The Rondout waterfront in Kingston. The Children's Home of Kingston, on Grove Street, will close its residential program and keep its day school open. Photo: Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Children’s Home of Kingston will close its residential placement program in early 2027 and keep open Grove Street Academy, the Chapter 853 day school on the same campus, Ulster County Legislature Chairman Peter Criswell said after meeting with the agency’s administration. The Daily Freeman, which first reported the school decision on Nov. 9, quoted Criswell as saying the residential program would close in early January. Mid-Hudson News, citing Criswell the following morning, described the closure as coming in early 2027.
Criswell, a Kingston Democrat, told the Freeman that he and other legislative leaders were informed of the plans on Friday, Nov. 6. He said the nonprofit received confirmation from the state on Thursday, Nov. 5, that it would be allowed to continue operating the school; the state Education Department did not immediately confirm that to the Freeman. Criswell said the home is working to place each residential student with “as little disruption as possible to their schooling and wellbeing.”
Grove Street Academy is a state-approved private special-education school for “hard-to-place” male students between 10 and 21, according to the agency’s website as reported by the Freeman. Criswell said it has capacity for 24 students and that the organization would like to increase enrollment. Students are placed there on the recommendation of their home district’s committee on special education, and the county said it would encourage local districts to consider the school for students with emotional and learning disabilities.
Criswell told the Freeman it was “pretty clear that they had financial challenges, some of them related to the cuts on the federal level to some of the programs,” and that, unable to get the number of placements they had hoped for, “the residential program was just not going to be viable for them anymore.” He said the county intends to offer employment services to the eight employees who will lose their jobs when the residential program closes. The campus sits on about five acres at 26 Grove Street. Mid-Hudson News quoted Criswell as saying the Children’s Home has, for 150 years, been “a place where young people who haven’t found the right fit elsewhere finally find someone in their corner.”
The Freeman reported a difficult financial backdrop, including operating losses every year since 2023, a federal Office of Refugee Resettlement grant that was not renewed for 2027, and an independent audit that found the agency owed more than $2.75 million by December 2025 for grant funding received above allowable costs. A state comptroller’s audit, the paper said, recommended that the Education Department deny $670,549 in special-education reimbursement for costs in three fiscal years ending in June 2022. The Freeman said repeated calls to Executive Director Leila Santana were not returned; in a March 5, 2026, response to the audit, the paper reported, Santana blamed inadequately trained accounting staff and turnover in the finance director’s role.
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