Cayuga Centers closing Auburn residential-treatment center, laying off up to 120

AUBURN, N.Y. — Cayuga Centers will shut down its residential-treatment program in Auburn and lay off as many as 120 people, the nonprofit announced Thursday.

The 166-year-old Auburn–based institution said in a statement that it had lost $2 million since July. “It would have been money well spent if it could have enabled us to attract the number of youth we need to break even. But the numbers just aren’t there,” Edward Hayes, president and CEO, said in a statement on the organization’s website.

While up to 120 employees may lose their jobs, Cayuga Centers will still have about 180 employees in the area, Hayes said in an email response to a BJNN inquiry. Along with respite programs for individuals with developmental difficulties and family therapy programs, the local organization will keep providing programs to help children in the welfare system. Also, he notes, Auburn will continue to be Cayuga Centers’ administrative headquarters.

Cayuga Centers has specialized and intensified its residential-treatment program in recent years with some success, Hayes said.

However, the organization experienced increasing difficulty attracting young people appropriate for the program, he said, noting Cayuga Center does not accept sexual offenders.

“Trustees and senior staff members deeply regret having to lay off so many excellent people,” David Connelly, chair of Cayuga Center’s board of trustees, said in the nonprofit’s news release. “They have been working extraordinarily hard, heart and soul, trying to make our residential program work under increasingly difficult circumstances. It grieves us to have to let them go.”

Hayes said there was an upside. “Youth services authorities have come to realize that placing troubled children with suitable, trained, loving families is far more effective for their treatment than housing them in group homes.”

Far fewer young people are institutionalized now, he said. “Programs such as the Cayuga Centers-created Treatment Family Foster Care produce wonderful outcomes at much lower cost than congregate-care placement.

“The programs that Cayuga Centers and other agencies have created in recent years enable them, with the help of participating families, to step into a troubled young person’s life before he or she ends up incarcerated,” Hayes said.

“We trustees have watched this exciting change for years,” Connelly said. “Cayuga Centers has been one of its leaders.”

Founded in 1852 as an orphanage, Cayuga Centers has evolved over the years, according to its website. It took on serving young people placed by family court in the 1950s and added community-based programs in the 1990s when it also began serving people with developmental disabilities and offering respite care. In 2017, the organization reported revenues of $48.7 million.

In addition to the Auburn facility, Cayuga Centers has operations in Rochester, the Bronx as well as in Delaware and Florida.

Contact McChesney at cmcchesney@cnybj.com

VISUAL CREDIT: Cayuga Centers website