that happened there” in the later years, Winters said. Those stories caused people who had “dedicated their lives to helping kids” to question the mission of the department, he said.
“There are so many people who are invested in the good things that were happening at Woodside, and maybe they have issues with how leadership handled it,” Winters said. “Those are the things that we want them to be able to vent about in a safe space.”
One of the most haunting Woodside stories was documented in a Seven Days investigation about the life and death of Grace Welch.
“The Loss of Grace,” published on October 25, 2023, chronicled how the troubled teen from West Topsham was mistreated during two separate stays at Woodside. She was physically restrained 31 times, left naked and streaked with her own waste for days, and denied schooling. Following a court fight in 2019 that laid bare the abusive practices at the facility, Welch was released. She died of a drug overdose just before her 19th birthday.
Winters, who had been on the job for only six months when the story was published, said it reopened old wounds. Two years later, Winters is hopeful the confidential “listening sessions” will foster healing and restore trust among staff.
“This is a big step for us,” Winters said. “It’s dealing with something that’s been lingering and hanging over us for so long.”
Steve Howard, executive director of the Vermont State Employees’ Association, said he’s skeptical DCF is truly interested in what workers have to say because leaders ignored their suggestions about Woodside for years.
The union head said he supports any effort that might help even one person process their justifiable anger about how Woodside was managed. But Howard worries that by focusing on workers, the process allows state leaders — from DCF brass to lawmakers to Gov. Phil Scott — to avoid responsibility for the debacle.
Howard said he thinks Woodside employees and caseworkers who sent kids there have been “scapegoated” and lost their jobs while managers have moved to other positions in state government.
“They should have defended their staff and listened to them — and not made them out to be horrible human beings for following the policies of the people they hired and the policies they created,” Howard said.
DCF leaders and supervisors are not involved in the sessions by design so that current and former staff can have a place to speak their minds “without fear of retribution from leadership,” according to a DCF spokesperson.
The consultant team includes Marc Wennberg, who helped with the restorative inquiry into abuse at St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, and Jon Kidde, a restorative justice expert from Vergennes. The team began by talking to top DCF officials before reaching out to current and former staff over the summer, Winters said.
A document shared by DCF describing the process calls the listening sessions an “opportunity to be heard, speak to their needs, and listen to the experiences of others.”
“Naming, unpacking and understanding the impacts of Woodside can result in healthier work relationships, a more cohesive and collaborative work environment, and a more trauma-informed, high-end system of care,” the document reads.
When the sessions are complete, Winters expects the consultants to issue a public report that will help guide the design and programming at a future secure facility.
Plans to locate a replacement facility on state-owned land in Vergennes ran aground in June. The so-called Green Mountain Youth Campus was to have an eight-bed crisis stabilization program and a six-bed treatment program off Comfort Hill Street at a cost of up to $25 million.
The state withdrew its request to change the zoning for the property after local officials expressed concern that DCF officials — including Winters — weren’t telling them the full story about the proposed facility. Of particular concern to some was the involvement of Sentinel Group, the private company hired to help design and run the center.
Reporting by Seven Days has shown that Sentinel’s founder, Jeff Caron, runs two other entities that have come under scrutiny. Staff members at the Vermont School for Girls in Bennington have faced charges related to sexual assault. And Mount Prospect Academy, which serves youths in New Hampshire, is facing approximately 125 lawsuits alleging physical, sexual and psychological abuse of students.
Mark Koenig, chair of a committee representing Vergennes in discussions with DCF, told Seven Days in July that Winters’ failure to mention Sentinel’s issues during a meeting made it difficult for members to trust the commissioner’s reassurances about Sentinel’s professionalism.
DCF is still committed to the new facility but has no updates on a potential location. South Burlington has previously been cited as one possibility.
Vermont does have a short-term secure facility for youths, Red Clover Treatment Center, which is run by Sentinel and located in Middlesex. But its four beds are often full, meaning juveniles are often sent to adult prisons, according to Isaac Dayno, a spokesperson for the Vermont Department of Corrections. As of last Friday, four youths under age 19 were being held in adult prisons. Because they don’t mingle with the adult population, their situations amount to solitary confinement, Dayno said.
“When you don’t have this critical infrastructure in place, you end up with kids in prison,” Dayno said.
Winters said he hopes the restorative process can lead to consensus about a better system of care for youths. But he worries the public might not see the process in the same light.
“We’re trying to do something good here,” Winters said, “and we’re probably going to get criticized for it.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Woodside Wounds | A “restorative process” is under way for staff who worked at Vermont’s notorious juvenile lockup. Abuse victims are not invited.”
This article appears in Sept 17-23, 2025.
