Town-run camps across Connecticut operate without state oversight. Is it time to change that?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “Child sex assault case in Bethany sounds alarm on town-run camps,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here.
WSHU: Hello, Laura. You decided to investigate the issue of unregulated town camps for children following the Anthony Mastrangelo case in Bethany. Could you set the stage for us? We know that Bethany, like most small towns in Connecticut, has never been subject to state oversight for its town-run camps.
LT: I initially learned about this case by reading news articles about accusations against Anthony Mastrangelo. There are allegations that there were sexual assaults and illegal sexual contact with children that occurred during Parks and Rec programming in Bethany, where he was a camp counselor, and he also worked in that community as a substitute teacher in the school there. So initially, I was interested because there was a lot of frustration about the town leadership and whether they had appropriately handled the situation. Also, the first four victims made their allegations back in December of 2022, but the first arrest wasn’t made until May of 2024, so there are also just some questions about why it took so long.
WSHU: Tell us a little bit about the first selectwoman, Paula Cofrancesco, and her relationship with the accused.
LT: Yeah. So, Paula Cofrancesco, she’s the town’s first selectwoman. She has been in many, many town meetings since this happened, defending her role. There’s a lot of anger in Bethany at her and people demanding that she step down. Part of that comes from the fact that she said that she was aware that there were some allegations against the accused that had resulted in him being removed from working with children, but that she was not aware that those allegations were of a sexual nature. About a year and a half after the first four allegations were made and documented by police, there was another alleged incident in which a child in that community said that she was also abused while he was babysitting her, and so the frustration in the town comes in part of this perception that the town’s first selectwoman could have in some way done more to let the community know that there was something concerning going on.
A lot of people in town, I should say, believe that she was aware that these allegations against him were sexual. Part of that is because she’s friends with his mom. There are photographs of those families wearing the same T-shirt while on a vacation together, you know well after these allegations, initial allegations had come forward. She is also a relative of the two people who were running Parks and Rec at the time, so there are just a lot of ways in which she’s sort of like deeply connected to the different parties involved. And I think that people in town are skeptical of the idea that she didn’t know what those allegations were.
WSHU: There were a lot of people who were talking about whether it’s time for the state to step in as far as regulating these counts. You spoke with Beth Bye, who’s with the Office of Early Childhood. What did she have to say about this?
LT: It was interesting because, you know, when I started looking into the story, I wasn’t aware of this back story about the push and pull about the regulation of municipal camps, that there have been people in the legislature who’d been advocating for some steps toward regulation of different varieties. There was a move a couple of years ago to try to actually license these camps, which failed. And you know, if you look at the statements about that proposed bill, they’re overwhelmingly in opposition from mostly municipalities throughout the state parks departments or town managers who say why this is problematic, the idea of licensure.
Licensure involves health and safety checks. It involves different regulations around the ratios between children and counselors. It involves checking on the qualifications of different kinds of counselors to do things like being a lifeguard or teaching archery. It requires certain ratios of bathrooms to campers. There are a lot of things in there, some of which would be more expensive to implement than others. So the idea of full licensure has been really opposed, almost, you know, universally, by these municipalities, because of that sense that if, if this did happen, it would simply become too expensive to run a lot of these programs for these towns, that it would be a lot of new paperwork and levels of bureaucracy. That there could be issues like, you know, the fact that a lot of the people who work in these programs tend to be teenagers who are maybe making their summer plans at the last minute, or things like that, and having to comply with the State System of background checks, which could take a while to get the check back, then you’re in a situation where you may not have enough counselors at the last moment. There’s just a lot of kind of logistics that seem to be, you know, onerous and overwhelming.
And I think that the commissioner has said that, you know, she is interested in pursuing some middle road between full licensure and what we have now, which is really no state oversight. You know, if you go looking for the number of how many children each year enroll in municipal programs in Connecticut, no state agency seems to have that information because it is 169 different municipalities, you know, some of which may not have these programs at all, but they’re all doing things different ways, and they don’t have to report that information to any state authority. They don’t have to report major incidents, like whether children who go to those camps are hospitalized, and there have been efforts over the years to make some, you know, baby steps toward that, to have some additional requirements or oversight or ability for people to report things to the Office of Early Childhood. And all of that has met quite a bit of resistance because it seems to be because of the perception that it’s steps toward full licensure, which they oppose.
So I think that, you know, some of the folks that I spoke to for this story, their hope was kind of that the fact of this case and some of the concerns about a municipality being the authority that oversees one of these programs could at least lead to an opening in that conversation to talk about some of those more intermediate steps that might just add some layers of safety or state oversight without requiring full licensure, which would be much more expensive, potentially.
WSHU: So, the bottom line here, Laura, is that something will have to happen in the next legislative session because of this case in Bethany. Do you get the sense that there is enough of a push for some action to be taken by the legislature next year on this?
LT: I really don’t know. It’s a conversation that a lot of people want to have. But given the fact that in the past, people have wanted to have this conversation, and it hasn’t seemed to have gone anywhere, I don’t know you know with certainty if something will happen or not, but it does seem like this is a real, sort of unfortunate example of some of those safety questions that arise when something like this happens. You just don’t have that oversight, and you don’t have any watching. A lot of the questions that arose when I was reporting this story were: did this lack of oversight really have anything to do with what is alleged to have happened in Bethany? For example, if you have a program where a lot of the people working in that program are young, they may not have anything on their criminal record that shows up on a background check to indicate that there’s any concern about hiring them in the first place.
I think that one of the pieces of information I did find out that pointed to the fact that, you know, lack of oversight is concerning is the fact that one of the counselors, one of the staff at these programs who worked there a long time, once the law was put into effect that people working in these programs 21 and over have to get mandated reporter training, he still never received that training. And so I think that that’s one of those examples of something where, you know, everyone is getting the training they should have.
And there is also kind of a conversation about expanding mandated reporter training, maybe to include all staff at these programs, or to include staff 18 and older, since so many people who work in these programs are young, and that is one of those steps that wouldn’t again be expensive to put into place. It would just require some logistics. So I think that that is definitely something that’s on the table, and there does seem to be a good number of people who are in support of that.