Answers sought on Nevada plan to keep children in controversial program

Thursday, Nov. 11, 1999 | 9:57 a.m.

Assemblywoman Ellen Koivisto, D-Las Vegas, chairwoman of the Legislature's interim panel on health care, said Wednesday the panel plans a Dec. 14 briefing on the Cleo Wallace Centers program.

"I am extremely concerned about leaving Nevada children in a facility where such serious charges have been made," Koivisto said, adding that she wants to hear from Janice Wright, Nevada's director of Healthcare Financing and Policy.

Koivisto also has asked for testimony from the Moapa Band of Paiutes, which withdrew its children from Cleo Wallace early last year following complaints about physical restraints. The state of Nebraska also pulled its children from the program.

Wright said earlier her agency's research found that Nevada children in the program weren't in any danger. Nevada has between four and five children in Cleo Wallace at any given time, at a rate of $283 per child, per day.

Cleo Wallace Centers provide inpatient and outpatient care for children from Colorado and other states at facilities in Colorado Springs and the Denver suburb of Westminster.

Nevada children have been enrolled in a residential treatment center, where they go to school, have off-campus activities and are in long-term therapy.

Cleo Wallace also has a separate program for acute, short-term care or psychiatric emergencies, which could be a single instance of psychotic behavior.

In 1995, Colorado started a two-year pilot program that put all Medicaid mental health patients into managed care. The result was a substantial drop in the need for inpatient placements at Cleo Wallace.

Soon afterward, staffers at Cleo Wallace were told the program had been given the go-ahead by state licensing agencies to place residential treatment children in the locked inpatient facility.

But Cleo Wallace Executive Director Michael Montgomery says the residential children sleeping in the inpatient unit got all the appropriate services.