Facing what it called “difficult choices,” the Howard Center has announced cuts to four programs, including the Centerpoint school.
“The cumulative effects of years of underfunding in Medicaid reimbursements and government grants that make up nearly all our revenue have become too large to address through cost-cutting, fundraising, and other efficiencies,” CEO Bob Bick wrote in a Wednesday email to staff, which was obtained by VTDigger.
The Howard Center is a nonprofit organization that provides mental health and substance use disorder treatment in Chittenden County.
In addition to a 1% budget cut to every program and department at the agency, four programs will be shuttered this summer, according to the email: the Autism Spectrum Program’s center-based programs for toddlers; Intensive Family Based Services, which provides state-mandated assistance to kids who are at risk of being removed from their homes and their families; the St. Albans Public Inebriate Program, which helps intoxicated people; and the Centerpoint program, which includes a school. Centerpoint is run as a partnership of the Howard Center, NFI Vermont and Matrix Health Systems.
Representatives for the other two agencies in the partnership could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
Beth Holden, chief client services officer at Howard Center, said in an interview on Thursday that 22 Howard Center staff positions will be cut, although the organization is trying to move affected employees into existing vacancies.
“Our HR team is making lots of appointments to help people find a seat that they feel comfortable with and they feel good about,” Holden said.
After two other programs were cut earlier this year, the Howard Center employee union asked the agency’s leadership whether further program mergers were expected, according to union president Andy Blanchet. At the time, the employees were told that wouldn’t be the case, Blanchet said in an email.
“Instead of communicating with us to be proactive, the Agency has left workers and community members in a lurch seemingly out of nowhere,” Blanchet wrote. “We want the community to understand that we, the workers of Howard Center, want these programs back up and running as soon as possible and hope to see the executive leadership of Howard Center consider their own salaries when cutting such fundamental programs.”
As for the impacted jobs, union secretary Katie Harris said in a text message on Thursday that one St. Albans employee was already offered a new position with a different schedule that doesn’t work for them, so they couldn’t accept it.
“We don’t know who is going to be able to accept the offered alternative positions,” Harris said.
Centerpoint is a youth treatment organization staffed by 10 Howard Center employees and 55 more from NFI Vermont and Matrix Health Systems, serving about 300 children in an outpatient setting, according to Holden and the Centerpoint website.
The program also runs a school with campuses in Winooski and South Burlington that serves students in grades 7-12 “faced with a range of social, emotional, learning, or mental health challenges,” according to the website. Twenty students are enrolled, Holden said.
Don Tinney, president of the Vermont NEA, the union representing Vermont teachers, lamented the Centerpoint closure in an interview on Thursday.
“This is extremely unfortunate that we’re going to have fewer resources for students with serious needs,” Tinney said.
Holden said all three agencies involved with Centerpoint have seats on the board of directors and “conversations have been going on around the continuation of Centerpoint services and to figure out how to manage the financial deficit that the program has endured over the past several years.”
Intensive Family Based Services is a Department for Children and Families-mandated program to provide mental health treatment to children and solutions to their families when a child is at risk of being removed from the home or when they return to the family following out-of-home placement. The program will be rolled into Howard Center’s existing family and community-based services program and referrals from DCF will be honored in the newly configured program, according to Holden.
The Autism Spectrum Program provides behavioral treatment in a variety of settings, including homes and schools. Howard Center will shut down the center-based toddler services in that program. Holden said the two toddlers currently in the program would be moved to another program.
The St. Albans inebriate program is a supervised environment for intoxicated individuals. It is similar to a Burlington program called Act 1, which closed earlier this year due to staffing concerns.
Bick noted in his email to staff that, while many of the 50 total programs run by the Howard Center run in a deficit, “In selecting the four programs, we considered whether alternative services are available either at Howard Center or through other community providers, the financial burden each places on the agency, the number of people each program serves, and whether programs are among those we are mandated to operate.”
Holden said that the designated agency system, where the state choses one mental health agency in each area of the state to provide mental health services, has been underfunded for years. “And it started to catch up with us that we were providing services without being fully funded for it,” she said.
Holden went on to say that she expects that other agencies are facing similar challenges and that the state needs to work to shore up the system.
“This is our new normal,” Holden said. “How do we attract people to our state? How do we get young people who are new to the workforce interested in human services? I think we really need a multi-prong approach to address our acute needs.”
