Klingberg Family Centers, which has been treating troubled children for 108 years, said Tuesday it will reduce its residential program from 68 to 26 beds to concentrate on in-home and neighborhood services.

The move dovetails with a major push by the state Department of Children and Families to decrease the number of kids in residential centers and increase the number of foster and adoptive families. There were more than 1,400 children in residential programs on any given day last year, nearly 30 percent less than in 2004. The number of kids 12 and under in the residential programs went from 201 in January 2011 to 123 last month.  This also means that Klingberg will be forced to lay off 400 of it’s employees.

Mark Johnson, the center’s vice president, said Tuesday that every effort will be made to plug residential staffers into jobs in the community-based programs. Some of those programs may expand.

Thirty of the children now in residential care at Klingberg will be moved to other settings, including returning to their biological families or being placed with foster families. Klingberg and DCF are working together on the transition. The children who live at Klingberg are referred to the center by DCF.

DCF Commissioner Joette Katz said that despite the progress over the last few years in getting kids into less restrictive settings, “too many children and youth are not growing up with family and community ties.”

She said Klingberg’s action “is going to be instrumental in accelerating that movement.”

Katz has said that troubled children can succeed in family settings along as there are sufficient support services.

Johnson said Klingberg “saw the writing on the wall” and thought it wise to move in the direction DCF was going.

He said Klingberg already has 18 programs in the community, including intensive in-home therapy designed to keep families together.

“We also do foster and adoptive care, and that could very well be among the programs that we increase,” Johnson said.

Steven A. Girelli, Klingberg’s president and CEO said the center’s in-home, outpatient and foster-care programs can handle issues ranging from “moderate family programs to serious behavioral-health needs and traumatization.”

Klingberg also runs three group homes, two for girls, one for boys, with five children each.

Asked if those would increase, Johnson said DCF is steering away from group homes in favor of families that could take in several children.

The center opened in 1903 and served as an orphanage until 1970, when it opened its residential program with a focus on treatment. In 1988, the center started its intensive in-home therapy program.

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