After over 50 years, Athens County Children’s Services is on the road to building a new facility.
Located at 18 Stonybrook Drive, their current campus of four buildings was constructed in 1972, and soon, two of those buildings will be demolished. Atop them, a new, larger facility will be constructed, and the remaining two original buildings converted into storage spaces.
Athens County Children’s Services was founded in 1876 by Quaker philanthropist John S. Fowler with the intent to provide better accommodations for children, mostly orphans, compared to the infirmaries at the time.
Today, ACCS’s mission is much the same, but with a reoriented focus on helping children in need and their parents gather the skills and care required to reunify into a happy home.
“We do steps in prevention to avoid ever getting that first call,” ACCS Executive Director W. Otis Crockron said.
Crockron said that while the end goal is to reunite children with their families, sometimes that is not possible, at which point ACCS will be permitted full custody and will seek new forever homes for the children.
“When we get a referral from anyone in the community who believes there’s a child who’s being abused or neglected, our first response as an agency is to take that call and determine, is the allegation true?” Crockron said. “We’ll go in and have conversations with the family to see how we can assist, because sometimes it’s just a lack of services or capacity to keep a child safe.”
Those services include training sessions for developing parental skills, providing food, making sure they have appropriate clothing and shoes and working with the children’s schools to ensure their success and recovery.
According to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, 16,241 students were in foster care during the 2023-2024 school year.
As ACCS’s responsibilities grew and changed, its four 5,000-square-foot buildings on its campus were losing practicality. Parents used to stay overnight in the facilities regularly, which Crockron said has since changed.
Crockron also said making children and staff walk from building to building, especially in the elements, was less conducive to the construction of a safe and welcoming environment. ACCS has grown, and they decided that so too must their facilities.
“If you go back even 10 years, we would average 75 children in our care, now we have 130 to 135 in our custody,” Crockron said. “And when I came onboard in 2008, we had 72 staff members, but now we have 99.”
Two of the four buildings will be torn down, with the remaining two converted into storage for documents and belongings of children waiting to be adopted by a foster family.
Atop the two buildings to be demolished will be a 28,800-square-foot singular facility, which Crockron said will be separated into three parts: “Mama Bear, Papa Bear and Baby Bear.”
Mama Bear is a conference center inside the main entrance for aspiring foster parents, Papa Bear is an administrative building of office spaces for the staff, and Baby Bear is a visitation center separate from the main entrance where children can have a safe space to open up to ACCS staff or meet with parents under ACCS supervision. The building’s sections have indoor connectors to walk between them, safe from the elements.
"We want to make sure every location of the building is inviting, safe and an environment that would be conducive to a child being able to share,” Crockron said.
Demolition of the two buildings is set to begin by the end of April, and Crockron said those buildings have already been vacated in advance.
Move-in is expected to occur in August 2026—give or take a month either way—following the 520-day construction contract. Crockron said the pandemic taught ACCS that remote work can still allow for a lot of their services to be accomplished, and will be re-employed in the interim while construction occurs.
Don Dispenza, the CEO and principal architect at BDT Architects and Designers, said demolition will be quick, with construction ready to start after just two weeks. The build is projected to cost $12 million.
He said the buildings being demolished are small and have basements, which means most of the necessary work for laying the footprint of the new facility is already accomplished. However, he cited a need to recompact the soil and said it is typical of construction in Athens.
Dispenza said the building’s main framework will be constructed of mass timber, which is smaller than a large, singular chunk of wood and thus can be created from smaller trees of a larger variety of species.
Each piece of timber is only either 12-by-14 or 12-by-20 inches in dimension. Dispenza said mass timber is more environmentally-friendly as well, compared to brick and concrete, which are most commonly used in Athens construction.
“This building is designed to perform very sustainably,” Dispenza said. “The carbon footprint for (mass timber) work is tiny compared to what it takes to make processed brick. I think it’s a better way to build.”
