VisionQuest, For-Profit Firm Tapped to House Migrant Kids in Philadelphia, Has Sordid History

[DonViejo]

From the founder’s comment about a racial slur in 1979 to allegations of physical abuse in 2017, VisionQuest has been dogged by controversy.

Michael Daly
Special Correspondent

Published 07.01.19 4:44AM ET

Migrant children may soon be housed at a for-profit facility in Philadelphia managed by the same company that ran a juvenile detention center there until state authorities shut it down amid allegations of physical abuse two years ago.

The City of Brotherly Love is also a sanctuary city and it is staging a legal fight to block a federally funded $5 million plan by VisionQuest to hold 60 migrant children aged 13 to 17 at a facility called the Grace Dix Center. A judge found in favor of VisionQuest, but the city has appealed.

Popular opposition to the plan in Philadelphia was stoked when the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the company’s founder, Robert Burton, overheard two counselors-in-training chatting with each other and told them, “Don’t speak Spanish.”

That was just the latest in a long series of troubling incidents at VisionQuest, stretching all the way back to 1979 when Burton was quoted as saying the use of the N-word is “not necessarily improper.”

Back then, Burton did allow to the Arizona Daily Star that the word had been directed “inappropriately” by one of his staff to a 17-year-old girl in a group home run by his enterprise.

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