Complaint filed in Commonwealth Court by Dauphin County youth shelter operator details calculated plan by DHS executive leadership to shut them down
Updated 7:21 PM EDT, August 24, 2026
By Laura Harding
In the interest of protecting the identities of vulnerable youth, who it has been stated here have been victims of crimes, details that could lead to their identification have been excluded.
The operator of a trauma-informed care residential youth shelter located at the former Schaffner Youth Center in Steelton, Pennsylvania, BCL Partners, LLC d/b/a Leading Youth for Excellence and owned by James Ellison and Bilal Hasan, has filed a lawsuit against two state officials for revocation of its operating license claiming it was pretextual. The complaint filed in Commonwealth Court outlines a systematic pattern of abuse of authority by Deputy Secretary Laval Miller-Wilson, Office of Children, Youth & Families (”OCYF”), and OCYF’s Central Region Director Gabi Williams, that was designed to bleed the shelter of its operating funds and create a financial crisis manufactured entirely by OCYF.
What has been gauged from sources close to the matter, and as outlined in the press release issued by the plaintiffs, is that there have been long-standing and fundamental differences of opinion between plaintiff and defendants on the type and levels of care provided to the children. It’s been alleged that Director Gabi Williams has the long-held opinion that the Schaffner Youth Center should have remained a juvenile detention center and is opposed to it being used as a youth shelter. Dauphin County Commissioners voted to close Schaffner Youth Center in 2010, then with Cornell Abraxus managing the juvenile detention center, and the county operating a separate youth shelter. The facility reopened as a youth shelter in 2012 under a lease agreement with Alternative Rehabilitation Communities (“ARC”).
In a recent interview, Ellison and Hasan described a hostile meeting with Deputy Secretary Miller-Wilson following their license revocation where they claim he excoriated them – but not for the reported violations related to the elopement of children as one might expect. Instead, the hostility was directed at them for providing therapeutic counseling and psychiatric services to the children in their care at their own expense, and for those children staying beyond 30 days. Opposing the provision of these additional services is a strange take for a deputy secretary whose resume includes 14 years leading the Pennsylvania Health Law Project and almost equal time working as a senior attorney with the Juvenile Law Center. They also allege that Deputy Secretary Miller-Wilson has repeatedly referred to the youth center as a “way station” and has stated on multiple occasions that the children should be sent on their way, regardless of if they have found another placement, by day 31.
Hasan and Ellison claim that they would routinely accept children into their care from the most extreme cases and who were therefore difficult to place – a claim that appears to be substantiated by correspondence from county offices across the state included in their complaint. The nature of these children’s cases is the reason they have elected to provide additional services at their own expense and why they remain in their care sometimes for longer periods. Providing these services puts the children in a better position to manage and cope with any future challenges once they leave their care.
An alarming allegation outlined in the complaint is that multiple children have been subjected to serious physical violence and harm as a direct result of the license being revoked and children removed from the facility. The reasoning behind the license revocation is murky when all the facts are presented. OCYF’s attempt to classify elopements of teens in an unlocked shelter facility as abuse, who are free to leave whenever they choose, and who were all located and returned to the facility within hours is quite the stretch of the imagination. Additional claims that the regional office was not notified of the elopements in the time period required is misleading, as it is claimed that they were notified by email instead of the Childline phone line, a practice they have done for years and was never considered a violation until this latest revocation order.
Comparatively, a Cornell Abraxus run facility in Berks County is facing four lawsuits for a decade of sexual abuse by staff of children in their care, and yet they have been allowed to continue operating under a provisional license. The difference between these two facilities and how they have been treated by DHS couldn’t be more stark—one in Dauphin County is a Black-owned small business providing a level of care for children that goes above and beyond what is required, and the other operator in Berks County managed under parent company GEO Group, the second-largest private prison company in the world, that commodifies human bodies and treats them as chattel by using them for forced labor. Based on the allegations and claims made, it appears that despite Deputy Secretary Miller-Wilson’s resume, he is more aligned with GEO Group’s business model than L.Y.F.E.’s.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the lawsuit is that upon the plaintiff notifying OCYF of their intent to file suit, the budget that had been pending final review for 467 days was approved within 24 hours. To any legal watchdog, that would appear that they knew exactly what they were doing by withholding budget approval, and that the reason for doing so is exactly as stated in the complaint.