AURORA, Colo. -- When California sent dozens of teenage felons to the Excelsior Youth Center, the state may have expected to hear about it from Colorado officials if something happened to any of the girls there.

But when a male staff member seduced one of the center's 169 girls, California officials never heard about it from Colorado authorities, according to the Colorado licensing caseworker assigned to oversee Excelsior. In fact, if California officials had asked, it is questionable whether they even would have been told about that incident of sexual abuse or any of the other three abuse allegations lodged against the center since 1995.

"We'd have to be careful about giving states abuse reports," said Fred Alderman, the Colorado licensing worker assigned to oversee Excelsior. If probation or social service workers call, "We usually tell them they (the homes) have a valid license or whatever," but make no mention of the number or nature of complaints lodged against the agency.

This is the massive hole in the system governing the roughly 1,000 boys and girls California sends to other states for juvenile reform.

Members on the student council at Boys Republic recite the Pledge of Allegiance before a meeting. Bee photo / Chris Crewell

While California has some of the strictest guidelines in the nation governing privately run juvenile programs, the state has no control and often no knowledge of what happens in centers beyond its borders. And recent history has shown that in some states there have been serious failings in how such programs are inspected and licensed, a three-month investigation by The Bee has found.

"Some people make the assumption that licensing is equal, and certainly it's an expectation, but it's far from being the case," said Ira M. Schwartz, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work and a member of VisionQuest's board of directors.

In Colorado, as in California, child abuse files are strictly confidential. It is up to the private facility to volunteer information to counties that send youths to it of any programs. Licensing reviews regarding abuse allegations, however, are a matter of public record as of 1996. But when Alderman was asked to produce the public file on four complaints about Excelsior -- considered by placing officers to be one of the nation's finer programs -- he could not find it.

Three allegations were found to be unsubstantiated; the fourth dealt with the staffer seducing the girl and was found to be true, according to Alderman, who read from a file he said was private. The staffer was fired but it is unclear what action, if any, Colorado took.

Colorado has had an especially rocky history of regulation.

In late April, state officials shut down the High Plains Desert Youth Center in Brush, Colo., after female staffers were found to be having sex with the youths they were supposed to supervise as well as providing the teenagers with beer and, at one point, a pornographic movie, according to the spokesman for Colorado's Department of Human Services. No California wards were housed there.

Staff members there also were using excessive force to restrain youths, according to Dwight Eisnach, spokesman for the department, which licenses and oversees such programs. He said there were 132 reports of child abuse at High Plains in February and another 121 in March, as compared with 187 reports for all of 1997 in a similar program.

"It seemed their staff was quick to use physical force," he said. "They went right from nothing to a four-point restraint on the floor on top of a kid's back. There was nothing in between."

Had High Plains been operating in California, it would have been allowed to use some restraints because it was a residential treatment program. Such programs operate under different guidelines than out-of-state detention programs, which technically are group homes. Restraints are not permitted in group homes in California.

Eisnach said that while state officials knew there were "chronic" problems with staff qualifications and training for at least two years before the program closure, Colorado's need for the 40 to 60 beds at High Plains Youth Center overrode regulators' concerns about youth safety.

"We always felt we didn't have a big hammer we could hold over their heads because we were so desperate for bed space," he said. "Had we taken our kids out in earlier years, we wouldn't have had anyplace else to go with them. So we were stuck between a rock and a hard place."

In December 1995, Illinois investigators warned Colorado about the High Plains facility after making an unannounced visit there and finding sexual offenders mixed with other residents in locked, six-bed dormitories, according to an Illinois regulators' report.

One youth had been serially raped for months, according to a report filed with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. When he pounded on the door for help late one night, a staff member told him to go back to bed, the report said.

Schwartz, who also serves as dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work, finds Colorado's system particularly troubling.

"You bet it's a problem," he said. "The information ought to be broadly shared and made available to the media and to judges."

But there have also been troubling lapses in oversight elsewhere.

Investigators from Illinois who paid two unannounced visits four weeks apart to an Oklahoma sex offender treatment program in 1996 found filthy living conditions, gang graffiti on walls, evidence of inappropriate sexual behavior and questionable documentation by staff of suspicious incidents.

An Oklahoma investigator visited the same program between the two visits and noted none of those problems, according to an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services report.

"In every case where we have discovered substandard programs in out-of-state facilities, we invariably find that the in-state agencies charged with monitoring and licensing responsibilities have failed (often miserably) to do their jobs," Ron Davidson, director of the University of Illinois, Chicago, Mental Health Policy Program, wrote to Illinois state officials.

In Nevada, Rite of Passage houses 283 California boys on two American Indian reservations in the high desert and a smattering of group homes in Nevada and California, at a cost of roughly $11.8 million annually.

Because the camps are on Indian land, they are exempt from oversight by Nevada's Division of Children and Family Services Administration. Instead, tribal representatives inspect both sites.

Child abuse allegations are referred to the state's division of children and family services and they are "strictly confidential," said Nancy Angres, Nevada's chief deputy attorney general. If charges are filed with county prosecutors, they become public in the courthouse at the county seat.

Rite of Passage officials refused to allow The Bee to see their camps, saying that "based on the general climate in the state of California" in the wake of the March 2 death of Nicholaus Contreraz at the Arizona Boys Ranch, they feared public scrutiny, according to Suzanne Schulze, special projects coordinator.

The mayor pro tem and the clerk of the Boys Republic student council preside over a meeting at the juvenile offender facility in Chino Hills. Boys Republic stresses that young offenders must learn responsibility. Bee photo / Chris Crewell

And Rite of Passage has had its share of bad publicity.

