A Lawrence home for troubled teenage boys soon may be out of business.

“We are in the process of deciding whether to stay open,” said Bobick Sarraf, executive director at Achievement Place for Boys, 1320 Haskell Ave.

Sarraf said the eight-bed home was caught between state guidelines that limit boys’ stays to 140 days and higher costs.

“To do what they want us to do would cost thousands of dollars,” he said. “We don’t have that kind of money. We’re bottoming out, financially.”

Earlier this year, the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services and the Juvenile Justice Authority announced that group-home stays would be limited to 140 days.

The longer stays, they said, violated the state’s Medicaid plan.

“The kids we are dealing with are products of severe neglect, abuse and trauma,” Sarraf said. “It takes quite a bit longer than 140 days to build relationships with them. We can’t do it.”

The 140-day restriction was added to the state Medicaid plan in 1996 in an apparent effort to steer children toward foster-home placements rather than group homes.

Records show that before lawmakers privatized the state’s foster care system in 1996, 69 percent of the state’s foster children lived in group-home settings; today, only 15 percent do.

Katrina Ostmeyer, Topeka, an assistant teaching parent at Achievement Place for Boys, 1320 Haskell Ave., discusses the successful fulfillment of some house duties with one of the boys in residence at the home. The Achievement Place for Boys likely will be closing because of Medicaid billing rules.

Until this year, the 140-day limit had not been enforced.

To remain eligible for Medicaid, Achievement Place would need to become a certified “psychiatric residential treatment facility.”

“To do that, we would have to create one full-time position just to handle the paperwork,” Sarraf said. “And we would have to have 24-hour access to a nurse and to a doctor. We’re not big enough for that.”

Currently, Achievement Place is operating at half its capacity, he said.

State officials say their hands are tied.

“Changes are being made in the way Medicaid funds can be used to reimburse people for the services they provide,” said Juvenile Justice Authority spokesman Bill Miskell. “They apply to everybody.”

Most of the boys at Achievement Place are in both the juvenile-offender and foster-care systems. Their stays are paid in large part by Medicaid, a 60-40 blend of federal and state funds.

Stays that exceed 140 days may not be eligible for federal funding.

Miskell said about 1,600 children – teens, mostly – were in Juvenile Justice Authority custody. About 310 are in group homes similar to Achievement Place. The remainder, he said, are in locked-door facilities or foster homes or living with their families.

Launched in 1967, Achievement Place pioneered the concept of using married couples – rather than three shifts of employees – to run group homes, creating familylike settings.

Sarraf and his wife, Roxanne, live at Achievement Place.

“I’m afraid we’re about to lose the granddaddy of the whole idea,” said Dave Kingsley, a Lawrence-based researcher who has studied Achievement Place’s techniques.

Sarraf said he and his governing board would decide by Friday whether – or when – to close the home.

“This has been an incredibly stressful time for us,” he said.

The fate of the four boys now at the home is unclear.

“I’m guessing they will try to find foster homes to take them,” Sarraf said. “I don’t know.”

Faced with similar budget pressures, Achievement Place’s counterpart, Achievement Place for Girls, 637 Tenn., closed in June 2004.