By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Days after state officials announced plans to pull all wards of the state from Maryville Academy’s main campus in Des Plaines, Father John Smyth offered to step down if the state would promise to leave the children there and begin sending more youths.

But Smyth, who said he believes that Department of Children and Family Services Director Bryan Samuels has made the dispute personal, also said he would find a way to keep the home for abused, neglected and otherwise troubled children open even if Illinois removes the children who are in state custody—nearly all of the 141 youths who currently reside on the campus.

Cardinal George said in a Sept. 19 statement that he “regretted” the decision to remove all the children.

“I had hoped that DCFS would give Maryville additional time and support in their progress at making the appropriate changes before this final decision,” the cardinal said. “Nevertheless, I accept this decision and pledge that I will work hard to help make those changes, redesigning programs and restructuring staff, in order to reopen the Maryville Academy campus.

Cardinal George has met with Smyth and was expected to meet again with him in the next several days to discuss Maryville’s future.

Smyth, the face of Maryville Academy for more than 40 years, has become a lightning rod in the ongoing controversy about problems at Maryville, once the state’s largest residential child care facility with a 270-bed campus. The negative publicity started with accusations that staff altered reports about the suicide of a 14-year-old girl in February 2002. Since then, more reports have come out about sexual and physical assaults committed on other residents by children who live there—children who generally have not been successful in multiple foster-care and group home placements before being sent to Maryville.

The state sent monitors to the site after the suicide, and stopped sending children to Maryville Dec. 8, in order to give the agency time to make changes in staff training and procedures.

Earlier this summer, Smyth and chief operating officer Father David Ryan relinquished control over the day-to-day program to Dr. James Guidi, at the request of DCFS.

When Samuels called for Smyth to step aside entirely in a meeting with the Chicago Tribune editorial board Sept. 22, three days after Gov. Rod Blagojevich ordered all state wards to be removed, Smyth reacted with mystification.

“He thinks I’m still running things,” Smyth said. “But I haven’t talked to him or to [Cook County Public Guardian Patrick] Murphy for months. I haven’t even joined in the negotiations about what’s to be done.”

Murphy, who serves as the attorney for most of the children at Maryville, was reportedly considering filing a lawsuit in an attempt to block the children’s removal. Smyth said that for many of the residents, Maryville provided the first stable home they ever had, and removing all of them would mean taking some 18-year-old high school seniors who have lived there for three, four or five years out of schools where they are doing well and expected to graduate. Those who do graduate are promised scholarships to any college that will admit them, from money raised privately by Maryville.

“If you ask the kids, to a one, they say they want to stay here,” said Smyth. “The kids are making fools out of the adults in this case.”

Smyth believes the DCFS agenda is to reduce or even eliminate residential group care for children, pushing ever more of them into foster homes, which are much less expensive to run. But most of the children at Maryville have already had several foster home placements, he said, and there has been a track record of problems at foster homes as well.

In the meantime, although the governor promised Sept. 19 to move children within 30 to 90 days, no arrangements had been made for anyone to move by Sept. 23, when The Catholic New World went to press, partially because all of the children are in special education and need to have alternative school plans before they could be pulled from their classes, Smyth said.

Smyth, a master fundraiser who saved Maryville from closure in the 1960s, acknowledged that there had been problems, especially as Maryville grew at a rapid pace in the 1990s to accommodate children DCFS was pulling back from out-of-state residential homes. Among those problems is the apparent alteration of documents relating to the 2002 suicide—the second suicide at Maryville in Smyth’s four decades. Those charges are now being investigated to see if staff members could be charged with Medicaid fraud in the case.

“Were there problems? Yes. Did staff members do things wrong? Yes, and I’m embarrassed about that,” Smyth said. “Those things were dealt with, and Maryville is better today than it was six months ago. We try to improve every day.”

Maryville and Smyth still enjoy the support of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and a long list of benefactors and alumni, along with other local politicians. Illinois state Sen. Dave Sullivan (R-Park Ridge) and Des Plaines Mayor Tony Arredia hosted a rally in support of Smyth on the Des Plaines campus Sept. 22.

“This campus is the only home these kids have known,” Sullivan said in a statement. “There are problems at Maryville to be sure, but the solution is to fix the problems, not shut the place down.”