The Hopewell residential program expands to offer high school courses

By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
FTER BOUNCING AMONG 12 foster homes and getting kicked out of several schools, Tamelia Brown hopes she is only four months from earning a high school diploma at Hopewell.
"I didn't do school so good," said Brown, 19, who was diagnosed as a child with borderline personality and anxiety disorders. She wears a bracelet with beads spelling patience on her right wrist, and a colorful cross is pinned to her gray blouse.
Sometimes, she said, she acts out or talks too loudly.
"My goal is to work on my tone," she said.
The high school program is one of several recent changes at Hopewell, a residential mental health program on a 333-acre farm off state Route 534.
In the past few years, the nonprofit facility raised a $6 million endowment, and officials expect a recent federal budget appropriation bill includes a $380,000 grant for new heating and air conditioning systems for residences. A residence is expected to open in April, increasing the maximum number of patents from 35 to 40.
Therapeutic farm
Patients often arrive at Hopewell from mental hospitals, and the staff tries to interest them with animals, arts and crafts, cooking and basic car repair. Although it is billed as a "therapeutic farm," farm work is secondary, and largely conducted by contractors.
"The idea here is to try to offer as much as you can to engage the individual," said Robert Sawers, executive director. "If you can engage them in something outside themselves, we are halfway there."
Hilltop's rolling campus includes a pond where Amish harvest ice, 150 acres of woods, barns, sheds and a separate residence for a half-dozen full-time volunteers. Most patients are in single rooms in buildings that, from the outside, look like condominiums or homes.
All this doesn't come cheap. The cost is $185 per day. The endowment, accumulated since 2000, now allows Hopewell to offer financial assistance of up to $60 a day, Sawers said. Most residents get $15 a day or more, he said.
"Virturally everybody is getting some financial aid, from $15 a day and up," he said.
Many residents stay for longer than six months, and, in most cases, their families pick up the bill.
A stay for young adults who were wards of the state is sometimes paid by the county department of children services, however, even after they turn 18. That's the situation for Brown and her friend Tiffany Yakopovich, 18, also from Cleveland.
Yakopovich, who is diagnosed as bipolar, said that she likes the program but that her goal is to get out.
"I want to live on my own," she said.
siff@vindy.com