Jason Taylor, one of New Hampshire’s two assistant child advocates, said the Office of the Child Advocate’s final report on its investigation into potential abuse and neglect at the Sununu Youth Services Center could take “certainly weeks but maybe months” to complete.
“Really, what I hope our report will talk about is the impacts of isolation and a lack of activity on children’s health,” Taylor said in an interview this week. “I think that’s the story. I really, honestly do.”
Taylor was second-in-command at the office to Cassandra Sanchez, who served as child advocate from 2022 until she was forced out of the job last week. He now serves under Sanchez’s replacement, Allen Aldenberg, a former Manchester police chief who was appointed to serve as acting child advocate. Taylor said he doesn’t know how the leadership transition will affect the progress of the report.
For her part, Sanchez said in an interview, “The long and the short of it is that leadership has failed that facility. The children have not been safe, and what has gone on in that facility is extremely harmful and dangerous to these children, both physically and mentally.”
The investigation began in March after a child who was being held at the Sununu Youth Services Center, the state’s juvenile detention facility in Manchester, called the Office of the Child Advocate.
“Anytime a child calls we drop what we’re doing and we go meet with the child,” Taylor said.
Taylor was the employee who first visited the facility, he said. After interviewing the child, he returned a few days later with Sanchez and the other assistant child advocate, Jennifer Jones. The office sent a letter to lawmakers March 30 alleging staff had been potentially abusive and neglectful. The office then continued its investigation and monitoring of the facility.
The Disability Rights Center-NH, the Attorney General’s Office, and a state Senate ad-hoc committee also launched their own parallel investigations. Several allegations, including an overly restrictive lockdown, children being forced to urinate on the floor of their cells, illegal restraints resulting in at least one broken bone, unnecessary strip searches, and dried blood found on the walls, have emerged as a result of the several investigations. The investigations also revealed that staff members’ aggressive approach to managing the children was a response to the kids’ violent behavior.
In early July, the Attorney General’s Office released its report, which concluded that there were staffing problems and general leadership failures but no evidence of physical abuse of youth by staff.
Sanchez was critical of the report. She said the Attorney General’s Office “put the blame on the children almost completely” and “very minimal blame elsewhere.”
“That’s just not accurate,” she said.
Sanchez said the staff experiences are important, but should be balanced with what children at the facility are saying. She hopes her team’s final report, which is no longer in her control, centers the experience of the children more.
Sanchez said she aligns closer with the ad-hoc state Senate committee’s report, released in May, which calls for sweeping changes to leadership, a ban on strip searches of children (except in “narrowly defined emergency circumstances”), increased training, upgraded cameras in the facility, and separating the Division for Children, Youth, and Families from its parent organization, the Department of Health and Human Services. She hopes her office’s report is closer to the Senate committee’s.
Taylor said he visited the facility last Friday and “the kids are ripping that place apart right now.” He said there were broken windows, fire sprinklers, door handles, and more. He argues the aggression is a response to the kids’ deteriorating mental health.
“Every journal you can find on juvenile incarceration is very clear” that isolating children has negative effects, he said. Children had never done that kind of damage to the facility before, he noted, even at times when the detainee population at the facility was much higher.
“The argument is, the staff did what they thought they needed to do to keep themselves safe,” he said. “No argument there. The next question is, how did that impact kids?”
Specifically, he believes the facility violates laws enacted in 2023 through House Bill 49, which requires “trauma-informed care” and “evidence-based practices.”
Taylor, who worked at both the Sununu Youth Services Center and DCYF before joining the Office of the Child Advocate, doesn’t put the blame on any individual staff members. In his view, the problems within the facility are systemic. The education programming the kids are getting is insufficient, the facility is understaffed, and the program is underfunded, he said.
“The staff have been made to be the scapegoats for what’s going wrong,” he said. “I think people want an easy way out of this discussion, and that’s not really how we got here.”
Meanwhile, Sanchez called it “so extremely frustrating” to be forced to leave in the middle of the investigation. She said the office was not yet drafting the report by the time she left.
“Particularly because the reason why we couldn’t get to the point of drafting the report is we were waiting on specific information from DCYF (the Division for Children, Youth, and Families) and the facility itself that we needed to review to capture in the investigation,” she said. “And that had been dragged out for so many months, and dragged out beyond the point of me being able to be available to assist in the drafting of the report.”
In January, Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced she wouldn’t be renominating Sanchez for another term. Instead, she picked Diana Fenton, a former prosecutor and attorney for the Education Department. But Fenton ultimately withdrew from consideration amid criticisms that she had a conflict of interest by being a foster parent with an active case before DCYF.
Sanchez left the role Friday after serving six months in holdover status, which the state’s human resources department said was the longest the state law allowed her to stay without being renominated. Ayotte announced Friday she was tapping Aldenberg to replace her in the interim while the search for a permanent replacement continues.
Sanchez fears that in her absence, the office will be pressured to be “more aligned with” the attorney general’s report on the subject “because I’ve seen the governor’s coverage of supporting that report and I am not sure that the state wants the facts to show otherwise.”
She worries there could be outside pressure to downplay certain elements of its final report.
“These are children, and they may have made poor decisions, but they are children who need help,” Sanchez said. “And the system and the way it’s working right now is not helping them. It’s harming them further, and I do worry that that aspect is going to be either not allowed to get out in public or downplayed completely.”