Press Releases

Sept. 13, 2008

Contact: Rosa Rozek
773.374.1000

Campagna Academy sprouts Hope Center
The academy, formally called Hoosier Boys Town, helps troubled teens.
By Diane Krieger Spivak, Post-Tribune staff writer

The new 41,500-square-foot Hope Center on the campus of the Campagna Academy campus in Schererville will help nurture troubled teens.

Photos by Scott M. Bort/Post-Tribune

SCHERERVILLE — Years ago, the Rev. Michael Campagna found a dying plant in an alley, picked it up, nurtured it and watched it ultimately bloom into a beautiful yellow rose.

Campagna, who founded Campagna Academy as Hoosier Boys Town in the 1947, looked at children in much the same way, the academy’s Chief Operating Officer Bill Dwyer said Friday.

“If you nurture and care for them, give them a good place to live and love them, they’ll turn out to be God’s good creatures,” Dwyer said as he paused near a mosaic of a yellow rose in the floor of the academy’s new 41,500-square-foot Hope Center.

The rose is central to the logo of the academy that for decades has helped troubled teens become happy, productive individuals, many of whom go on to college and jobs and, ultimately, raise families of their own.

Campagna died in 1979, but his passion for nurturing young people lives on.

On Friday, officials dedicated the opening of Hope Center that will accommodate up to 48 boys and girls at a time and 120 annually, nearly doubling the not-for-profit’s capacity.

The $8.4 million addition to the Campagna campus was completed $600,000 under budget and two months ahead of schedule, Dwyer said.

Officials offered tours of the academy, which, by month’s end, should begin accepting clients.

For the first time in the academy’s 61-year history, those clients will include girls.

“The number of youth aged 12 to 18 in Lake County who have been removed from their homes and placed into residential treatment centers like Campagna Academy has grown almost 50 percent in the past five years,” said academy CEO Bruce D. Hillman. “And up until now, there were not enough beds available in Lake County to serve these children.”

The two-story New Hope Center will offer individualized treatment plans for each child. The living quarters include single and double dorm-like rooms with a supervised group social activity area and dining services in each of its four quadrants.

The center also offers academic classrooms, a computer lab, indoor and outdoor recreational facilities, family visitation rooms, therapists’ offices and working spaces for consultation.

Clients are referred through social services to the Oasis Secure Program in the center, which deals with all aspects of a child’s treatment, including educational, medical, psychological, social, familial and substance abuse, officials say.

The center will be staffed 24 hours a day, and will increase the academy’s employees from 110 to nearly 200, Hillman said.