ELLENVILLE – After a local couple's disturbing run-in with a teenager in early-February, some questions have been raised regarding the state of services available for the area's youth. Late one Monday evening last month, Mr. and Mrs. Smith pulled up to their house when they were accosted by an intoxicated teenager, Mike Jones [Editor's Note: names have been changed for legal privacy issues].

The 17-year-old started yelling at the couple, prompting Mr. Smith to get out of his car to try and put a stop to the harassment.

"My husband was pushing him away because he was so intoxicated, he was not stopping," said Mrs. Smith about the incident. "He threw beer on my husband — my husband was covered in beer."

Eventually the confrontation was stopped by the Ellenville Police, with Mr. Smith being charged by Jones with assault. But the fact that her husband was arrested wasn't what got Mrs. Smith so upset about the whole thing: according to Smith and other anonymous sources, the youngster has a history of mental health issues and is on medication, a dangerous situation when mixed with alcohol. Worse, because of his age, he's not required to go to school or back home with his legal guardian, nor is he required to be committed to Ulster County's various mental health organizations unless it can be proven that he's an immediate danger to himself or others.

"How does a 17-year old [on medication] walk down the street drunk — he's going to end up in the hospital dead, or dead on the streets if they keep letting him go like this," said Mrs. Smith. "I'm worried about that kid getting help…I will do anything to see this kid get help, because it's really sad."

Because he is in need of help, but refuses the assistance of the various mental health services Ulster County provides, Jones might be classified as "falling through the cracks" of the system.

"Comparatively to our neighboring counties, Ulster County has a lot of preventive services that cover a huge variety of different issues," said Jessica Robie, Program Director of Mental Health Case Management with the county's Family of Woodstock organization. "But most of them are voluntary so people have to be willing to take the help.

"The kid you described is not a one-time incident — there are a lot of kids like that across the county, and some of them really do fall through the cracks… I think that the vast majority of people who are seeking services could get some kind of help … in this county."

Robie said that there are walk-in clinics in Ellenville, Highland/New Paltz, and Kingston, the last of the three being the central hub for health services in the county. The clinics provide a litany of services: clothes, counseling, a 24-hours-a-day phone operator, and case managers to help kids in need. The youths these case managers work with may be coming out of jail, on probation, or have substance abuse problems. The case managers can work with kids between the ages of 12 and 21, and help them with job searches, mental health issues, housing needs — the list goes on. The services Family provides are all free of charge, with very few exceptions.

Robie explained that part of the reasoning for creating Kingston's sister-clinics in the Highland- and Ellenville-areas was to ensure that residents in regions further away from Kingston have access to health services they need.

"There's a need in those parts of the county," she said. "Ellenville in particular — there's not a lot of jobs, there's a lot of issues out there: there's a lot of racial tension, there's a lot of domestic violence, there's a lot of substance abuse — there's a lot of need in Ellenville, and the same thing in the southern part of the county, meaning the Highland-area. There's just not a lot of economic boom going on there, and people are struggling."

Ed Brown, Commissioner of Mental Health for Ulster County, said that the problem of kids not taking advantage of the services that are available is being felt not just in Ellenville, but throughout the entire county, and even the whole state.

"The fact of the matter is it is a difficult population: these are kids who are moving into adulthood, they're feeling their independence," he said. "They are often not amenable to the services that are available. We work diligently to try and engage them in services as needed.

"A lot of these kids have multi-system needs — they're involved in the DSS [Department of Social Services] world, or involved in Mental Health. They might have a developmental disability; they might have a substance abuse problem, so oftentimes these kids have multiple needs."

Brown also told of a proposal that's being worked out which would seek to create a transitional housing program for adolescents that would work with kids that don't have a good home situation or who are homeless. The program, he said, would also provide them with a structured environment to help them become more stable in the community, giving them dependable support once they leave the housing program.

However, like all state-funded agencies and programs, the county's mental health services are in danger of being altered drastically with the looming cuts that will come once the budget is hashed out up in Albany.

"We lost a huge grant that funds our Midway Program, which is our transitional living program," said Robie. "So we're scrambling to try to make up the $250,000 that we lost. We're all waiting with baited breath to hear what happens with the state budget, because if the block grant that's being proposed by the governor goes through, it could essentially eliminate services for runaway and homeless youth."

Robie explained that the block grant would change the structure of funding: instead of different amounts of state money going to different initiatives and programs, the state would provide one lump sum of funding to the county. The county would then disburse the money as it saw fit, likely providing the most money to required mandates, such as lockup and juvenile hall. This could potentially give many of the aforementioned programs the short shrift — and turn a system which has only cracks into chasms.

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