Barton’s Crossing homeless shelter in Pittsfield could close

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The threat of losing Barton’s Crossing, the homeless shelter run by Berkshire Red Cross, brought a full house to an emergency meeting July 25. The meeting was initially called to set up protocol for referring people to homeless services; it became a call for help, when Barton’s Crossing took a $40,000 cut from the state after a $28,000 cut from United Way. Officers in the Pittsfield Police Department said Barton’s Crossing was critical to the city’s safety, and many people’s stability. “There are so many homeless in Berkshire County now, people moving from friend to friend, burning bridges as they go . . . too proud or uneducated to get help.” There are just four officers on the street now to protect 40,000 citizens in Pittsfield; what happens if two get tied up, taking care of a domestic difficulty? “We aren’t seeing what we had 15 years ago, people living out of bags on North Street,” the officers said, but they see two and three families in an apartment on every call they make. All week long, they pick up substance abuse cases and send them to the police station, Berkshire Medical Center, to court — it is a cycle. A representative from Berkshire Medical Center said Pittsfield is seeing street homelessness already. He knew of one woman living in a park, with small children, which she lost. She had refused Department of Social Services’ services. He was worried that if the shelter closed, the city would see more higher risk mentally ill people on the streets. Kathleen Phillips, executive director of the Red Cross, said right now Barton’s Crossing is operating on an emergency budget. Its future depends on the way its state funding breaks down. The shelter needs $211,000 a year for operations; it now has $170,000 for the year. If the state allows the Red Cross to spend what it has it until it is gone, the shelter can continue to operate, and it will buy time for further fundraising. If the Red Cross has to divide $170,000 by 12 months, it will have to run the shelter on a shortfall of $2,500 a month. The shortfall started July 1, according to the current budget. Phillips expected that it will be retroactive. Until this year, have gotten funding from the state, the city of Pittsfield and United Way. The board ate $25,000 of the United Way hit, with reserve funds, Phillips said. It cannot absorb any more. She has been working with the local legislators, but they have not been able to protect the shelter’s funding. This is an election year, and politicians are not giving much information, she said, but the shelter program used to be somewhat protected, because it was a line item. Boston politicians wanted to take it out so they could compete for the funding. The legislature has slashed funding to shelters across the state, she said. There may be 25 shelters in Boston, and one main shelter in Berkshire County; it makes no difference. The Berkshire shelter is not a priority. And if the shelters start closing here, supportive services will die with them. Barton’s Crossing has been operating on a tight budget for years, Phillips said. She has started wondering, “why are we suffering by ourselves? We will not have economic development in the Berkshires if there are homeless people on Main Street.” Most people who come through Barton’s Crossing make the transition successfully, and most of them live here. If the Red Cross decreases the number of people at the shelter, it will back up other local agencies. The Red Cross needed help, she said, and soon. The shelter needed $40,000. “Volunteers are great, but they don’t pay the rent.” Representatives from county police departments, shelters, homeless services, churches, hospitals, the house of corrections, the sheriffs office, and services for battered women and the terminally ill, gathered at the Red Cross Chapter House. Janie McCormick on the Berkshire Community Action Council explained that there were a group of people trying to provide services to the homeless, who were not sure who to call if a family turned up after midnight without a place to stay. The Red Cross hoped to collect information on the services available, and set up a protocol so these organizations could call one number, instead running up a tally of ‘I’m full. They’ll have to go somewhere else.’ McCormick said she was overwhelmed by the response. Many of the organizations offered to help. Mark Amuso, director of the Pittsfield Department of Community Development, said the shelter closing would be devastating. “There is a cap on what we can spend, and we are very close to it,” he said, but he would look into it. He suggested Phillips write to Berkshire Health Systems. Losing Barton’s Crossing would slow down the movement of patients, he said, and people already come into the emergency room to keep warm. Dan Dillon from United Way suggested she write to the United Way Community Chest. Barton’s Crossing has run on a tight budget for four years, he said. “Tell them donated toothbrushes don’t carry it anymore.” Jack Downing, who represented a Veteran’s Hospital just over the border, said Barton’s Crossing’s closing would effect him in the next county as well. He advocated setting up a cot shelter. “We do that in Northampton ... run it on a daily basis.” He said Phillips should “demand from the community that they replace money taken from Barton’s Crossing. It is a real lynch-pin to people’s sanity. Without it, people will be in deeper and more violent crises. I think you’ve done tremendous work, and I’ll do whatever you’d like me to.” Joel Huntington, the pastor at Pittsfield’s South Congregational Church, also represented the Council of Churches. The council has an emergency fund, he said, and so do most churches. He and Cara Davis at Construct Inc. discussed holding a walk-a-thon for Barton’s Crossing. Faith communities take some organizing, he said, but he and the other faith communities represented — the Christian Center, Larry Higgins of the Dalton Police Department with the Central Berkshire Episcopal Community, and Friends of St. Vincent de Paul in Lenoxdale — promised help. The