Trey Bundy

Seneca founder and CEO Ken Berrick and his staff toast their work over the past twelve years.

They raised paper cups filled with apple juice to toast the end of an era that lasted 12 years.

This week, employees at Seneca Center in Concord, a treatment program for at-risk youth, said goodbye to their last client and closed their residential facilities for good, mostly due to state budget cuts made back in October by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Counselors, teachers, therapists and other mental health professionals gathered in the residential wing of the campus, where the dormitory-style rooms sat bare, without a trace of the hundreds of kids who once lived in them.

“It’s a shame,” said Shannon Dickerson, who started at Seneca as a counselor in 2007. “I’m heartbroken.”

Since opening its first site in 1985, Seneca has gained a reputation for taking in kids whose behavior caused them to fail in other programs -- the kids most agencies wouldn’t let through the door. Seneca still maintains programs in several Bay Area counties. Ken Berrick, the agency’s founder and CEO, said he’s trying to look at the Concord closure as an opportunity to redeploy staff and strengthen other Seneca sites.

“But that silver lining in no way mitigates this disaster,” he said. “You could see vetoing money to fix potholes and saying, ‘It’s going to be a couple of years before we can do that.’ But vetoing money for these kids? They live here, these are their relationships.”

To critics of Schwarzenegger’s budget cuts, the closure of Seneca’s Concord location shows how the cuts have thrown mental health services into chaos and jeopardized children’s rights that are guaranteed by law.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act promises “free, appropriate public education” for all students, including treatment for mental health issues that affect learning. School districts provided those services until 1984, when the state legislature passed a measure transferring that responsibility to county mental health departments.

But amid a flurry of budget cuts in October, Schwarzenegger cut $132 million in mental health funding. The move let the counties off the hook but did not alleviate the federal mandate to provide services, so the schools—already facing financial woes—became responsible by default.

For their part, the schools are broke. The Mt. Diablo Unified School District, which includes Concord, released a memo in January estimating that it would cost $2.4 million dollars to provide mental health treatment to students for the remaining five months of the school year—money that does not exist in the district’s current budget.

Jim Preis, executive director of Mental Health Advocacy Services in Los Angeles, said the loss of funding is only part of the problem. Most school districts—unequipped to provide mental health services—are scrambling to implement treatment for students and, as a result, fewer kids are even being assessed for whether they have special needs.

“There was definitely a chilling effect on referrals, particularly on high-end services like residential,” Preis said. “The particular group of kids that felt the burden of the chaos were not yet in the system.”

Jesse Hahnel, an attorney who directs a foster care education initiative at the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, said the off-the-cuff manner in which Schwarzenegger made the cuts threw school districts and student services programs into panic around the state.

“That resulted in mass confusion,” Hahnel said, “Now the districts are pointing fingers at the counties and the counties are pointing fingers at the districts, and meanwhile the students are suffering. It was the opposite of an orderly, well-thought-out transition from county responsibility to district responsibility.”

Under Governor Jerry Brown some mental health funding is the process of being restored, but the current budget battle in Sacramento has made the ongoing financial wellbeing of programs like Seneca anything but certain.

The Seneca campus in Concord employed an innovative mix of residential care and community services that allowed the staff to maintain ongoing relationships with kids even once they returned to their families. The goal, said several staff members, was to buck the traditional stereotype of group homes as warehouses where violence rules and young souls go to atrophy.

“I know the nightmare stories but this place taught us to look past those behaviors and get to know the kids,” said Dickerson, now a quality assurance project manager at another Seneca site in San Francisco. “Unconditional care was really ingrained in everything we do.”

Berrick echoed that sentiment, adding that Seneca is a no-fail program for youth.

“The motto is, ‘Whatever it takes,’” he said, “and everyone is serious about it.”

Warnell Brooks started at Seneca straight out of college and has been there for eight years. He majored in criminal justice in college with an eye on becoming a parole officer, but said working at Seneca has proved to be a more effective crime prevention strategy.

“I’ve been able to have more impact on more kids here than I ever would have as a parole officer,” he said. “Kids I’ve worked with still call all the time to say thanks. I like being there for them.”

After a number of tearful speeches Wednesday, the staff went to the dining room to feast on salads and sliders prepared by Seneca’s house chef M’Lisa Kelley, a former chef at the renowned Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. She will be moving on to cook at the Seneca site attached to San Francisco General Hospital, but she started to cry as she recalled the ten years she cooked in Concord and all the kids she guided from steady diets of mac-and-cheese to arugula salads and specialty olives.

“This is really my home,” she said. “It’s what I was meant to do.”