| Timeline: |
| April 15: D.C. middle school principal Brian Betts is found shot to death in his Silver Spring home. |
| May: Four DYRS wards are accused of murdering Betts. Nickles has Hildum write a report to address the agency’s problems. |
| July: Nickles uses Hildum’s report to have Schindler fired and pushes Fenty to hire Hildum as DYRS interim director. |
| Dec. 15: Hildum resigns and Nickles rehires him for his old job in the Attorney General’s Office. |
The interim director of the District’s troubled juvenile justice agency has resigned, becoming the third head of the agency to leave the post this year. Robert Hildum took over the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services in July after a slew of high-profile killings allegedly committed by agency wards helped to topple interim Director Marc Schindler. Friday is Hildum’s last day on the job. He’ll return to his previous post as the head of the D.C. attorney general’s public safety division. Hildum is leaving in the face of uncertainty surrounding his future when Vince Gray takes over the mayor’s office on Jan. 2.
“He didn’t get an emphatic endorsement from the incoming administration,” D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles told The Washington Examiner. “He did as much as he could in his time there.”
What Hildum did was start building a law-and-order approach to the agency’s handling of the city’s juvenile delinquents. In the months before he was appointed, DYRS had come under heavy fire as The Examiner reported how more than a dozen of the agency’s wards had been accused of murder in 2010 and a half-dozen others had been killed. The growing death toll undermined the political bedrock that had supported a residential-treatment program put in place by DYRS Director Vincent Schiraldi. He left in January for a job in New York City and was replaced by the like-minded Schindler.
But as Mayor Adrian Fenty fought in a re-election battle, he chose to break with Schiraldi’s philosophy and fired Schindler.
When Hildum took over DYRS, opponents to the Schiraldi-Schindler program applauded him as someone who would restore order by putting more juvenile delinquents behind bars. Hildum immediately began a review of each of the agency’s 900 cases with an eye toward locking up more young criminals.
That plan quickly backfired. The the city’s new 60-bed youth prison in Laurel was already overcrowded when Hildum took over DYRS, and the ratio of youth-to-beds only worsened. The youth advocates who supported Hildum’s predecessors gained political footing, and they now see Hildum’s leaving as a sign that Gray will embrace their vision.
“I am heartened by the message the mayor-elect is sending,” said Daniel Okonkwo, executive director for D.C. Lawyer’s for Youth. “Gray has the opportunity to send a message to D.C. that he believes in youth development principles.”
But Gray will also have to find a way to fix an agency that has been marred by unstable leadership over the past year.
“His decision to leave before a new director is selected is a great disappointment to me,” said Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells, who heads the committee that oversees DYRS. “It continues the instability.”
