The former Glen Mills Schools, a reform school closed amid a child-abuse scandal in 2019, is on the verge of reopening as Clock Tower Schools and may admit boys by court order as soon as next month. But what education they’ll get is unclear.
Clock Tower can’t operate a school itself, according to the state license it received earlier this year as a residential treatment facility — meaning the West Chester Area School District, where the campus is located, will be responsible.
But the district says it isn’t equipped to provide education to boys who may be ordered there as soon as July 1 — a task that it says involves hiring teachers amid an ongoing staffing shortage, and preparing equipment and materials it will need to set up at Clock Tower.
Clock Tower has “no capacity to educate kids,” Andrew Faust, a lawyer for the West Chester district, said in an interview Friday. “We’re very worried they’re going to be representing to juvenile judges they are in fact a school, when they’re not.”
The district asked the state human services and education departments last month to intervene and delay Clock Tower’s opening by a year. Faust said the district has not received any response, other than officials confirming receipt of its letter.
In a letter sent later Friday to Faust, both departments said they had “engaged in significant measures to support Clock Tower Schools and West Chester Area School District in fulfilling their respective legal responsibilities and will continue to do so.”
”It is imperative that all host school districts, including West Chester Area School District, work with residential facilities that are opening within their boundaries to ensure that both the school district and the residential facility are fulfilling their legal responsibilities in a timely manner,” the letter said, noting that education department representatives had conducted site visits to Clock Tower beginning in February, and West Chester, in March.
Education and children’s advocacy groups said West Chester had raised red flags about the program.
“This is a key component of programming in juvenile residential facilities,” said Marsha Levick, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. “What do they do all day? They go to school.”
Representatives of Clock Tower, which is run by a longtime Glen Mills Schools executive, said Friday that the facility wouldn’t open until education plans were finalized.
“The Clock Tower Schools is committed to developing a partnership with West Chester Area School District that will enable us to offer a student-centered, trauma-informed, academic, and rehabilitative program designed to address the unique needs of the highly vulnerable population our child residential and day treatment facility will serve,” lawyer Bill Zee said in a statement.
“It is unfortunate that representatives of the school district have chosen to focus on perceived obstacles to meeting the needs of this population rather than exploring ways that we can work collaboratively to timely address challenges that all schools are facing in the present environment,” Zee said, adding that the education department “remains unwavering in its support of our mission.”
Clock Tower was granted a provisional license by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services to run a residential treatment program for 25 boys — a much smaller number than Glen Mills, which had a capacity of 400 students.
The oldest existing reform school in the U.S., Glen Mills was shut down by the state in April 2019 following an Inquirer investigation that found employees beat boys and threatened them with longer sentences to keep them silent, fostering a culture of rampant violence.
A little more than two years later, Clock Tower Schools was incorporated. It applied in September 2021 to the human services department for a new license on the same campus where Glen Mills had been located.
While the state denied the application last year, it reached a settlement with Clock Tower in January, promising “close and thorough monitoring” of the reopened facility directed by former Glen Mills executive Christopher Spriggs. (Also permitted to work at the new program are seven former Glen Mills employees who swore under oath they had no firsthand knowledge of abuse that went unreported at the school, according to the settlement.)
The provisional license — which was approved days before former students settled with the Chester County Intermediate Unit, which provided educational services at Glen Mills, in an ongoing lawsuit over the abuse — allows Clock Tower to serve no more than 25 children. But Clock Tower can apply for additional provisional licenses every six months, with a limit of four licenses during the first two years of the agreement.
Faust said Clock Tower indicated it plans to serve 65 children ages 14 through 18, though it may have as few as five children at first.
The district expects it will be responsible for providing education quickly, because children with special needs may warrant summer services, Faust said.
In his letter to state officials last month, Faust said Clock Tower was only providing two rooms and an office for West Chester to use — inadequate for offering “a full, standards-aligned high school course of study, together with required special education and English language learner programming” to a possible 65 students.
Since then, Faust said, Clock Tower has offered more space. But the district still doesn’t have enough time to hire and prepare, he said.
Faust said Clock Tower — which has a website that reads “Coming Soon” and advertises “trauma-informed care” and an “academic model,” without further information — should seek licensure as a private academic school.
The state departments said in their letter that West Chester would be responsible for providing or supervising education at Clock Tower even if it were a private school.
Margie Wakelin, senior attorney of the Education Law Center, said children sent to facilities like Clock Tower are entitled to public education. But she agreed that Clock Tower’s opening should be delayed.
The education plan “can’t just be an afterthought,” Wakelin said, adding that “this is exactly the concern when we heard about this terrible decision to grant this license.”
Stefanie Arbutina, director of vulnerable youth policy at the Philadelphia-based Children First nonprofit, said the education department should notify judges that may be ordering children to Clock Tower of “the educational opportunities, or lack thereof.”
“There were issues with [Glen Mills] providing a quality education before, and it looks like we’re back down that road again with Clock Tower,” she said.
Zee, the Clock Tower lawyer, said the program would be providing necessary services.
“Making assumptions about our program based on matters pertaining to a now-defunct institution risks further delay in employing the many resources we have to offer to young people most in need of them.”
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