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Twin Valley to close doors Monday
Sunday, June 29, 2008
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What's next for Twin Valley site?
- Dayton Public Schools owns 45 acres of the 100-plus acre property off Wayne Avenue and will begin construction of the new Belmont High School there later this year.
- Other potential uses, depending on state funding and city zoning requirements, include a small-scale "crisis stabilization" center for the mentally ill and headquarters or operations for various social service agencies.
DAYTON — Its beds empty and its staff packed up, the Dayton area's only public psychiatric hospital closes Monday, June 30, after 153 years in business.
"It's just very depressing," said Deborah Dietz, volunteer program administrator and 35-year veteran of Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare on Wayne Avenue, formerly Dayton State Hospital.
Dietz is one of 25 Twin Valley employees retiring with the closing. Of the remaining 175 staffers, 43 were laid off, 30 resigned and some are taking jobs at other state hospitals and agencies, said Trudy Sharp, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Mental Health.
Sharp said 32 of the hospital's 51 long-term patients have moved to Summit Behavioral Healthcare in Cincinnati, the rest to state hospitals in Columbus and Toledo.
"None of them went kicking and screaming," said Jim Chase, a social worker and patient advocate at Twin Valley who is retiring after 32 years. "Most of the patients are pretty resilient. They'll do anything they think is required of them, generally speaking."
The closing follows months of protests and pleas from community leaders, patients' family members and other Twin Valley advocates who tried to convince Gov. Ted Strickland to reverse his January decision to close the 110-bed hospital. But Strickland, a Democrat, would not relent, saying the closing, as well as that of a similar hospital in Cambridge, was needed to help the state avoid a $733 million budget deficit in fiscal 2009, which begins Tuesday.
Twin Valley opened in 1855 as the Southern Ohio Lunatic Asylum with 59 patients and a budget of $4,900. It grew over the years, adding hundreds of acres and changing names several times along the way, to around 1,600 patients in 1969 before the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s. The main building later became 10 Wilmington Place, a retirement community.
Looking back on his career at the hospital, Chase said what he liked most about his job "was just being able to talk to patients like they were human beings and knowing they appreciated that."
For Dietz, whose mother worked for 18 years as a beautician at the hospital, it was the employees and volunteers, the "wonderful, caring people that really had the patient's interests at heart."
"That's all they really cared about," Dietz said. "It took a special kind of person to take care of these people and we had the best there was."
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7408 or agottschlich@DaytonDailyNews.com.