In 1986, a Contra Costa probation officer pulled two youths from a camp and filed child abuse complaints charging they were neglected and deprived of adequate clothing and shelter, according to a General Accounting Office review of the situation.

Two U.S. representatives -- from Nevada and California -- demanded a federal probe to see if there was adequate oversight and if it was proper for federal money to help defray county costs. Ultimately, the camp was allowed to remain open, but it has since added permanent buildings and heaters.

Six years later, a San Francisco youth fell into a coma during a restraint by two staff members after he allegedly didn't complete a required exercise routine, according to news accounts at the time. A lawsuit in the case has been sealed.

"He's a vegetable," said Jani Iwamoto. an attorney for the boy's family. "Western medicine can't do anything anymore."

Meanwhile, Larry Bolton, the chief counsel for California's Department of Social Services, has criticized Arizona's oversight agency for what he perceives as ineffective policing of the Arizona Boys Ranch. California had placed more of its juvenile offenders in Boys Ranch than in any other out-of-state facility, until Contreraz died and the state prohibited new placements.

Bolton said he is particularly uncomfortable with a practice that allows the Boys Ranch attorney to sit in when child abuse investigators interview staff, a practice that resulted from a lawsuit filed against the Arizona Department of Economic Security after Boys Ranch disagreed with 13 incidents of alleged abuse that DES substantiated in 1993 and 1994. The lawsuit claims investigators were incompetent.

Bolton also criticized DES for allowing Boys Ranch to decide whether to report abuse claims to the state. Instead, Boys Ranch was allowed for a time to report such incidents only to the juvenile's probation officer. Claims of abuse now are reported to both entities.

And Bolton raised questions about how complete the Boys Ranch disclosure is even today, two years after Arizona and the facility hammered out an operating agreement.

A comparison by The Bee of Arizona's licensing files on Boys Ranch and VisionQuest, both large, Arizona-based programs that deal with similar populations and take large numbers of California youth, show a wide disparity in what is reported to authorities.

VisionQuest appears to self-report every incident in which a child is harmed, from claims of physical abuse to scraped knees on the basketball court. The Arizona Boys Ranch files are not as detailed, but Thomas said the ranch reports what they are required to.

Other reports from the ranch center on items such as meal plans and how often the swimming pool is cleaned.

Bolton said that while California and Arizona laws do not differ significantly in forbidding abusive punishment, he sees vast differences in enforcement.

"Maybe we just view licensing as more proactive here," he said. "If I feel there's enough to sustain a licensing action, we will often shut the facility down before the (law enforcement) investigation is completed."

However, that diligence does not extend to out-of-state facilities.

A review by The Bee of the public licensing files in Arizona and Colorado, which oversee four private programs that house more than half of the delinquents that California places out of state, indicates that no state officials or any of 58 county probation departments has requested information on three of the four facilities within the past five years.

The lone exception is the Arizona Boys Ranch, about which several counties wrote letters of inquiry after three runaways claimed they were abused there in 1994. Alameda County subsequently pulled all of its wards out of Boys Ranch.

Were it not for a media firestorm and the unprecedented intervention of the state of California, it is unclear whether probation officers outside Sacramento County would have heard about the Contreraz death -- except through the grapevine.

Arizona Boys Ranch policy in case of death is to notify its state licensing body and the county that placed the youth.

That is why without strict oversight by other states, California is left to depend on individual county probation officers to monitor how their wards are being treated.

But probation officers are overworked and understaffed. Counties have been stretched thin by a decade of downsizing which, in most cases, has hit probation especially hard.

California's Department of Social Services, which technically approves the transfers of juvenile offenders to out-of-state facilities, takes no role in monitoring children elsewhere. Department officials don't even know for certain how many youths are out of state or where they are. In March, the agency conducted a telephone survey of county placements, but was unable to reach every county.

The result, say some child advocates, is that in an era of chronic overcrowding and diminished budgets, oversight takes a back seat to need.

"The programs aren't going to complain that they're not looked at carefully enough," said Loren Warboys, an attorney for the Youth Law Center in San Francisco.

"Probation isn't going to say they're not doing a good enough job," he said. "And nobody else knows what's happening."

Overextended caseworkers often visit out-of-state facilities less frequently than called for in their own policies.

When officers do come, they typically coordinate the agenda in advance with program administrators. Marketers of out-of-state programs say they regularly offer to fly out California officials and buy them meals.

Last month, Sacramento Juvenile Court Judge Kenneth G. Peterson was offered a plane ticket to see local youths graduate at Glen Mills Schools in Pennsylvania. He declined the ticket, deciding instead to use court funds to visit the site.

However, Sacramento's Probation Department accepts such freebies from Glen Mills twice a year, then pays its own way twice more annually, said Michael Elorduy, probation's chief deputy for placement. The practice of accepting free trips is under review.

Unannounced visits, which are supposed to be the hallmark of regulators, do happen. For instance, Sacramento County officials said they made several such visits this year, including one to the Arizona Boys Ranch. But they are the exception.

"Our visits are scheduled, they know we're coming," said Elorduy. But he argues that his officers' oversight is thorough because they ask probing questions.

And surprise visits are particularly difficult given the remote locations of many of the programs. But it is exactly that isolation that worries some advocates.

"Their chances of abuse go up dramatically," Warboys said. "And nobody knows until something horrible happens. Nobody gets access, nobody can visit. . . . It's a closed-door world."