DYRS Performance Oversight

Before the Committee on Youth Affairs Council of the District of Columbia

Chairman Zachary Parker and Members of the Committee

February 2, 2026

Introduction

Open City Advocates submits this written testimony regarding the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services’ (DYRS) failure to comply with the ROAD Act’s requirements for individualized rehabilitation planning and reentry planning. This testimony is submitted on behalf of Penelope Spain, CEO, and Joshua Miller, Research & Advocacy Director.

Open City Advocates provides post-disposition legal representation to youth committed to DYRS. We advocate for youth to remain connected to their families, schools, and communities while receiving wraparound, trauma-responsive support. Our testimony draws on direct experience representing committed youth and on the findings of the DC Auditor’s October 2025 report on New Beginnings.

Part I: DYRS Is Not Complying with the ROAD Act

Testimony of Penelope Spain, CEO

A. DYRS Is Substituting Paperwork for Individualized Rehabilitation Plans

The ROAD Act requires individualized rehabilitation plans (IRPs). In practice, DYRS is treating the requirement as a paperwork exercise. Instead of producing plans that are genuinely individualized, we repeatedly see DYRS substituting other documents and calling them IRPs. Success plans and YLS materials have their own purposes, and we do not want them to go away. But they are not IRPs. The ROAD Act created a new requirement precisely because these existing tools were not sufficient. DYRS cannot satisfy the law by relabeling what it was already doing. Often the document is boilerplate, lightly edited, or structured in a way that suggests it was not built to guide a youth’s rehabilitation at all. The point of the law is individualized substance, not a renamed template.

B. DYRS Is Failing to Conduct Reentry Planning as Required by Law

The ROAD Act also requires discharge and reentry planning, and DYRS is not doing it in a way that can possibly meet the law’s purpose. Reentry planning should begin at admission and be iterative. The ROAD Act requires that discharge and reentry planning begin no later than 60 days after placement in an out-of-home setting. It should identify:

• Placement pathway: Where a young person will live upon discharge, whether they are stepping down to a group home, going to a foster home, or returning home, along with any housing stability assessments, family readiness preparations, and logistical arrangements that need to be completed before the youth’s transition
• Education: The school the young person will enroll in, how credits will transfer, and what educational supports will be in place
• Community services: The core service agency and what community-based services will be provided
• Behavioral health: What mental health or behavioral health treatment is needed, what provider will deliver it, and how continuity of care will be ensured
• Family engagement: The role of the family and the concrete plan to support family engagement and stability
• Evidence-based interventions: Such as FFT or MST when appropriate, and the timeline for initiating them

None of that can happen if the plan is kept secret until the end.

C. DYRS Has Adopted a Policy of Secrecy Around Reentry Planning

DYRS has made clear that secrecy is the policy. In response to our requests for discharge plans, DYRS’s General Counsel stated that “a completed discharge/re-entry plan will only be finalized and shared upon the youth’s release.”

That is not reentry planning. A plan that is secret until release is not a plan; it is a reveal.

You cannot coordinate rehabilitation, engage the family, line up school enrollment, or ensure continuity of behavioral health treatment if no one sees the plan until the young person walks out the door. DYRS is asking this Committee to accept secrecy as compliance.

D. DYRS Is Not Holding the Meetings That Make Individualized Planning Possible

This secrecy is compounded by DYRS’s failure to hold the meetings that would make individualized planning possible. DYRS is not holding regular team decision making meetings (TDMs) for youth in out-of-home placements, including out-of-state placements. For youth placed out of state, DYRS relies on progress meetings run by the facility rather than conducting DYRS-led meetings that bring the whole team together and keep the DC-based members engaged and prepared for discharge. For youth at New Beginnings, DYRS does not conduct team decision making meetings except at discharge. There are internal youth progress meetings at New Beginnings that we have not been allowed to attend, meetings that appear to focus on the levels system rather than on reentry and that do not meaningfully involve the Care Coordinator or the youth’s full team in preparing for discharge.

Reentry planning cannot be done behind closed doors and revealed at the last moment. It requires collaboration with the young person, the family, education stakeholders, community providers, and counsel. DYRS is not doing that work.

