(Re) Discovering the House of Reformation

three blue and yellow brushstrokes with a cinderblock shadow in front

Posted in FCI-Blog

Researching the Past to Change the Present

When Vinny Schiraldi (then with the Justice Policy Institute) and Marc Schindler (then with the Youth Law Center) were doing advocacy around juvenile justice issues in Maryland in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they learned that some of Maryland’s youth facilities had been segregated by race in the past.

Fast forward 25 years, when they accepted leadership positions at Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) in 2023, Schindler spearheaded an effort to research and document this history, including both the Department’s history and juvenile justice in Maryland generally. Through archival research conducted by Crystal Foretia, a Governing for America (GFA) Fellow and Policy & Legislative Administrator at DJS, DJS documented racially segregated facilities, patterns of labor exploitation, physical abuse, and operational deficiencies and inequities at what was known as the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children (1870-1937), the Blacks-only reform school. DJS currently operates a successor facility to the House of Reformation, called the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center.

Restoring the Dignity of the Lost Youth

Leaf-covered ground with scattered cinderblocks

Following discovery of the burial site, DJS began planning a number of activities to restore, recognize and maintain the burial site at Cheltenham, with the goal of affording Black youth who had literally been thrown away and buried, the dignity and humanity they and their families deserve, and to implement a healing process to atone for the harms caused by the State of Maryland.

These planned activities included: 

  • surveying the cemetery through ground penetrating radar to find out exactly how many boys are buried there and the locations of where they are buried; 
  • restoring and properly maintaining the area so that it is an official cemetery with markers identifying the boys buried there; 
  • making efforts to locate and communicate with the descendant families of the boys; 
  • working in collaboration with the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) to erect two roadside historical markers that acknowledge the segregationist history of DJS’s two oldest facilities, Charles H. Hickey, Jr. School and Cheltenham Youth Detention Center; and
  • partnering with non-profit groups and hopefully descendant family members to recognize the existence and history of the cemetery, creating the possibilities for a restorative process to address the harms committed to the children buried at Cheltenham and their families. 

The overall goal was to properly honor the youth who died or were killed at the House of Reformation and are buried in the cemetery, and provide a more holistic and accurate understanding of the racial inequities that plagued the system dating to the 1800s in order to place in context the racial inequities that we see today and help with efforts to reduce these inequities moving forward. 

The Path Forward

Understanding that state government is often reluctant to pursue these types of activities (as was the case in Florida, where efforts to uncover the history of boys buried at the Dozier school were resisted by state and local government), it had always been the plan to try to partner with a non-profit group and possibly an academic entity so that there would be organizations and individuals outside of government advocating for the activities to happen, regardless of whether state government remained committed to prioritizing and pursuing the project.

In addition, in June 2025 to make sure the burial site was acknowledged and to also try to encourage related reforms that DJS had been pushing for prior to leaving DJS, information was shared with Maryland State Senator Will Smith (Chair of the Maryland Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee, who had introduced legislation to reform Maryland’s auto-waiver laws) on the history of the House of  Reformation being established by the Maryland General Assembly to remove Black youth from adult jails and prisons, and about the burial ground that had been discovered. Senator Smith was motivated to take action and decided to visit the burial site and while there make an announcement that he would be refiling his auto-waiver legislation and also that he would be holding hearings related to the burial site and the state’s segregationist history.