PAGE – Page area youths and family won’t need to drive to Flagstaff for juvenile court services.

Coconino County leased a wing of Tse’Yaa’To’ High School in Page. The new space moves the small department out of their shared location with adult probation services, giving them both more space to improve services.

Thursday, the Chronicle attended the ribbon cutting ceremony and spoke with Casie Lightfoot, director of juvenile court services for the county.

Lightfoot said, “We shared a building with adult probation that was just across the street from the high school. We’ve shared that space for at least 16 years. As long as I’ve been with the county.”

Coconino County Manager Steve Peru said, “The former facility was very small. This provides additional room for programming, interaction, and really provides more opportunity for integration of the services and the community.”

Lightfoot said, “With adult probations growing needs and ours as well. That was just such a small space that we couldn’t provide the full array of services that we really wanted to, and neither could adult probation. So, we looked all around and couldn’t find a reasonable space to rent in Page.”

Things changed when they began talks with Accommodation School District principal Robin Pete.

Lightfoot said, “They agreed to let us rent to this wing of Tse’Yaa’To High School. And that’s very relevant to us because we have kids that attend the Accommodation School District here which is just down the hall.

“This move is allowing us to provide more support to those students because we’re literally feet away from them at times. And then it also has given us so much more space, so we have a fully functioning courtroom now.”

Lightfoot said, “We’ll be having our judge and the county attorney and public defenders coming up to Page at least once a month to provide in-person court for our clients and systems in Page and the outlying areas – which is huge.”

Telecourt is also offered between visits from Flagstaff-based officials and staff.

Lightfoot said, “It’s really important for us that we are providing the same level of services to the citizens of Page that we are in Flagstaff.”

The new courtroom is large enough for other services, such as programs like intensive outpatient, or IOP, and life school programing.

Lightfoot said, “We have a clinician that can run quite a vast array of classes. So, we have the space now to do that, and it’s not just in this multipurpose room, but we also have an outdoor space, and that’s been huge too because a lot of kids do better when they’re doing things in an experiential way.”

In addition to the courtroom and large outdoor area, there are more offices for court appointed special advocates, or CASA, staff. Lightfoot said the CASA staff can do more recruiting in the area.

Lightfoot explained that “a CASA is a volunteer that’s assigned to a child in a dependency hearing, and they really help advocate for that child’s best needs.”

Coconino County Juvenile Court Services generally gets about 500 referrals a year, and of those, about 200 enter a probation program. Page area youth represents as high as a third and as low as a fifth of those on probation. The age range for court services is 8 to 18-years-old.

The build-out for the new space is unique for the area. David Lafont with Goodman’s interior structures began planning the project about a year ago.

Lafont specializes in prefabricated construction. The modular wall units are designed with software and are moveable to create different layouts if needs change in the future.

Lafont said, “It’s flexible. You can easily take this down and reconfigure it. If they decide that perhaps this is not working for their needs or their needs change, we can come in and change the direction of some walls or swap out a solid frame for a door or create a new office, or whatever it is that they need. That’s the flexibility, the futureproofing of it. And it’s not going to end up in a landfill.”

Lafont said of the system: “It’s a company called DIRTT (Doing It Right This Time). It’s integrating technology in the construction industry, which has been behind with technology. So, all of this is I design in proprietary software.

It creates a price and parts lists simultaneously, and any changes I make, it updates it live.”

Lafont continued, “Then that file that I design is sent to the manufacturer and sent to the factory floor and built from that file, and then delivered to the site. And then our guys install it.”

David Lafont with Goodman's Interior Structures brings flowers for Casie Lightfoot, director of juvenile court services.

County Supervisors Patrice Horstman, Lena Fowler and Mayor Bill Diak.

County District 5 Supervisor Lena Fowler flanked by Juvenile Court Judge Angela Kircher and Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Ted Reed at new facility ribbon cutting.

County Manager Steve Peru