DYRS could say, plainly: here is our plan, and it may change. That is what functional systems do. Instead, DYRS is using secrecy as a shield, and we believe that secrecy is hiding failures to do the work the ROAD Act requires.

DYRS’s FY26 approved budget totals about $97.5 million. With secure-facility populations in the neighborhood of 175 youth on a typical day, the District is spending on the order of fifteen hundred dollars per confined youth per day. At that level of investment, the public should be able to see individualized plans, real treatment, and real transition planning, not secrecy and delay.

Part II: The Youth Perspective and the Auditor’s Findings

Testimony of Joshua Miller, PhD; Research & Advocacy Director

A. What the Young People Are Saying

I meet with the Youth Council at YSC every month, and I hope the Committee will find time to visit with them soon. I always expect young people to be guarded. Right now they literally are. DYRS staff monitor while we talk. And despite that, and despite the fact that I am not meeting with the young people who have the most serious complaints, this group can still give you an earful.

When I met with them two weeks ago, I told them we would be here today and I asked if anyone had a message for the Committee. They struggle with that. They do not know you, and they do not know what your role is. But when I asked if they had any questions, one young woman immediately raised her hand. There were five other people in the room, including a Supervisory Youth Development Representative (SYDR), so they can confirm what happened next. She launched into what I can only describe as a perfect piece of testimony:

“What is your plan? Seriously, do you even have a plan? How exactly are we being rehabilitated? That is what we are here for, right? Rehabilitation? This is jail, not treatment. If we do not learn anything new, we are just going to get sent back here. I need them to figure this out. I need them to figure out how to turn a no into a yes. All they seem to do is turn a yes into a no. There are all these fights, all these incidents, because there is nothing happening. Judges need to get the incident reports, because they do not understand what is happening here. There is no structure. There are not enough staff. DYRS is so inconsistent. They break their promises. We get disappointed. And that just means we will be back. So ask them, what is your plan?”

If you boil down the Auditor’s New Beginnings report to its essence and strip away the professional language, it does not sound much different than that. Failing to plan is planning to fail.

B. The Auditor’s Findings Confirm What the Young People Know

The Auditor’s findings confirm what this young woman already knows. The data is stark:

• 78% recidivism rate: Of 72 committed youth admitted to New Beginnings in 2023 and later released, 56 had further involvement with the juvenile or adult criminal justice system.
• 70% recidivism among “completers”: Even among the 30 youth who supposedly completed the program, 21 later had criminal justice involvement. Completion of the program does not predict success.
• Security model, not therapeutic: Facility managers told the Auditor that New Beginnings operates as “a security model largely overseen by YDR staff.”
• Diagnostic information ignored: The Office of Independent Juvenile Justice Facilities Oversight (OIJJFO) found that in 15 of 16 sampled cases with court-ordered independent evaluations, at least one diagnosis identified by an independent evaluator was either not identified at New Beginnings or not included on the problem list. Trauma was not included on problem lists, or was added well after trauma symptoms presented, in seven cases. Conduct Disorder or Depressive Disorders were diagnosed by independent evaluators for eight youth, but were not added to the problem list.
• No substance use assessment: OIJJFO found that of the 17 youth in the sample, 15 had identified substance use histories prior to admission to New Beginnings; 10 of those youth were recommended for substance use assessments; and none received them.
• Evidence-based substance use treatment missing: OIJJFO found that while 15 of 17 youth in the sample had substance use identified either prior to admission or while at New Beginnings, 11 youth (73 percent) did not have evidence-based substance use treatment group sessions documented in the EHR.
• Generic treatment plans and late planning: OIJJFO found that one youth had no treatment plan developed by New Beginnings until six months after admission; another had only one treatment plan in a 13-month span; and treatment plans for 13 of 17 youth in the sample failed to adequately address disruptive behaviors, trauma-related symptoms, cognitive and learning concerns, or substance use disorders.
• Family engagement nearly absent: OIJJFO found that family therapy or other family involvement was specifically recommended for 13 of the 16 youth with independent evaluations, yet the records did not evidence regular family involvement in treatment. Among 13 youth who had been discharged as of the time of review, families for only four youth received a call from the therapist within one to two months of discharge, and typically only one call was made.

