WEBSTER GROVES — Residents of this suburban community are pushing back against a planned psychiatric health center on the site of a K-12 academy that they believe would add traffic and make their neighborhoods less safe. The not-for-profit mental health provider, KVC Missouri, wants the property at 303 N. Gore Ave.
to add a hospital that would take in hundreds of children and keep them overnight. KVC runs a K-12 therapeutic day school there that provides a range of community-based services. The academy will still be running if they rezone the property.
More than 40 residents came to a recent city planning commission meeting to oppose the idea. Webster Groves resident Julie Cohen, whose home is two doors from the site, said she worries about safety. Cohen said police caught a juvenile from the academy in her yard while her kids were playing nearby.
The incident traumatized her kids, she said. "I tried my hardest to shield my kids from these terrible past stories my neighbors have," Cohen said. "I can't take back that incident of the kid being apprehended in my yard, but if they continue to feel this way, I am going to have to look to move elsewhere.
" A KVC Missouri spokesperson said the organization has no connection to the youth or incident described. Julie Cohen's husband, Jared Cohen, said he spoke with a Webster Groves police officer who said there was an incident in March between a teenage girl with developmental delays and a teacher that left the teacher with severe head trauma. Webster Groves police Chief Erich Weimer confirmed there was an incident between a student and a staff member, but said he could not disclose any more details, and the department denied a request for incident reports because it involved a minor.
Jared Cohen said he's unhappy with the city's lack of transparency in the case. He tried to obtain the report himself, with no luck. "Neither KVC nor the City of Webster Groves were proactive in disclosing the above issues," he said at the planning commission meeting last week.
"KVC claims an outstanding track record, and this simply isn't true." Plans call for a new children's mental hospital with 77 beds and related outpatient services. KVC says the new health center is needed because the St.
Louis region has less than half of the private psychiatric beds needed to support children. This, in turn, causes delays in admissions, long waiting lists for treatment and long travel times for families needing to find care, the organization said. Debbie Dinzebach, who lives on the same street as the KVC academy and has worked with patients with neuropathic disorders since 1985, said she is uncomfortable with the proposed expansion.
She and some other residents started a petition against the facility's expansion because she said she's scared for the neighborhood's safety. "I've experienced this first hand with a number of patients I've worked with over the years," she said. "I don't want that where I live.
" Last week, the city's nine-member Plan Commission told designers they needed more information about the plans — particularly those related to pedestrian crossings and biker traffic — before making a decision. The City Council must ultimately approve the project before the hospital may be built. The lead architect for the KVC project, Michael Goslinga, defended the project and blamed prior problems with residents on the previous management company, Great Circle.
"Please don't judge this project based on the failings prior," Goslinga said at the meeting. "Many of the stories we may hear tonight were all related to a previous point in time." Management issues with both operators The non-profit group, Great Circle, managed the property until April 2023, when KVC Missouri acquired it.
Great Circle, considered one of the largest providers of youth behavioral health services, admitted last year to federal authorities that it had falsely submitted bills to Medicaid for treatment services for six residents between 2019 and 2020. Assistant U.S.
Attorney Meredith Reiter, who led the team on the case, said the non-profit claimed to provide enhanced supervision to the kids at the facility but failed to provide it. “A cascade of issues can arise from inadequate supervision, particularly for children with such intensive need for treatment and assistance,” she said in a statement last year. In a settlement with the Department of Justice, Great Circle agreed to pay $1.
8 million and add programs to monitor the compliance of a code of ethics. KVC operates psychiatric hospitals for kids across the state. They have facilities in St.
Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, Columbia, and St. James. It's had its own legal issues involving patients.
One suit, filed in May 2023, alleges KVC placed two 8-year-old girls together in a facility knowing one had a history of sexually inappropriate behavior and the other had survived sexual assault. The lawyer for the young assault victim said she was coerced into sexual acts, which she reported to KVC. The health system released her to her mother the next day, according to court records.
KVC denied the allegations in court filings. Another family sued KVC in 2021. It claimed an infant placed by KVC in a foster home in Kansas died because of overcrowding.
Another lawsuit in Kansas, filed in February of 2023, alleged that KVC placed a teen in an unsafe home with a man who sexually abused her. KVC spokesperson Jenny Kutz said in an email that KVC exceeds state and federal performance outcomes for child safety programs. She added that KVC has positively impacted 75,000 people each year out of the more than 1 million children they have served in the past, and that any lawsuit should be put into that context.
"Protecting children and keeping kids safe is KVC's first priority," she said. Barriers to access in Missouri Missouri Hospital Association spokesperson Dave Dillon said there are only 576 beds in children's psychiatric facilities in Missouri. He could not cite a specific number that would solve the problem, but he noted that many children have to leave their communities, and sometimes even their states, to get needed treatment.
Some children wait in hospitals — health centers that often have no psychiatric providers — for over a year to find a spot in the right facility, he said. This can overcrowd hospitals and overwork hospital staff, he said. "It's really a bad environment for a child to wait for the right type of care," he said.
Dillon said that while he understands the Webster Groves residents' concerns, inpatient psychiatric facilities are highly secure, and many are hard to differentiate from any other hospital. "The stigma with behavioral health is real," he said. "There's a lot of work needed to build the capacity to provide the care Missouri kids deserve.
Adding adolescent behavioral health beds and outpatient services is an important part of the solution." Long-time Webster Groves resident Phyllis Hickey said she is disappointed to hear her community does not want to help support children. She said her husband and son once had to travel out-of-state to receive the mental health care her son needed.
Before that, he had to wait in a hospital emergency department for days until a mental health facility finally had an opening. "So many people are afraid of anybody with mental health problems," she said. "These are traumatized children that someone is trying to provide healing.
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