Every year, the team of journalists at The Frontier sit together to make a plan for the future.
We ask: What issues are the most important to cover right now? Where is the money going? Who is being harmed? These guiding questions push us to find the facts and to hold those in power accountable.
They led me to ask why more children are being sent out of state to get needed mental health care. And those questions guided me over the last year as I wrote multiple stories about abuse against residents with developmental disabilities at the Robert M. Greer Center in Enid and how the state responded to the allegations of beatings, chokings and delayed reporting.
I was able to spend time figuring out that the Greer Center went years without a state advocate on site full-time and dive into records that showed state inspectors continued to cite the facility for problems months after widespread abuse was first made public.
I broke news that local prosecutors had dropped charges against seven former Greer Center staffers accused of abuse because a key witness couldn’t be located. And I learned that state officials decided they would hire a consulting company to fix problems at the Greer Center rather than fine the management company for putting residents’ lives at risk.
Time is one of the most important ingredients to investigative reporting. And that isn’t possible without support from our community.
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