photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The building at 3500 Clinton Place is pictured Thursday, Dec. 28, 2023. The site will be the future home of Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center's youth recovery center.

For the leader of Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center, opening a facility dedicated specifically to young patients has been on the distant horizon, but that horizon suddenly seems much closer.

Bert Nash CEO Patrick Schmitz said such a goal, until recently, seemed anywhere from five to eight years from fruition. But that all changed over the past year, thanks in part to an unexpected property acquisition.

Now, Bert Nash is working to develop a youth recovery center at 3500 Clinton Place, with hopes of opening within the next three years. Schmitz spoke with the Journal-World on Thursday and detailed what the path from here will look like.

That facility will eventually fill a need that isn’t being met in Douglas County at the moment, Schmitz said. Right now, kids in crisis are likely spending some time at LMH Health until they can find access to the next level of care, and that care is likely going to be in another community. Schmitz said those families are probably having to travel to Kansas City, Topeka, Wichita or even three and a half hours away to Hays, where there’s an inpatient mental health treatment facility for kids ages 6 to 18.

“To get that kind of care, it’s really challenging for them,” Schmitz said. “That’s part of why the state of Kansas is investing money in trying to develop more (of) what they call pediatric crisis centers. We’re just really honored to be one of the first to receive funding to help us develop our version of it here in Douglas County. It really is an extension of all the work this community has been doing over the last 10, 12, 15 years around improving our ability to help our community members in crisis.”

Meeting a need

Since April, Bert Nash has been operating the Treatment and Recovery Center of Douglas County, the county’s behavioral health crisis center at 1000 W. Second St. Until the TRC began accepting patients, people experiencing a mental health crisis had been stuck in a cycle of spending time in the custody of local law enforcement agencies or waiting in the LMH Health emergency department.

But while the TRC’s front-of-house urgent care unit serves any community member regardless of age, only adults can stay for overnight periods in the facility’s observation and stabilization units. That has left another gap in care.

“While we were developing the crisis center, which eventually became the TRC of Douglas County, we always knew that someday we would need to add some capacity for overnight stays for (kids) somewhere in the community,” Schmitz said. “It was always on our radar, like ‘Hey, we’re going to get to it someday,’ but we didn’t envision that it would happen as quickly as we’re going to be able to do that now.”

That’s thanks in large part to the sudden availability of the property where the youth recovery center will eventually be located at 3500 Clinton Place. The building was previously one of several health care-related businesses in that plaza near the intersection of Clinton Parkway and Kasold Drive, and its owners began offering it to a select group of local nonprofits in April — and at a reduced price to boot.

As Bert Nash leaders walked through the former medical facility, Schmitz said they quickly came to the conclusion that it could be a good fit for youth services.

“As we were walking through it, my (Chief Operations Officer) Stephen O’Neill and I looked at each other and said, ‘You know what, we could do the children’s crisis center here,’ because it’s the right facility, it’s the right location in town and nearly the right zoning,” Schmitz said.

What originally seemed like a goal that was five to eight years away from being realistic quickly became achievable in the next two or three. Schmitz said Bert Nash moved to purchase the three-level building and eventually completed a gift sale, which saved the agency almost $1 million.

Plans for the space

The Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission granted rezoning approval for the project in late August, which is what will allow the youth recovery center to accommodate overnight stays for mental health services. Schmitz said there won’t be a need to seek further approvals beyond that from either the Planning Commission or the Lawrence City Commission.

Schmitz said that though the project is only in the early stages of facility and program design, he does have at least a preliminary idea of how Bert Nash’s youth services could be distributed throughout the building. The top level would be home to the youth recovery center, which could accommodate mental health and substance use treatment for kids between 6 and 17 years old. They’d be able to stay at the youth recovery center for anywhere from three to five days to help them initially stabilize their condition.

The next floor down would house Bert Nash’s outpatient clinic for children’s services. Schmitz said plans for the first level are still up in the air, but the facility as a whole will focus on kids in some capacity.

“The two new pieces that are going to happen as a result of that building (are) the crisis center component and an intensive outpatient program for kids in that 6 to 17 age range,” Schmitz said.

A recently announced partnership with O’Connell Children’s Shelter will be key in that work, regardless of how the facility is eventually structured. As the Journal-World reported, the two agencies are partnering to form a new youth crisis continuum of care, one important piece of which is the youth recovery center. A roughly $250,000 grant from the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services will fund hiring a director for the center through Bert Nash and a program manager through O’Connell, who Schmitz said will work in tandem to develop the system. Those hires are expected this year.

The level of staffing that’ll be needed to eventually run the facility is hard to predict for now, but Schmitz anticipates that it will look somewhat similar to the staffing structure at the TRC. That facility’s medical director, Dr. Cord Huston, will likely also provide those services for the youth recovery center. The rest of the staff will probably consist of nurse practitioners, therapists, social workers and parent support staff.

Some direct overlap between this facility and the TRC will also exist. Schmitz said patients regardless of age would still start the intake process at the TRC’s urgent care unit, where they would be assessed and staff would determine whether the next best step was heading across town to the youth recovery center.

“… As we say, it gives us the gift of time to work through and then determine what are the next steps,” Schmitz said. “Hopefully, the next step for most kids will be right back home with some wrap-around supports. For some, it might be going over to O’Connell for some extended supports and work for them and their families and then return home. That’s some of that fun stuff we’re working on designing, and I think it’s going to be real neat in three years to look back and see what we’ve been able to create.”

Schmitz said that partnership would also bring more options when it comes to serving patients’ individual needs. For example, if a child stays at the youth recovery center but needs longer to get stabilized, the child could potentially move over to O’Connell for additional care. That keeps the treatment local, Schmitz said, and easily accessible for families.

What happens next?

Beyond hiring a director and program manager to guide the design process for the youth recovery center, Schmitz said the next big step in the project would be launching a capital campaign to help pay for a full-scale remodel of 3500 Clinton Place. He said that cost is estimated to be $12 million, a price tag kept lower than otherwise thanks to the discounted building purchase and the fact that Bert Nash won’t have to build something entirely new.

The capital campaign is slated to run through 2024. From there, Schmitz said the plan was to tackle remodeling work in 2025. Depending on how extensive that work ends up being, Schmitz said the youth recovery center could be ready to open by late 2025.

But even if it takes until 2026, Schmitz said that’s still ahead of schedule in his book.

“Let’s say worst-case scenario, it ends up opening sometime in 2026,” Schmitz said. “To me, that’s still three to five years sooner than it would’ve been had we not come across this opportunity to get this building and that a number of other things are coming together at the right time to make it possible for us to do this. If we had to go and build a whole new facility and all of that, the planning for that alone would’ve taken several years. Now we have a building so we can move forward faster.”