“Why is there no accountability, and why isn’t there any attempt to remedy that?” asked state Sen. Heidi Campbell, D-Nashville, one of the sponsors of the bill. She said in the past DCS has improved with oversight. “But right now, there’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just the wild, wild west.”
Despite acknowledging the ongoing problems inside the facility, DCS continues to contract with the Bean Center to place children there, paying about $175 per day per kid.
“Although the facility is not currently in an approved status, there is nothing to indicate conditions at the facility are unsafe,” Ashley Zarach, DCS communications director, said in an emailed statement. DCS said the Bean Center is no longer using seclusion and that its current violations are largely clerical. “We are holding approval to ensure the facility updates its policy and schedules an annual fire inspection,” Zarach said.
But that arrangement is part of the reason lawmakers like Campbell want a third party involved. In the time DCS has been licensing juvenile detention centers in the state, it said, it has never terminated a license.
The original draft of the bill gave enforcement powers to the ombudsman at the independent state agency, the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth. The ombudsman’s office has existed since 1996 to respond to individual complaints about DCS, but it does not have enforcement power. The commission already has access to juvenile detention centers to monitor federal standards but not state standards.
Kylie Graves, policy director at the commission, declined to comment on the bill, saying, “We are going to let the General Assembly go through the legislative process.”
If a facility is in violation and doesn’t follow the ombudsman’s recommendations, the original draft would force DCS to suspend the facility’s license or, for detention centers like Bean’s, stop placing kids there until the violations are fixed.
But those enforcement mechanisms are no longer included in the DCS version.
Instead, the ombudsman would notify the facility of the problems, and if the facility doesn’t comply within a year, DCS would be notified in writing. Then “the department shall provide the ombudsman with an update on actions taken to remedy the findings by December 1, 2025, and annually thereafter,” the agency’s amendment says.
“If you de-fang it enough, you’re not going to have a useful piece of legislation,” Campbell said.
The DCS version does not detail what exactly would happen after that to a facility that is routinely out of compliance, as the Bean Center was. But it would require the ombudsman to report violations publicly to the General Assembly on a regular basis, offering some public accountability.
State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican sponsor of the bill, said he is not surprised that a state agency would push back against oversight legislation of this size and scope.
“DCS is probably arguing right now, ‘Hey, a little bit of flexibility for us is a good thing,’” Roberts said. “And I think some legislators are looking at it and say, ‘Well, we’re not sure that we agree with that, because we want to know that certain standards are being met in every situation.’”
Campbell said incremental progress is better than nothing.
“I would love to have a much stronger way to approach this,” she said, “but that having been said, as we say all the time around here, let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”