That is not a therapeutic program. That is warehouse management with clinical paperwork.

C. The Pattern of Neglect and Abuse

When a child is committed to DYRS, the agency acts in loco parentis. It takes on obligations that previously fell to parents. By that standard, DYRS is failing at every level.

Educational neglect. DYRS rarely gets the children in its care to school on time. Some go days or even weeks without attending school at all, receiving paper packets instead of classroom instruction. When youth are released, DYRS usually fails to plan for their transition back to community schools. If a parent did this, we would call it educational neglect.

Medical neglect. Youth needing mental health treatment or substance abuse services wait weeks or months. When treatment is provided, it is often generic rather than tailored to individual needs. Suicide risks are ignored. The agency’s own staff say that it focuses on secure detention, not treatment. If a parent did this, we would call it medical neglect.

Abuse. Even when judged merely for its efforts at secure detention and safe custody, the agency fails. DYRS staff know that some youth are angry with others. Rather than intervening, some incite violent incidents, encourage youth to nurture beefs, and offer treats and perks for beating other children. Sometimes they just let kids run free and attack each other. If a parent did this, we would call it abuse.

Out-of-state contempt. Some youth are sent hundreds of miles away to supposedly specialized facilities, making family visits nearly impossible. The staff in those out-of-state facilities often hold our city’s youth in contempt. Some of these surrogate caregivers are openly racist and enjoy using despicable racial slurs, then documenting a child’s responsive outrage as evidence of their pathology.

The staff witnessing these conditions are mandatory reporters. But who do you call when the problem is the system itself?

D. The Current System Is Designed for Containment, Not Rehabilitation

Right now, there is no credible plan for getting young people back into their communities. There is a plan to keep them locked up as long as possible, and then to hand them off to the adult system. Staff can sense it. There is no mission beyond containment. Nobody wants an incident that causes trouble for politicians or draws attention back to the District, so the entire system stays in damage control mode. The staff are exhausted, or they are brand new, sometimes barely older than the kids they are guarding, and too often undertrained for the job we are asking them to do.

Under DYRS care, some youth wait in limbo, warehoused while the agency figures out where to place them. Release planning comes late or not at all. Community placement agreements are cookie-cutter rather than individualized.

E. What Transition Planning Should Look Like

At the last hearing, the Committee asked what transition planning should look like. Here is the short version.

First, DYRS needs to stop pretending there is a therapeutic program at New Beginnings when what exists is primarily a compliance and deprivation model. The operating theory is that if you deprive a child of comforts and opportunities, they will reflect, grow, and earn their way back through privileges, and the prize at the end is going home. As parents and with more than twenty years of teaching between us, we can tell you that this is not how you rehabilitate children. The incentives collapse when the system is inconsistent and when promises are routinely broken.

Second, transition planning has to start early. DYRS often tells us they are waiting for young people to demonstrate they are ready for release. In practice, what that means is that a young person works through the program, then sits on home petition with little useful programming, and only then does DYRS begin thinking about a release plan. That planning then takes weeks or months more. These young people have short time horizons, and they notice when promises are broken. Breaking promises to children is one of the most reliable ways to teach them to stop responding to incentives. They become frustrated with the dead time, they act out, and the cycle restarts.

Third, the planning cannot be done in secret. Reentry planning has to include the young person and their full team. It has to identify the school they will attend, the community services they will receive, the behavioral health treatment and provider, the family supports, the placement pathway, and the timeline. It has to be shared, revised, and owned by the people who will actually carry it out.

But DYRS is not operating that way. We continue to see DYRS fail to hold regular team decision making meetings for youth in out-of-home placements. For youth placed out of state, DYRS relies on facility-run meetings rather than DYRS-led meetings. For youth at New Beginnings, internal progress meetings do not include the full team or focus on reentry. And we see DYRS treat information about reentry as something to be withheld until the last moment. That approach does not just violate the spirit of rehabilitation. It makes successful reentry impossible.

