In the basement boiler room in the Dorchester District Courthouse, a messy tangle of miniature tables and chairs and pastel-hued cushions is piled high against a wall.
"It's nice stuff," says Judge Sydney Hanlon, shouting over the thrumming machinery. "It's looking a little battered at the moment."
The furniture used to live in the courthouse's child-care center, a bright, pink-walled space with a full kitchen and a giant play house.
For years, that center was an oasis in one of the state's most chaotic places. Children could go there to paint and play and eat a decent meal while their parents stood in shackles or argued over custody or gave graphic trial testimony in the busy courtrooms.
It was one of 10 Massachusetts court-based child-care centers begun after Judge Julian Houston, then sitting at Roxbury District Court, decided he could no longer see children exposed to the miseries unfolding in his courtrooms.
"They would hear the testimony of the victims, or of women who had been raped, of witnesses in murders, of medical examiners," says Houston, now retired. "It all seemed so terribly wrong to me. To see a child in a courtroom while his or her parents are doing battle over who is going to get them, it will break your heart."
A group led by Houston began the state's first courthouse child-care centers in 1988. The program, called Courtcare, spared children the trauma of the courtroom. It also connected their mostly low-income parents with counseling and support programs. It made sure children were well taken care of, so that everybody could focus on the business of justice.
By 2002, the state's Courtcare centers had become a national model, serving 18,000 children a year.
That was the year a fiscal crisis led Acting Governor Jane Swift to nix the program with a budget veto.
Houston, his fellow judges, friendly legislators, and child advocates battled to get the money reinstated. Year after year, they failed.
Hanlon, of Dorchester, whose courthouse was jammed, eventually had to use the vacant child-care space. On a recent morning, mediators were resolving disputes between combative grown-ups in the pink-walled child-care center.
"We just had to admit, it's over," she says.
Now the courthouses scramble to protect children from the ugly proceedings as best they can. Some judges ban children from their courtrooms; a friendly court officer or assistant district attorney will baby sit in a hallway. Others, like Boston Juvenile Court Judge Leslie Harris, feel they have no choice but to allow children inside sometimes.
"I've had children screaming and crying in my courtrooms, but the mother's other child is before the judge," he says. ". . . I don't think a child should be exposed to that."
This week, the House is debating a $28 billion budget that, yet again, leaves out $2.3 million to revive Courtcare.
Legislators, however, have seen fit to spend 27 times the cost of Courtcare on $63 million in tax breaks for the film industry, even though the returns on that outlay are iffy, at best.
Representative Marie St. Fleur, vice chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, says the Courtcare program might one day be funded via an early education bill before legislators.
In the meantime, Chief Justice Robert A. Mulligan of the state's trial courts says that if he gets the $600 million proposed for the courts this year, he could afford to fund the Courtcare program in five locations: Plymouth, Worcester, Fall River, Lawrence, and at the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse in Boston.
Those little tables and chairs in the Dorchester boiler room? They're staying in storage. The kids in that busy courthouse, along with others in Chelsea, Brockton, Cambridge, Springfield, West Roxbury, and Roxbury, are out of luck. Again.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com.
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