Rally on Montana Avenue near the Capitol in support of Intermountain staff and students (photo by Paulette Kohman)

The months-long effort to keep the residential program at Intermountain Children’s Home open seems to have prevented a complete closure. The future is unclear, but the organization announced in early October that it would keep at least one residential cottage open while working to rebuild the program.

The announcement appears to be in response to staff and community concerns about shuttering the residential program. In September, Intermountain had announced that it would temporarily close the program because of staffing shortages and unsustainable rates of employee turnover. A number of staff members, former residents and their families, and community members expressed concern through a September 11 rally and by other means.

What is Intermountain? Intermountain Children’s Home is a nonprofit organization in Helena that provides care for children who need extra help with mental and behavioral health. Intermountain started as a boarding school with just nine students in 1909 called the Montana Deaconess School, according to the Intermountain website. The school, originally located in an campus in the Helena Valley, later moved to 11th Avenue and then to Lamborn Street below Mount Ascension.

The school was renamed Intermountain Children’s Home and shifted its focus to “relational therapy,” helping children who have had troubled childhoods have a safe place to heal, learn, and grow. The program focuses on staff connecting with the children one-on-one to provide deeper attachments, according to the website. As part of this therapy, some children live in cottages full-time, becoming residents at Intermountain. 

Intermountain has been important not only to youth and their families but to the community of Helena for more than 100 years. Fifty-five people were employed at Intermountain as of September 1, according to an article in the Independent Record. 

Many staff, families, and alumni fear that the essence of the program might become a thing of the past.

Certain rifts between staff and the new management as of early this summer were partially caused by staffing challenges, along with other reasons, according to articles published by the Independent Record and Montana Free Press. Covid also hit Intermountain hard, impacting the number of youth in the residential program.  

The Nugget interviewed Melissa Hammond, operational manager of the residential program, who agreed to speak for herself and not as a representative of Intermountain. She discussed the effects of the pandemic from a staff person’s perspective: “Why work somewhere for 40 hours in person when there are options to work from home?” The Covid outbreak was largely to blame for this difficulty in finding staff. 

Intermountain formerly had four residential cottages. That number has dropped for varied reasons, according to a staff member interviewed by The Nugget: The pandemic caused one cottage to shut down in the summer of 2022; another was closed just this summer due to the staffing shortages. As the program is reduced, class sizes dwindle. Intermountain teachers scarcely have more than three children in their classes, and if this continues the remaining teachers will have no students. 

The kids are being discharged or pulled from the programs, some to other facilities, and some to public schools and homes. This means they are not guaranteed the help and special care they had at Intermountain. The two-year program designed to help the individual children was cut short, and relationships built in Intermountain have been disrupted, meaning these children must interrupt their progress and restart or be restricted from the help they received at Intermountain. 

The leaders of Intermountain said that they are working to provide quality services. “The safety of the children has always been the top priority for Intermountain,” said Chris Oliveira, an attorney representing Intermountain, who was quoted in an article on KTVH, the local TV station. “Intermountain continues in its commitment to the children and families served through its residential program as well as its other services in the community.”

To bring awareness to the issue of the cottages being shut down, people involved in the matter gathered at the Capitol building on Monday, September 11. Staff members, former residents, and community supporters held signs on Montana Avenue near the Capitol to inform the passing vehicle drivers and pedestrians of the proposed shutdown of the residential program. 

The event focused on the possible effects on Intermountain staff and youth. “It [the rally] definitely gained attention,” said Hammond.

According to an article in Montana Free Press, ““As recently as Oct. 3, the plan changed again. In a statement to staff shared with media outlets, Intermountain walked back the possibility of all-out closure, saying leadership had developed a plan aimed at keeping one cottage open while strategizing about how to ‘rebuild’ the program.”

The article stated that “After weeks of turmoil, attorneys representing several staff members and parents negotiated an extension, agreeing that the campus would stay open at least until Nov. 30, and possibly later, giving parents more time to try to find other placements for their children.”

People in the community now know what’s going on at the place in Helena where children have a chance to recover.