By admin 
Teens, children and staff at youth treatment centers in Colorado called the state child abuse hotline 1,154 times in the past five years to report injuries, sexual allegations, children running away and other problems.
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Most of those — about 92% — were “screened out” by county child welfare officials, who decided to investigate 89 of the abuse and neglect reports from 11 youth treatment centers. That’s about 17 reports per year and an 8% “screen in” rate, which is far lower than the 26% rate for overall calls to the child abuse hotline or the 15% “screen in” rate for calls from youth institutions.
Youth treatment centers, which have residential and day treatment programs for children in foster care or with such extreme behavioral issues that they do not live with their parents, have been under scrutiny in recent years by Colorado media, the Child Protection Ombudsman’s Office and state lawmakers.
Alarming incidents included the deaths of two boys, ages 12 and 15, who ran away from different centers in 2018 and 2020 and were struck and killed by vehicles. And in December, a 32-year-old youth treatment counselor at Tennyson Center in Denver was charged with sexual assault of a child after a 15-year-old boy living in the residential program revealed they had a sexual relationship.
The Colorado Sun and 9News fought for five years to get data showing the number of hotline calls that originate from the state’s child treatment centers. The news outlets first sought the data in 2021 after the boys’ deaths and while investigating how many youth run away from the centers and how often police are called to help find them.
The Colorado Department of Human Services had refused to release the information, saying it would violate children’s privacy, but was forced to turn it over after the media outlets sued and the case made it all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court. The state’s highest court ruled in favor of the media outlets in March.
The ruling led to state child welfare officials releasing data requested five years ago.
The original request focused on three Denver area youth centers with some of the highest numbers of runaways and police calls — Tennyson Center, Mount Saint Vincent and Cleo Wallace. Tennyson and Cleo Wallace have since closed their residential programs.
But the five-year-old data shows that there were 1,571 hotline calls from just those three centers in three years. Of those, child welfare officials looked into 106 reports, or 6.7%. Information about those investigations and the allegations contained in the reports is confidential.
Latest data shows high volume of calls have persisted
After the state Supreme Court ruling, The Colorado Sun sent a new request under the Colorado Open Records Act to get the up-to-date numbers of hotline calls.
At least one of those reports, coming from Tennyson Center, concerned the alleged sexual relationship between the youth counselor and the 15-year-old boy, according to former staff at Tennyson. Details of that case emerged as The Sun was looking into why the Tennyson Center, for the second time in five years, closed its residential program.
Katherine Taylor-Burroughs, 32, is charged with four counts of sexual assault of a child by a person in a position of trust and defined as a “pattern of abuse,” a felony. The teen said he was sexually assaulted by the counselor four times in the center’s basement and reported they shared lewd messages via Snapchat, according to an arrest affidavit.
The number of child abuse reports emmiting from inside youth centers has been an issue since the Office of the Child Protection Ombudsman blasted child welfare authorities for how long it took them to shut down a troubled youth center in Pueblo.
El Pueblo Boys & Girls Ranch, for kids with severe behavioral and psychiatric problems, was the subject of 243 reports of suspected abuse and neglect within one year. Pueblo County caseworkers determined that most of them were unfounded and the reports were “screened out” without further investigation. Only 12% were assigned to caseworkers for further review.
The center was ordered to shut its doors in 2017, but by then, the ombudsman said, children and teens had suffered repeated abuse, including by staff members who had faced previous allegations, including aggressive restraint tactics, bruises and lack of food.
The ombudsman was able to get the data on hotline calls, but until the recent Colorado Supreme Court ruling, the media and the rest of the public could not, including parents of children living in treatment centers.
Data tells only part of the story
Jordan Steffen, Colorado’s newly selected child protection ombudsman, said the data is “hugely important for us to know what is happening inside these facilities,” but that it only tells “part of the story.”
The ombudsman’s office since 2019 has called for a public website where parents, caregivers and people placing children inside these facilities can see not just the number of hotline reports, but the types of reports and whether those reports required corrective action. The office has tried to put the requirement into legislation at least three times in recent years, but has not succeeded.
“This data is a great start, but it doesn’t tell us everything,” Steffen said. “It doesn’t tell us what the calls are about, what the resolution is. We only have access to just a part of the story.”
Calls could range from a lightswitch not working to sexual abuse of a child.
The process for reviewing hotline calls is the same whether the calls come from a mandatory reporter, who is legally required to report suspected abuse, or any other member of the community. Mandatory reporters include medical professionals, teachers and coaches.
Calls to the hotline, 844-CO-4-Kids, are reviewed by county human services departments, which determine whether the allegation meets the statutory criteria for possible child abuse or neglect. If so, the referral is “screened in” and assigned to a county caseworker, who must visit the home or facility and evaluate the safety of the children there.
The hotline received 117,470 calls in 2025, according to state human services officials. Of those, 30,509 were assigned to caseworkers.
Screen-in rates for hotline calls from institutions are lower than homes “because of the unique environment within the facilities,” state officials said. The hotline receives a high volume of calls from the centers because of the number of children in one place and because most members of the staff are mandatory reporters. Some reports are about “youth behavioral incidents” that might not fall under the legal definition of abuse or neglect, they said.
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