Epworth purchases Carolina Children’s Home campus

Epworth Children's Home has purchased the 19-acre Carolina Children's Home campus off Trenholm Road for an undisclosed amount.

The campus on Sunnyside Drive will allow Epworth, located on Millwood Avenue, to expand its care for college-aged youth. That care includes providing living quarters, tutoring, tuition and counseling when the youths are not attending college or having trouble with their studies or adjusting in the community, said Epworth’s president and chief executive officer.

“This will provide us an opportunity to provide help with our higher education and independent living population as they stay with us or are placed with us when they are older,” said the Rev. John Holler.

Those older youths are not treated for higher level challenges, such as drugs or alcohol abuse or anger management, at the home, he said. Any children with one of those disorders is moved to high-level residential treatment centers.

The home currently serves 78 children aged five to 18 years of age and 16 college-aged youths. The new campus would allow the home to absorb up to 80 more children and youths, Holler said.

“We’re in the process of studying and planning to determine how to use the property,” he said. “We haven’t determined which of our programs will be on which campus. But it’s going to be an expansion and extension of what we currently do.”

Holler said the home has no plans to sell property from either campus.

Carolina’s Children’s Home hasn’t housed or treated any children since last year, its board chairman, Stephen Creech, said.

Eastablished as an orphanage in 1909, the home in 2012 identified the need for mental health treatment targeted toward children and young adults with eating disorders, he said. Realizing there was no comprehensive residential and outpatient eating disorders program in South Carolina, the home opened and operated The Hearth Center for Eating Disorders from 2013 until it closed last year.

“We hated to close, but we were a little ahead of the times and the market,” Creech said.

It had served about 3,000 children since its opening.

Many of the up to 60 employees who worked at the center have gone to work for a smaller, outpatient eating disorders treatment program called Selah House, Creech said.

The organization will use the proceeds from the sale and its other assets to engage in “foundation-like” philanthropy, funding and advocating for other children’s causes in South Carolina, he said, “rather than through our traditional programs and bricks and mortar services.”

Epworth Children’s Home has been a mission of the United Methodist Church since 1896. Traditionally, children ages four to 18 move to Epworth from fractured families and other circumstances. The children are provided with individualized educational support, medical care and recreational and spiritual enrichment opportunities. Epworth’s goal is to break the cycle of abuse, neglect and shame.

As the needs of South Carolina’s children changed in the late 1970s, the home began caring for behaviorally challenged and mentally ill youth.

Both Creech and Holler said the two organizations will work together to ensure a smooth transition.

This story was originally published February 11, 2016 at 5:58 PM with the headline "Epworth purchases Carolina Children’s Home campus."