THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 16, 1995 TAG: 9509160268
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK AND MARIE JOYCE, STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Children at The Pines Residential Treatment Center on Portsmouth Boulevard reacted to news that they would be moved to another facility by lighting small fires and tripping fire alarms earlier this week.
The Portsmouth Fire Department responded to two fires, on Sunday and Monday, and to five false alarms started by tripped sprinklers from Sunday to Tuesday. The building was evacuated for the fires and partially evacuated for the false alarms, according to the Portsmouth fire marshal. Two students have been charged.
The head of the psychiatric center says the situation is under control. Group sessions with counselors and visits to the other facility seemed to have calmed fears, said Debra Goldstein, administrator.
She says the children apparently burned clothes to start the fires. Other times, they manipulated sprinkler heads to trip the fire alarms, according to the fire marshal.
The Portsmouth Avenue facility, called the Brighton Campus, is one of two Pines centers in the city. Brighton is an open campus on the grounds of a former military school, where students may walk outside to go to class or other activities. The center to which some of them will be moved this month, on Crawford Parkway, is a enclosed facility with open-air courtyards.
Administrators had planned to tell the children, but word leaked out beforehand. Goldstein said worries about the change in facilities, along with the knowledge that they would be separated from some staff and other students, caused the children to act out.
``They were responding to hearsay and not entirely accurate information,'' she said. ``It was attention-seeking. It was a display of anxiety.''
The move is part of restructuring going on at The Pines and its Nofolk-based parent company, FHC Health Systems. Some children will be grouped differently, and some housed on Crawford Parkway will be moved to Brighton.
Two students who were the ringleaders of the Brighton uproar have been transferred to an FHC acute psychiatric hospital in Norfolk. They ``were at risk of hurting themselves or others,'' said Goldstein.
The incidents illustrate one of the reasons for reorganizing programs, said Goldstein. As managed care emphasizes outpatient treatment for those whose cases can be handled that way, inpatient centers like The Pines are seeing a greater concentration of patients with more acute problems.
The center also is shifting from a ``psychodynamic'' approach, which looks at a patient's history and tries to get to the root of the problem, to an approach that emphasizes behavior, she said.
Many of the children at the Pines have been through other programs that weren't successful.
Brighton is licensed to handle 132 patients from age 5 to 22. Most of the students there have been referred by social services agencies. by CNB