Berkshires had a cot shelter years ago called The Last Resort, Huntington said. It is not impossible to do. It was run through churches. Church members sometimes took people in as well. But they ran into legal issues — “why don’t you put someone up tonight and have them fall down your cellar stairs. Or someone turns out to be schizophrenic, and you didn’t know. It only takes one night of listening to a schizophrenic mother yelling at her children” to make a host decide they cannot do this again. Phillips thought that with help, Barton’s Crossing may be able to pull off another year. Green said she felt secure in saying that much. The Governor’s veto of July 30 did not cut any more funding from the shelter. Berkshire Shelters Barton’s Crossing is a transitional and emergency shelter. It has 24 beds for 13 men and 11 women, who can stay up to four or five months. Barton’s Crossing serves “500 to 600 people a year, depending on whether you count repeats,” said Chris Greene, Berkshire County ARC and director of Homeless and Emergency Services at the Berkshire Red Cross. The Red Cross has been providing homeless services in Berkshire County for about 12 years. Barton’s Crossing opened in 1998. Green said the Red Cross operates only nine shelters across the country. Barton’s Crossing has been operating at 150 percent capacity for most of the year; they have a reprieve this month for the first time in the last six or eight months, Green said. It is a singles shelter, but has been accommodating families for the last couple of years. It stopped accepting families as of July 1. “You work with families very differently from individuals,” Green said. They have very different needs. There could also be a safety factor in working with individuals from all kinds of backgrounds, but, “knock on wood, we’ve never had any incidents.” It is one of four shelters in Berkshire County, McCormick said. She works with Our Friend’s House, a family shelter with 8 bedrooms. People do not come there for a one-day stay. The average is three months, McCormick said, and a family can stay up to two years. Our Friend’s House also offers motel stays and emergency services: if a client moves out on a Friday, the shelter may offer someone else a place for the weekend. Our Friend’s House does outreach and prevention work as well: mediation to prevent evictions, helping clients to pay bills, and repairing relationships with landlords. “Usually when you talk with people and calm them down, you can patchwork something at least, so they are not living in their cars. We have tried very hard not to have street homeless,” she said. They have succeeded so well, “many people are not even aware we have a shelter.” Cara Davis of Construct Inc.runs a shelter in Great Barrington, with three-family transitional housing and a program for teenage men. Charlene Carlson runs Lewison House in Adams, also a three-family transitional housing shelter. Doubling Up The face of Berkshire Homelessness is doubling up, Green said: multiple families sharing small apartments. “A lot of families don’t mind. They say ‘I’d rather have them here than in a shelter.’” The host family risks losing their own housing subsidies or getting evicted. Lorraine Jones from Berkshire Housing had some resources for people who are doubling up. She has 150 available and unused section 8 resources, vouchers that have to be matched with affordable housing. Berkshire Housing has traditionally had an influx of people from the eastern half of the state, she said: people from Boston would call, get selected, transfer out of the county and leave. The state changed regulations last year, so that people have to live in Berkshire County to benefit. The question now is whether affordable housing is available and whether her clients can find it. McCormick said many people who need housing are living from day to day, from crisis to crisis. They do not have advice or case management. The Department of Social Services can bring some force to bear, to help them find services and programs. Brad Gordon from the Berkshire County Regional Housing Authority spoke about the shortage of affordable housing. That day’s Berkshire Eagle had 48 rentals listed in the classifieds, for the whole county. He has a case load of 197 right now. People have more access to vouchers, but many people get them and have a hard time finding housing within the specified 180 days. “Or the housing is substandard,” Jones said. People find a place and the Berkshire Housing inspector looks it over and it is not up to code. Bordon said BCRHA is not a traditional housing authority. They provide counseling, mediation and case management, as well as housing. He was concerned over the decline in housing stock in Berkshire County. Rents have skyrocketed across the state, he said. There are more absentee landlords speculating here. And as rent gets tighter, landlords get more selective. The Berkshires have a housing crisis on their doorstep, “beyond 80 percent, 50 percent or 30 percent income. It effects everyone in the community. . . . There are no short-term fixes.” Prevention programs are losing funding, he said, for example the emergency assistance rent-a-room program: a shallow subsidy that provides assistance with three or four months’ rent a year. BCRHA has relied on it to prevent evictions. When people do not have permanent housing, they do not have stable households, he said; when they do not have stable households, they do not have stable jobs; when they do not have jobs, they lose income, stability, and housing. It is a cycle. A national housing coalition study of affordable housing in Berkshire County has recently found that over 50 percent of all renters are rent-burdened, that is, they are spending more than half of their income on rent. “You need to make $12 an hour to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Pittsfield,” Gordon said. At minimum wage, that means working 70 hours a week. And half of all single parent households are below the self-sufficiency standard. It was too bad, he added, that the local representatives and Senator Nuciforo had not come to the meeting. It would have been powerful for them to