Mount Pleasant Urges State to Close JCCA Campus, Citing Violent Incidents

Mount Pleasant officials on Wednesday demanded that New York State close JCCA’s Westchester campus after an escalating number of serious police calls have raised safety concerns for youth, staff and local residents.

Supervisor Carl Fulgenzi and Police Chief Paul Oliva pointed to 459 police calls connected to incidents at the facility at 1075 Broadway in Pleasantville, which includes the Cottage School, this year through June 30. At that rate, the numbers would far surpass the 760 calls at the campus in 2022. Those figures are only from the Mount Pleasant Police Department and does not include additional calls that required the Pleasantville Police Department to respond, Oliva said.

“It’s not just the number of calls that concerns us, it’s the escalation of violence, and when we respond to campus, we dispatch two police officers and a supervisor because of officers’ safety and the types of calls that we’re responding to,” Oliva said.

Calls have included assaults, gang assaults, property damage and numerous incidents of youths breaking windows on campus and using the shards of glass as a weapon, he added.

Last fall, JCCA said it serves about 200 youngsters on campus.

Fulgenzi said in the nine years he has been town supervisor, there have been many good faith efforts on the part of the town to work with the JCCA, but every attempt has failed. Those failures are partly a result of the state Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) sending youngsters with serious emotional and psychological problems there, which the staff is unable to handle, he said. 

“I’ve asked numerous times for JCCA officials to increase the security and supervision of their residents, which they have failed to do,” Fulgenzi said. “This failure represents a tremendous burden on our emergency services, whose personnel are literally spending thousands of work hours a year responding to major and minor situations. Everyone is endangered – children, staff and neighbors – by the state’s and JCCA’s failures to address the inadequacies on this campus.”

Of the 459 calls this year related to incidents at the campus or involving youths receiving services, there have been 248 missing persons reports. The open campus policy allows residents to leave the premises, Oliva said. He said that when a youth does not return by a certain time, staff typically calls police.

There have also been 24 assaults, 23 incidents of vandalism, 13 violent altercations and 11 threats of suicide or self-harm, according to statistics provided by the Mount Pleasant Police Department.

One of those incidents occurred on May 23 at about 2 a.m. when a 15-year-old female resident was attacked. The girl’s mother, Michele Iovanella, who attended local officials’ press conference at Mount Pleasant Town Hall Wednesday morning, said her daughter Destiny was beaten over the head with a pot and was hospitalized overnight.

Iovanella said Destiny has been moved from facility to facility, aging out of one, while another was closed and another wasn’t meeting her needs. She placed Destiny with the JCCA with the hope that she would get the services she needs for serious emotional issues, and now regrets the decision.

“It’s dangerous,” Iovanella said of the facility, “but where will my daughter go? That’s the whole thing. Where is she going to go? She can’t come home yet because she’s not well enough to come home. She has an IEP (and is) emotionally disturbed. She needs help, she needs services. She doesn’t get the services.”

Phone and e-mail messages to the state Office of Family and Children’s Services, the agency that has jurisdiction over the JCCA, were not immediately returned on Wednesday.

When contacted by The Examiner, the JCCA issued a statement on behalf of its CEO, Ronald E. Richter, who didn’t directly address the calls for closure but pointed to the currently inadequate mental health system. Richter acknowledged that the facility is forced to take in young people whose needs far exceed the capabilities of its staff. 

He said some of the young people have been placed there because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

“These children are in crisis – and so is the mental health system that is intended to help them,” Richter said in his statement. “For over a year, JCCA has been raising the alarm at every level of government about the growing level of needs among young people with complex psychiatric and behavioral diagnoses that cannot be addressed in our campus setting.”

JCCA has also been advocating for an intensive services model to help with safety, he said.

“We need more long-term solutions to support children with the most acute needs, and our partners at the City and State level must support our efforts to address these challenges,” he stated.

Mount Pleasant’s two state representatives, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) and Assemblywoman MaryJane Shimsky (D-Dobbs Ferry) both said they share local officials’ concern. 

“I am calling on OCFS to immediately remove those young people who cannot be properly cared for at the Cottage School,” Stewart-Cousins said in a statement. “They should be placed in other more appropriate settings where they can get the specialized care they need. In addition, OCFS must stop the practice of sending this population to the Cottage School.”

Shimsky added that JCCA continues to help many youngsters to lead productive lives and the problem must be addressed. 

“But this escalation is not due to most of the children there, nor the dedicated staff, but to a small number of children who are being placed there with a level of need that the facility was never designed to accommodate,” Shimsky said.

Oliva said he wants the state and the JCCA to step in before a tragedy occurs.

“I have a grave concern that if this increase in violence continues our officers will be placed in a position to have to resort to deadly force to prevent themselves or to prevent others from the threat of deadly force,” Oliva said. “I am here to support actions that will prevent this from happening.”