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Mo. Mental Health Director Speaks About Cottonwood Privatization

Brittany Myers
/
KRCU

The Cottonwood Residential Treatment Center in Cape Girardeau will stay open, but it will now be a private facility.

Cottonwood is a mental health facility for children will severe behavioral and emotional issues.

The private non-profit Community Counseling Center will take over the reins of Cottonwood from the Missouri Department of Mental Health. Cottonwood will go from a 32 bed to a 16 bed facility, and will have six contracted parent-family homes where children will stay with parents or care-takers who have professional training. Those kids will still receive treatment, education and services at Cottonwood but won’t live in an institutional setting.

KRCU’s Jacob McCleland spoke with the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s director, Keith Schafer, and asked him why they chose to take the privatization route.

SCHAFER:
Well, two reasons. One is we were tasked  by the Governor to try to keep Cottonwood open but to try do it in a much more efficient fashion. Cottonwood is a very expensive program, it’s a very high end program and as a state-operated facility its problem is it had to have everything on the site. So you had to have human resources, you had to have accounting, you had to have Medicaid billing, etc.

The advantage of this program being under the community mental health center is that the community mental health center already has all of those support services available so that we can concentrate on our costs on the clinical services side with support services already being part of the larger system. In our case of a small stand alone facility we had to do it all.

MCCLELAND:
What happens to the current employees of Cottonwood?

SCHAFER:
About over half of employees will definitely be very highly desirable for the community mental health center to move to the 16 bed residential facility. These employees have been with us a long, long time. They have a lot of expertise at working with very severely disturbed children in a residential setting. So we hope to retain all of those employees in good standing that we can. We are hopeful also that some of the employees who are perhaps more entrepreneurial will think about the possibility of operating the homes in the community.

MCCLELAND:
Cottonwood’s effectiveness was never really in question. Its problem has always been that it’s been in danger of being closed by state budget cuts. Is there some risk here that changing the model that’s been used could impact the quality which previously was always very solid?

SCHAFER:
That’s absolutely right, by the way. Since we will be using Cottonwood staff to continue to operate an intensive residential program, I doubt seriously we’ll see much quality changes at that level. The interesting opportunity here is to try to insert those six community homes as part of the living arrangement for children in the process, and that’s never been done in the state. So this will be a new effort that we’ll be trying and it could give them a broader array to serve children, particularly young children, very young children. They serve kids between the ages of 6 and 17 with severe behavioral problems or severe emotional problems. This may give an opportunity for a more home-like setting. We’ll have to see because we’ve not done this before.

MCCLELAND:
What’s the timeline for implementation?

SCHAFER:
I would anticipate that by the end of the fiscal year, that’s the 2015 fiscal year. So that’s somewhere around June 30 of next year you will have seen most of that transition completed.