Columbia Training School to close

The much discussed Columbia Training School in Marion County, Mississippi is finally going to be closed after years of law suits and troubles dealing with administrating the once welcomed center. The idea behind Columbia was to provide a place for troubled female juveniles to have a program to go to when their parents feel they could no longer control the child and needed help. This was the alternative to some purely juvenile jail or constant run-ins with the law with a boot camp type idea. Unfortunately, the Department of Human Services (DHS), run by Col. Don Taylor, couldn't keep the employee's of the school from acting inappropriately and according to reports regarding a 2003 Federal Department of Justice lawsuit against the state of Mississippi regarding conditions at Columbia and the male school (Oakley). This suit ended up with an extensive consent decree in which the State agreed to fix conditions and the treatment of the juveniles to avoid money damages or the pulling of federal funding for related programs. (I'm fairly sure no federal money actually went directly to these two schools.) Unfortunately the State continued to have issues including a claim of sexual abuse by one of the employees that was investigated and dismissed but the accusation still stands. Additionally, there have been other more recent reports of shackling of juveniles and denial of mental health treatment. All of this had led to to the closing of Columbia, something that has been called for for years, one example here.