EASTON, Pa. –Staff shortages at the Northampton County Juvenile Justice Center remain a serious concern, officials from the court system told a county council committee.
- Administrators from Northampton County courts asked for help solving the ongoing staffing crisis at the county's Juvenile Justice Center
- Officials have been asking for help to resolve the crisis for more than a year
- The center has less than a third of the full staff of youth care workers, the same number as last November.
“I’m asking again for the 14th month. Help us out,” Court Administrator J. Jermaine Greene told the Courts and Corrections Committee last week. “We have an obligation here, all of us, not just me, not just the courts, not just the administrative juvenile judge, not just the president judge. All of you on council have an obligation as well to help these children."
"We’re going to break up these families if we don’t do something.”
Currently, the juvenile detention and treatment facility has less than a third of an entire staff of youth care workers, the front-line employees directly responsible for the children in care, according to Jamarr Billman, the center’s administrator.
Center administrators netted zero new full-time employees since November – eight new hires replaced the same number of departing employees.
Greene asked the council to look into doing something similar to the bonus and retention package offered to employees of the county-run Gracedale Nursing Home in early 2022, using federal funds from the American Rescue Plan.
Five million dollars was earmarked for $2,500 bonuses, paid to both new hires and existing employees annually for four years.
Greene has long said that to solve the staff shortage, the facility has to increase pay.
Salaries for youth care workers are set by negotiations between the county executive and their union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Those negotiations have stalled; Greene said the parties have been waiting to go to arbitration for months.
Across the state, juvenile detention beds are in critically short supply. Only a handful of juvenile detention and treatment facilities remain in operation statewide.
Because of the staff shortage, Greene said the center has been turning away children from other counties nearly every day for months. He said that if the facility was fully staffed, it could bring in more money than the county spends on it.
