[2/5/04]Rep. George Flaggs proposed legislation Wednesday that would create a statewide task force to overhaul the state’s two training schools.

Flaggs, D-Vicksburg, filed House Bill 789 to create a 22-member committee that would devise a way to improve the Oakley Training School in Raymond and Columbia Training School in Columbia. The committee would report its findings by Dec. 31.

“I’m doing this because of the lawsuit and because of my passion for children,” said Flaggs, chairman of the Juvenile Justice Committee. “I took the blame for the situation and now I’ve got to provide the leadership to fix it. We don’t need to litigate this.”

After a letter citing violations was written 18 months after an investigation into the two schools began, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Mississippi in December citing civil rights violations at the state-funded facilities. According to a Department of Justice report, youths at state training schools were chained to poles, hogtied and forced to eat their vomit.

The two facilities operated by the Department of Human Services house about 550 children.

Flaggs has said the training schools should be shut down if a settlement cannot be reached in the federal lawsuit.

“It’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to the hard work of fixing our troubled system,” Flaggs said.

In addition to the task force, Flaggs is calling on the Casey Foundation to assist with the reform efforts. The foundation most recently worked with the State of Louisiana to fix problems at the juvenile justice detention center in Tallulah that was also the subject of a Justice Department lawsuit.

The proposed task force would also work to determine funding needs for the two facilities, examine how youths are sent to training schools and the quality of care they receive there and to seek alternatives to incarceration.

“The youths we’re dealing with now are quite different from the youths around when they set it up,” Flaggs said. “They were never meant to house mentally challenged youths and never set up for truancy and that type of thing.”

In its 48-page report, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department described the two training schools as understaffed and underfinanced. The report also found that the facilities were ill-equipped and had a poorly trained workforce.