Part III: Requests of the Committee

We ask the Committee to press DYRS on three concrete points, all of which are envisioned in the ROAD Act:

1. Develop the IRPs. Require DYRS to share its IRP template, materials used to train staff in how to draft the IRPs, and anonymized samples of IRPs that have been developed. IRPs should align with each child’s existing clinical evaluations, be tailored to each child’s needs, and recognize their natural support systems.
2. Develop and share reentry plans before release. Require DYRS, in conjunction with the child’s entire team and family, to develop discharge and reentry plans within 60 days of placement, as required by the ROAD Act; update them monthly along with the family and team, and share any updates with the youth and the full team well before release. A plan withheld until release is not an actionable one.
3. Implement team-based planning meetings. Require DYRS to conduct regular DYRS-led team decision making meetings for all youth, particularly those in out-of-home placements, including out-of-state placements, and ensure those meetings include education planning, behavioral health planning, family engagement, and concrete discharge steps and logistics.

In addition, we ask the Committee to restore independent oversight. Either restore funding for the Office of Independent Juvenile Justice Facilities Oversight to continue its work, or extend the Ombudsman for Children’s jurisdiction to cover all DYRS-committed youth. Currently, the Ombudsman for Children only has jurisdiction over DYRS-committed youth if they are dual-jacketed with an active CFSA case, which only happens if there is a problem with their biological parents or legal caregivers. For the majority of DYRS-committed youth, the Ombuds office has no access at all. If CFSA investigated DYRS, they would be forced to take custody of these kids away from their fellow public employees. We are asking you to fix that.

Part IV: Questions for DYRS

The Auditor’s report provides the roadmap for oversight. We respectfully submit the following questions for the Committee to pose to DYRS:

Therapeutic Model vs. Security Model

1. Multiple facility managers told the Auditor that “much of what happens at New Beginnings is a security model largely overseen by YDR staff.” Does DYRS agree with that characterization? Why is there not greater emphasis on the therapeutic model?
2. The report describes separate chains of command for behavioral health versus security staff. Who has final authority to resolve conflicts between “security” and “treatment,” and how often has that authority been exercised in the last six months? When does treatment win?
3. What are the concrete operational changes DYRS will implement in the next 90 and 180 days to shift New Beginnings toward a therapeutic model? Please provide the written implementation plan and the organizational chart showing decision rights.

Recidivism and Outcomes

1. Of 72 committed youth admitted to New Beginnings in 2023 and released, 56 (78%) had further involvement with the juvenile or adult criminal justice system. What does DYRS believe are the top three drivers of this outcome, and what three changes will DYRS implement this year to address it? Please provide the internal analysis, if any, that identified these drivers.
2. Even among the 30 youth recorded as having “completed the program,” 21 (70%) later had criminal justice involvement. What does “completion” mean operationally, and what changes will DYRS make so that “completion” predicts better outcomes?

Treatment Planning and Diagnostic Information

1. Walk the Committee through the intake-to-treatment-plan workflow: Who receives court-ordered independent evaluations, who is responsible for extracting diagnoses and recommendations, and what quality control step ensures the treatment plan reflects them? Please provide the current written operating policy and the treatment plan template.
2. OIJJFO found that Conduct Disorder or Depressive Disorders were diagnosed by independent evaluators for eight youth in the sample, but were not added to the problem list. What auditing exists to prevent this, and what were audit results for the last two quarters?
3. OIJJFO found that the problem lists relating to 14 youth should have included low cognitive functioning or learning disorders but did not. How can DYRS claim to provide individualized treatment if it does not reliably identify youth who need modified therapeutic approaches?
4. The report found no evidence that diagnostic and treatment information in independent evaluations was used to formulate treatment plans. What specific step in the workflow is failing, who owns that step, and by what date will it be fixed?
5. The report described cases where youth repeatedly triggered high-risk referrals, yet high-risk assessments consistently indicated “no changes” to treatment plans. Who reviews those determinations, and what corrective action has DYRS taken? Please provide the written criteria for “no change needed” determinations and the rate at which that outcome occurs.

