Hale House shuts doors to orphans
Wednesday, October 8th 2008, 12:44 AM
Davis/News Clara Hale, with 7-month-old Monique in 1984, was hailed by President Ronald Reagan as an 'American Hero.'
Hale House is no longer a home.
Seven years after the fabled Harlem charity for abandoned babies was rocked by scandal, Hale House has shuttered its residential program and is focusing its efforts - and dwindling dollars - on more traditional community services.
Gone is the orphanage for babies founded in 1969 by Mother Clara Hale, who became a national icon for taking in AIDS-infected and drug-addicted newborns and nurturing them as if they were her own.
In its place is the Mother Hale Learning Center, which provides educational day care for 36 kids, and a transitional housing program that has helped 161 homeless families and 297 children get back on their feet in the past four years, Hale House officials said.
"The drug and AIDS crisis of past decades diminished over time as did the need for emergency respite care," Hale House Executive Director Randy McLaughlin said in a written statement.
"That welcome circumstance . . . permitted the organization to extend its reach to serve a much larger population of children."
Hale House has been financially hobbled since it imploded in 2001, after a Daily News series exposed financial wrongdoing and neglected children under Hale's daughter, Lorraine, and her husband, Jesse DeVore.
They were indicted on 72 counts of stealing donors' millions and booted from the nonprofit by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
The cash crunch forced Hale House to burn through more than $12 million in savings Lorraine Hale left behind.
Recent tax records show the new team even sold off the $250,000 bronze statue of Mother Hale that stood guard at the 122nd St. brownstone and $431,000 in art work Lorraine Hale accumulated for her office and Scarsdale home.
Housing babies and toddlers in an orphanage-like setting with round-the-clock child care workers was expensive, as well as outmoded.
In 2006, the new team moved the babies out of the historic brownstone into two apartment buildings the charity owns across from Morningside Park. Since then, they quietly began to phase out the residential program.
Sources told The News the last of the 10 children housed there were either adopted, placed in foster care or returned to relatives in July.
"It's a shame they are only focusing on day care and transitional housing," one veteran Hale House employee said. "That residence was Mother Hale's legacy, her dream. That should have been saved."
Another child care worker who didn't want to be named said, "We were really attached to those children. It's sad. I'm just hoping they didn't go to a bad place."
McLaughlin said Hale House's mission "to provide child-centered, family-focused programs to those in need has not changed and never will. Should any parents with challenges come to us, we will assist them with emergency child placement."
1 comment:
that's sad news.
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