Months after a bombshell report, St. Mary's Home for Children responds to accusations

NORTH PROVIDENCE – Three months after a startling report about alleged mismanagement and mistreatment at St. Mary’s Home for Children, the psychiatric treatment facility has issued a response about how it has addressed its failings – while offering some “points of clarification” on some of the most egregious findings.

But the home’s attempt to “rewrite history” does not sit well with the Office of the Child Advocate, which issued the scathing report in December about the state’s only residential psychiatric treatment center for children.

“It should be noted that some of those 'clarifying' the actions of St. Mary’s are the same people identified throughout the investigation and under whose leadership and supervision these failures occurred,” wrote the state’s acting child advocate, Katelyn Medeiros, last week to St. Mary’s interim CEO Charles Montorio-Archer.

“It is important that St. Mary’s response not be used as an opportunity to rewrite history or skew objective findings through a subjective lens,” she said.

'It's a complete lie'

Among the points of clarification St. Mary’s makes in its corrective action response concerns the claim in the Office of Child Advocate report that the home’s former executive director, Carlen Casciano-McCann, during a tour of the facility, told investigators “I wouldn’t let my dog come here.”

Casciano-McCann, who stepped down in the wake of the investigation’s report, was given a chance in St. Mary’s corrective report to respond to that allegation: “I never said I would not send my dog to St. Mary’s – it’s a complete lie,” she says.

She goes on to say she asked the author of the Child Advocate’s investigative report to retract that statement “and she did not respond to me.”

Michael Burgess, the home’s resident program manager, defends Casciano-McCann, saying the child advocate’s report “indicates that I was present when this alleged comment was made, which is not accurate. I am also of the opinion that Ms. McCann would never have made such a statement.”

Correcting the report about biker guards

St. Mary’s corrective report also takes issue with how the Child Advocate explained the home’s use of a biker group to guard children against the threat of prowling child sex traffickers.

The child advocate’s report described how members of Bikers Against Child Abuse were “in the units interacting with children as well as staff and parents.” The report also said members of the motorcycle club participated in searches for runaways on the home's grounds, and that it was unclear if they had gone through proper background checks.

But Melissa Santoro, the home’s outpatient director, in collaboration with the club’s president, wrote in St. Mary’s corrective plan that the biker club members were staged outside the facility on a public street – and that participants did go through at least a club-initiated background check.

The unusual biker arrangement moved forward without the knowledge or approval of the state Department of Children, Youth & Families, which places children in the home.

Office of the Child Advocate not impressed with St. Mary's response

The St. Mary’s corrective response also includes statements from Nursing Director Nicole Froment that she knew nothing of staff being admonished for raising concerns about inadequate care in the home – another allegation made by the Child Advocate after interviews with staff, parents and the adolescent residents of the home.

“I am adamant that neither myself nor my team has ever been put in a position where we were asked to refrain from or minimize reporting and documentation of any situation that warranted it,” said Froment.

The Child Advocate’s investigation of St. Mary’s began last April, after a 17-year-old girl was found unconscious from a drug overdose on the bathroom floor of a residential unit.

A three-member team of investigators spent months speaking with staff, residents and the parents of children in the home, and also reviewed hundreds of pages of documents and emails, as well as hours of video footage of common areas in the Fruit Hill Avenue center.

Their work revealed that St. Mary’s was often an abusive place, where physical assaults of children took place, health standards and proper procedures were disregarded and the already-traumatized children were underserved. 

More: Screams, runaways dashing through yards: Neighbors share what it's like to live next to St. Mary's.

The report has outraged state lawmakers, who have held oversight hearings on the situation and demanded improvements.

In a statement last week, Montorio-Archer said the child advocate’s report “contains truths that St. Mary’s acknowledges and has taken action on,” including more rigorous and mandatory staff training, cleaner spaces, better security systems to monitor care and improvements in proper medical documentation and auditing procedures.

In an interview Monday with The Journal, Montorio-Archer said, however, that he also believed his staff deserved a chance to respond to the Child Advocate’s report, to be given a “fair opportunity for them to say, ‘I did not say that.’”

Currently, about 15 children live at St. Mary’s, which has a capacity of 30. DCYF stopped placing children in the home until there has been significant improvements.

And Child Advocate Medeiros says St. Mary’s corrective action report is so far insufficient.

“For many of the recommendations provided, your response cited existing policies and practices," Medeiros said.

"The OCA investigation clearly highlighted that those policies and practices were not routinely followed, therefore citing these as solutions is not proposing any real remedy to the issues presented.”

Contact Tom Mooney at: tmooney@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: St. Mary's response to bombshell report 'insufficient,' Child Advocate says