see. Huntington spoke of the difficulty of trying to communicate these issues to regular people in the community. Gordon said BCRHA has thought of setting up a speaker’s bureau that will go into churches and speak with members. He also directed Huntington to the Homeless Committee which meets once a month, second Wednesdays, at the Red Cross Chapter house. Further Berkshire resources for homeless & affordable housing Green asked the group whether they knew of gaps in the community’s services. She mentioned the difficulty of making sure mentally ill people were properly referred to the Safe Harbor program or one like it. She also spoke about teenagers. “Most homeless teens are jumping from friend to friend to friend to friend . . . They are not using services. They will not go into a shelter. They don’t acknowledge they need services.” A case manager for people living with HIV and AIDS said that one of the hardest things she did was to find safe and affordable housing for people with a life-threatening illness. There was heroin and crack in many buildings. She was on-call after hours, and took midnight calls from people with no place to stay. “It is even harder with a father and an 8 year old girl, or a mother and a 12 year old boy,” she said. Men and women are kept separate in the shelters and these children are too young to be put in a room by themselves. Judy Sullivan at the Sherriff’s office collaborates with many of the people present. She finds transitional housing for people who are leaving the house of corrections. A colleague works with people who have just been released from the hospital or the House of Corrections, trying to help them qualify for health care. The loss of Mass. Health Care Basic has led to more people leaving without medications, she said. More people without healthcare, medication and housing during that transition will cause more problems for the city. An aftercare for female inmates said she recently called 21 shelters for battered women, in collaboration with the Elizabeth Freeman Center, before she found a place for one woman, and that shelter is way out of the area. Shelters are great help in violent situations, she said. Others noted the difficulty of finding aid for single-parent families where the parent is the father, or finding de-leaded apartments safe for young children. Norm Schutz, chief of Adams Police Department, said teachers see problems generating, and asked whether schools were aware of contact numbers for local services. McCormick said she meets with the Pittsfield School Department. School administrations have to deal with issues of liability, confidentiality, mandated reporting, and irate parents, which make their situation very difficult. Lt. Healy, Station Commander of the Cheshire Police, said he does not get many walk-ins, but he does get stranded people: someone driving a car five miles has a break down, and she has three kids in the back. There used to be bus vouchers with the Salvation Army, he said. These people have a place to go, but no way to get there and nowhere but the police station to wait. They have people in the lobby for ten hours, waiting for friends to arrange a ride from Boston or Montpelier. Major Barnes of the Salvation Army said the Salvation Army runs rehabilitation programs in Springfield and Albany, and accepts referrals. Each program has 50 to 75 beds; they are residential, and low cost, or free if the person has no income. Referral is not hard — a phone call and a fax is all that’s necessary. McCormick said the Red Cross needed to collect knowledge of these resources, and others. Until a protocol is officially worked out, the Red Cross will serve as lead agency for local homelessness resources. Someone answers the phone there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They will take information and a phone number and get back to the caller within half an hour. The caller may be at a pay phone, or at least panicked, and unable to call back. Often an emergency situation is not an emergency, she said; it is a panic situation. “You need someone who knows what to ask. ”A caller says ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. I had a fight with my boyfriend’ or ‘my husband kicked me out.’ If they are scared, they should go to police or women’s services and take out a restraining order,” she said. But if someone is getting kicked out of the house tomorrow, she can ask, ‘Ok, but you can stay there tonight? Come and see me tomorrow morning and we’ll work something out.’
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McCann Recognizes Superintendent Award Recipient

By Tammy DanielsiBerkshires Staff

Landon LeClair and Superintendent James Brosnan with Landon's parents Eric and Susan LeClair, who is a teacher at McCann. 
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Superintendent's Award has been presented to Landon LeClair, a senior in McCann Technical School's advanced manufacturing course. 
 
The presentation was made last Thursday by Superintendent Jame Brosnan after Principal Justin Kratz read from teachers' letters extolling LeClair's school work, leadership and dedication. 
 
"He's become somewhat legendary at the Fall State Leadership Conference for trying to be a leader at his dinner table, getting an entire plate of cookies for him and all his friends," read Kratz to chuckles from the School Committee. "Landon was always a dedicated student and a quiet leader who cared about mastering the content."
 
LeClair was also recognized for his participation on the school's golf team and for mentoring younger teammates. 
 
"Landon jumped in tutoring the student so thoroughly that the freshman was able to demonstrate proficiency on an assessment despite the missed class time for golf matches," read Kratz.
 
The principal noted that the school also received feedback from LeClair's co-op employer, who rated him with all fours.
 
"This week, we sent Landon to our other machine shop to help load and run parts in the CNC mill," his employer wrote to the school. LeClair was so competent the supervisor advised the central shop might not get him back. 
 
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