A new Shelby County Juvenile Assessment Center is slated to open in July in the building that once housed the old Raleigh library.

The center will take the place of the former Youth Advocacy Center, a project the county funded in 2018 that was housed on the campus of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

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The mission of the new center has not changed from that of the previous iteration, said Dorcas Young Griffin, director of Shelby County Community Services, who has worked on the project for the past several years.

“It is all really the same project. It has all been birthed from the same vision,” Griffin said. “... The youth assessment center was our effort to really look at how we could have youth that may be in contact with law enforcement and may be on a trajectory to be involved with the court system, how we can divert some of those kids to a place they can get some services and support instead of going through the system.”

While the mission of keeping children out of the court system has not changed, what has changed is having law enforcement referrals for children at the new center, which will be operated by Shelby County. Young said when the center opens, referrals will come from both law enforcement and families.

When the former youth advocacy center opened in 2019 at UTHSC, there was resistance to having law enforcement involvement on the college campus in the process by referring children to the center. Instead, they had to come through the family. 

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“In terms of law enforcement referrals, it was a challenge in trying to figure out what that looks like, and I understood UT’s side and I understood the police side,” Griffin said. “So UT’s position was just that was not something that really fit what they were about on their campus, and I actually completely understood that.”

She added: “It was really hard to find some solutions and we really couldn’t come to an agreement, and so we just figured that it probably made more sense for the county to try to operate it because some of those same concerns were not as prevalent for us, although we are not trying to have a center where a whole bunch of kids are brought in, in handcuffs.”

Griffin said the center will not be “a place where law enforcement can just drop off kids” but police will be able to refer children to the center after they come in contact with them.

In the past, children who had been issued a summons by law enforcement received appointments to see someone at the former advocacy center several weeks later. Critics said this took too long to get the children the immediate help and services they needed.

“What we’re saying now is this summons does not turn into a court interaction if you report to the youth assessment center in a certain amount of days,” Griffin said. “And we will help them with transportation.”

There may be some limited cases where Griffin said law enforcement may need to bring a child directly to the center for situations involving “imminent risk,” in which police need to get a child out of a situation and take him or her to a safe space like the center to “calm the situation down but not arrest them.”

“We will have the ability to do that but we do not anticipate having a whole bunch of police drop-offs all day and all night,” she said.

The center will be at the former Raleigh library at 3157 Powers Road. The building was transferred to the county from the City of Memphis at no charge.

The county has provided $500,000 in operating cost for the center, same as with the former center at UTHSC.

At the June 2 Shelby County Commission meeting, Griffin along with Michael Thompson, the county’s civil finance manager, requested unused funds from the Aging Commission’s construction project to pay for upgrades at the assessment center, including bullet-proof windows and upgrading the HVAC unit in the building.

They proposed taking $366,000 left from $800,000 funding for the Aging Commission project to use on the youth center upgrades.

County Commissioner Willie Brooks Jr., whose district includes the center, said he supports the project.

“This project is directly in my neighborhood, and I pass through there every day. ... They are definitely doing the work, and I want to make sure that we are providing the support that is needed serving our youth,” Brooks said.

Griffin told commissioners the center will serve 800 children based on referrals from law enforcement and the community.

She said when the former center was open at UTHSC, only 66 children were served during the time it was open.

“It’s no secret to anybody that’s in the room that since we rolled this out and have worked hard to get it in place that we have had some starts and stops,” Griffin told commissioners. “You all got here in 2018 as a body and you know that our 2018 effort did not prove to be as effective as we hoped that it would be because we only had 66 children who were served from opening in June 2019 to June 2020.”

She added: “We recognize, y’all, that a major change was needed to get the vision back on track, mainly around the county being the convener and operator of this center while we rely on partners to actually do the services.”

She said that the county is in the process of hiring a youth assessment manager to run the center, which will not be open 24 hours a day.

“What we are really looking at is starting off small, and that’s why we will kind of focus our efforts with referrals from law enforcement from the precinct that is closest to Raleigh. So that will be the Austin Peay precinct and we will really be targeting families in that area even though it could theoretically be open to anyone, any families at the one or two schools that we work with in that area,” she said.

“We can’t afford to do 24 hours a day right now, but we are hopeful the need and the success of it will allow us to have something that is open all hours of the day for youth and families.”