Behavioral Health Services

1. The Auditor recommended a grand rounds program with outside experts, specifically suggesting a partnership with DBH and Saint Elizabeths Hospital, and noted DYRS did not respond substantively. Will DYRS commit today to launching grand rounds by a specific date, and has DYRS initiated the DBH partnership? If not, why not?
2. For youth with substance use concerns, OIJJFO found that 10 youth in the sample were recommended for substance use assessments and none received them. What is DYRS’s required assessment protocol, and what percent of eligible youth actually received it in 2024 and 2025?
3. OIJJFO found that while 15 of 17 youth in the sample had substance use identified either prior to admission or while at New Beginnings, 11 youth (73 percent) did not have evidence-based substance use treatment group sessions documented in the EHR. What evidence-based model or models does DYRS use, how often are groups offered, and what is the participation rate?

Family Engagement

1. Dr. Lee found family involvement is “essential to successful rehabilitation,” yet family therapy or other family involvement was specifically recommended for 13 of the 16 youth with independent evaluations, and the records did not evidence regular family involvement in treatment. Among 13 youth discharged as of the time of review, families for only four youth received a call from the therapist within one to two months of discharge, typically only one call. What is DYRS’s minimum standard for therapeutic family engagement (frequency, modality, purpose), how is DYRS measuring compliance, and is the current level acceptable?

Treatment Plan Compliance

1. OIJJFO found that one youth had no treatment plan developed by New Beginnings until six months after admission, another had only one treatment plan in a 13-month span, and treatment plans for 13 of 17 youth in the sample failed to adequately address disruptive behaviors, trauma-related symptoms, cognitive and learning concerns, or substance use disorders. What is DYRS’s current compliance rate for: (a) initial treatment plan completed within the required timeframe, (b) updates at required intervals, and (c) plans that include a named provider and service frequency?

Restrictive Practices and Graduated Reintegration

1. Dr. Lee observed that restrictive programming, including room and unit confinement, inhibits self-regulation skill development. What is the current policy and monthly rate of room and unit confinement, and how will DYRS reduce reliance on restriction as population management?
2. The Auditor recommended graduated reintegration, including greater freedoms in the facility and even weekend passes, to help youth acclimate before release. The report noted DYRS did not respond to this recommendation. What elements of graduated reintegration has DYRS implemented, what remains, and what is the timeline?

Staff Conduct and Youth Safety

1. We have received reports that some DYRS staff incite violent incidents, encourage youth to nurture beefs, and offer treats and perks for beating other children. What systems does DYRS have in place to detect, investigate, and discipline staff who encourage or fail to prevent youth-on-youth violence? How many staff have been disciplined for such conduct in the past two years?
2. What is DYRS’s protocol when staff witness or learn of threats between youth? What documentation is required, and how does DYRS ensure intervention occurs before violence?

Outcome Measurement and Transparency

1. The Auditor recommended that DYRS “develop and publish a discrete set of outcome measures” including recidivism rates by time in community, educational and vocational engagement at release, and changes in risk assessment scores. The report noted DYRS did not respond to this recommendation. Will DYRS commit to publishing quarterly outcome data?

Facility Acquisition

1. Director Abed, during your 12 years leading Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services, the Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit (JJMU) repeatedly documented that the Waxter facility was “wholly decrepit” with extreme temperatures, mold, raw sewage smells, and structural deterioration. The JJMU recommended closure in 2007, yet girls remained detained there until 2022. Though media reports contradict this, you have told us that DYRS is now pursuing acquisition of that same condemned facility for DC youth. Can you explain this decision, and what has changed about the facility’s condition that would make it appropriate for DC youth when it was unfit for Maryland youth? What is the current status of those negotiations?

Conclusion

The core question is the one the young people are already asking: What is your plan?

If DYRS cannot answer that question, then DYRS is not rehabilitating children. It is managing them. And the predictable result is exactly what the young people told us: they will be back.

DYRS is entrusted with children. The ROAD Act set clear rules. DYRS should follow them, and this Committee should insist on nothing less.

Respectfully submitted,

Penelope Spain, CEO

Joshua Miller, Research & Advocacy Director

Open City Advocates